Town & Country
Spare or share?
‘If farming destroys soil, there’s no point in having land for Nature around the edge’
NEW research by the RSPB suggests that the environment would be better served by splitting land into areas of natural habitat and high-yield farms (a land-sparing system), rather than combining food production and conservation everywhere (land sharing). However, some sustainability experts, such as Patrick Holden, founder of the Sustainable Food Trust and a farmer, have expressed doubts at the land-sparing approach, countering that, until the advent of industrial agriculture, ‘an incredible profusion of wildlife used to co-exist with low-intensity farming’.
The RSPB examined the impact of land sparing and sharing on biodiversity, climate change, pollution and recreation in two different areas: the Fens and Salisbury Plain. It concluded that some land-sparing options offered the greatest environmental gains. ‘In the Fens, the scenario that maximised the area of deep peat being rewetted to Fen performed best,’ says Tom Finch, the study’s lead author. ‘On Salisbury Plain, results were more variable, but scenarios that increased the area of
