We can lead the way
The radical move to put the €2.5 billion currently paid annually to UK farmers into a new agri-environment scheme can be seen as an affirmation of the environmental benefits of game shooting. The proposed Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMS), on which the Government is pinning its hopes for a reversal of biodiversity decline, are in no small measure due to decades of research and policy work by the GWCT.
“All the vast experience of shoot managers will play an important role”
For example, 30 of the 37 arable stewardship options available to farmers were influenced by GWCT science. And many of these, such as cover crops and supplementary feeding, are based on techniques originally developed by gamekeepers to sustain wildlife in a working countryside. The increasingly urgent need to do something about the loss of UK wildlife has, it seems, led the Government
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