Intensive farming protects biodiversity
New evidence suggests that wildlife benefits from agriculture becoming more intensive, not less
Anew review bolsters the idea that, to best conserve global biodiversity while feeding a growing human population, agriculture needs to become more intensive rather than more wildlife friendly.
The review, published in the Journal of Zoology, looks at 2,500 species worldwide in a range of agricultural landscapes and finds that most species fare better in ‘land sparing’ systems where agriculture is high-yield, intensive and confined to a smaller area, rather than in ‘land sharing’ systems where the farming itself is more wildlife-friendly but needs more land to produce the same amount of food.
The findings challenge the current push for wildlife-friendly agriculture. “We’ve paid billions for land sharing over the past 30 years in the form of agri-environment schemes,” says the review’s author Andrew Balmford of the University of Cambridge.
“Land sparing as a strategy makes sense from a science-based perspective,” says Tim Benton, director of the Environment and Society Programme at Chatham House. However, he says an increase in intensive farming would bring its own problems. “Intensification creates spill-overs via pollution, climate change and pesticide drift, and the market creates incentives to convert natural habitat into revenuegenerating agriculture.”
According to Joanna Lewis, director of policy and strategy at the Soil Association, the world needs less intensive agriculture, not more: “Intensive farming has driven the significant declines of wildlife that we’ve seen over the last 50 years, so we have to move towards a system where all lands are managed in a way that restores nature.”
And that, she says, need not come at the expense of biodiversity. “What makes that possible is shifting towards more-sustainable diets – less meat and less food waste.”
Balmford agrees that lifestyle changes are essential. “But none of the numbers I’ve seen suggest that those alone will get you there. You have to do something about yield,” he says. “You can’t have your cake and eat it. We live on one planet. You can’t have more land locked up for nature, more nature on farmland and still feed yourselves. It doesn’t work.”