Once, many years ago, I was working on a European landscape ecology project. This was about factors that influenced the distribution and abundance of species in agricultural landscapes. To me, these factors including both spatial and temporal components; spatial because species depend on how the habitats are structured now, and temporal because they may also depend on the history. The balance varies between species; some species are more mobile than others, so can respond more rapidly to a changing landscape. I didn’t think my views were particularly contentious, but it hit a nerve. The Dutch scientists strongly favoured spatial processes, whereas the Belgians strongly favoured historical explanations. I started to get it when we were taken onto a field trip to the Belgian side of the border with the Netherlands. Our host took us to an ancient woodland, and pointed out the worn down trenches from World War One. We looked beyond the border to the Dutch flatlands, reshaped many times over the generations according to need. I wondered, does the Belgian culture promote historical explanations, and the Dutch promote spatial ones? In other words, did the choice of preferred explanations reflect a cultural view of the world?

I bring this up because I wonder if something similar is happening about the land sparing / land sharing debate. And this is triggered by my recent travels in Africa and Asia. I’ve lived all my life in England, where the countryside is the product of hundreds of years of interaction between people, plants and animals, resulting in a cultural landscape that at its best can include farming, biodiversity, livelihoods and beauty. This is land sharing, where serious wild nature has long gone.

My recent trip to Hong Kong presents a very different view. My son’s flat is at the edge of the city, and fronts on to forest. This has been disturbed, sure (there are no tigers for example), but is probably still close to primary woodland. This is land sparing in the extreme. These forests are used by many people for hiking and leisure, but there is no cultural landscape as I recognise in Yorkshire. In Kenya, the situation was more complex. We travelled by road from the Amboseli national park to central Nairobi. I was expecting quite stark boundaries between nature reserve, farming and urban areas, but no. The park itself is nearly stripped of trees by the elephants, and so the landscape is wide open. At the park boundaries, the scrub appears. This area is grazed by Masai cattle and sheep, but is shared by giraffe, zebra and gazelles. We were told that big cats and elephants didn’t venture here, creating a cultural landscape that seemed to complement the national park really well. But the Masai even grazed their livestock close the city centres, using road central reservations and other patches of grass. Whether this is land sparing depends on which species you are interested in, but to me the landscape could not be described by such terms anyway.

I wonder if the terms land sharing and land sparing are as much cultural as ecological, saying great deal about the backgrounds and expectations of the people using the terms, just as the preferred explanations of species distributions by landscape ecologist were rooted in their own cultures. I also wonder if these terms encourage to mistake the metaphors of land sparing and land sharing for actual descriptions of how the world works.

Last week, Nature published a research article from China. The approach was simple; smallholder farmers were asked to contrast two farming approaches, one their business as usual, and the other farming according to a crop management simulation, parameterised according to local climate, soils, and crops. The novel system outperformed business as usual, with increased yields and reduced fertiliser inputs. Where the research becomes really interesting, is its sheer scale. The field trails were fully randomised, and took lace over a decade, giving over 13,000 site years of data, over 3,000 per major crop. This research is part of a wider campaign involving 1,152 scientists, 65,000 extension staff, 138,000 agri-business staff and over 20 million small farmers, across 452 counties. 

I led the UK Farm Scale Evaluations of GM crops, and I thought that was big. But this is REALLY big. The advantage of this study size size comes from the more local and detailed analyses, supporting the sustainable intensification of farming at the local scale without losing the national picture. I’d be surprised if it can be repeated anywhere else in the world, it relies on the availability of a lot of resources coupled with an integrated bureaucracy. Just conducting the experiment is a great achievement; getting the data in, properly validated and analysed is, to me, simply awesome. 

To me, it also raises the question of the role of large scale experiments in agriculture. There is a perception that these experiments are not really needed, if we have intensive data recording over a large population of farms, coupled with some form of analytics to come up with some form of optimum management. I’m old fashioned, I tend to mistrust analytics. It’s very easy for algorithms to become misled by incomplete and biased data, it’s also very easy for them to fail to capture the key variables of value as farming and our environment changes. In other words, to me, even though the amount of data may be far larger than we have seen before, it is still subject to problems of bias and lack of completeness. But experiments were designed to address this problem; you decide what to measure and what to vary, and how to sample from a wider population without bias. This study supports my belief that experiments are still the mainstay of collecting evidence to support changes in farming. The challenge is to make sure the experiments are large enough, and conducted well enough, to be fit for purpose. 

I was never sure about how to answer this one. Is it climate change, intensive farming, pollution? But now I'm becoming more concerned about another factor. The increasing lack of awareness of wildlife. 
It really hit home to me last year, with my zoology and ecology students. Out of 160 or so, around 1/4 to 1/3 put their hand up to say they had been on safari, or had done some wildlife watching overseas. How many went wildlife watching in the UK? One and a half (I guess the half was someone show had been dragged around the countryside by the countryside). In a tutorial, I ended up asking a few students, where would you watch wildlife in the UK. There was an awkward pause. The one of them tentatively suggested, "A zoo?" 

There are other warning signs. I was in Todmorden last weekend (more to follow on this), and my host for a delightful walk around the town told me that she knew things were changing when she saw blackcurrants for sale in supermarkets for £2 a punnet. I knew what she meant. Why pay for them when they are all over the place for free? And now the loss of words about the countryside from the Oxford Junior Dictionary has prompted a new book, The Lost Words, by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris , written and illustrated to try to keep the natural world as a real, living part of the world of children.

For without that strong emotional link, what is there to keep people caring about our living world? If plants, animals and ecosystem are just symbols, then nothing. If they are to be invoked by documentaries, well, we have loads already that we can repeat. And if it's all about going to exotic places, well they will be kept, supported by the tourism industry, while our living landscapes around can become more sterile without fuss of murmur. 

There is lots of good work being done, of course, not least through events like LEAF's Open Farm Sunday, and programmes like Countryfile, and organisations like the Wildlife Trusts. Is it enough?

​One of the big issues for all of us engaged with the UK’s agricultural environment Is what happens post-Brexit. This week, at a meeting in Brussels, we had a few clues. The meeting was a seminar intended to show off the work of the White Rose Universities In food and agriculture to the good people in and around the European Commission. I gave a talk describing the background to the White Rose Sustainable Agriculture Consortium, followed by Jonathan Leake giving some of our new results and their implications for farming, and Thorunn Helgason talking about the future of our research, with a focus on the potential value of new technologies for gene sequencing. The great news was that people came, especially Phil Hogan, Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, who gave the keynote talk. There were plenty of others, too. Their presence made it clear that they still have an interest in what the U.K. Is up to, and an expectation that we will still be involved in research and policy discussions. I found this most heartening.
 
And the challenges facing agriculture policy in both the EU and UK are considerable in the coming years. There will be less money around, so spending must be better targeted. This isn't just about promoting increase in food production or environmental quality; in the EU the talk includes  promoting a circular economy approach, and encouraging young people to go into farming. More money will need to be found from somewhere to keep farmers in business if farm gate prices stay so low. Our work is starting to suggest at least one way it might happen; we are starting to get results that good management can increase soil quality and carbon, making crop production more resilient to extremes of rain or drought but also reducing the risk of flooding downstream, and capturing carbon from the atmosphere. If we can get those who benefit from these changes to help pay for them, who knows, we might get somewhere.

Last night I was one of the panellists at a public engagement event in Cardiff, called 'Come Dine With The Future'. We all had to invent a menu for a 3 course meal to be served sometime in the future, given our individual ideas and research interests. Between us we suggested insects (insect burger anyone, or just feed them to pigs), more productive and resilient plants and animals, that sort of thing. And, happily, the favourite dish of the 100 or so people who came was mainly chocolate (ok, vegan chocolate brownies, but still chocolate).

Events like this are always good fun, but an added bonus is that you meet some amazing people. Last night I was talking with Tom Webster, of the Grow Up Urban Farms team. This is a new company that is producing fresh fish and vegetables in the heart of London, using aquaponics and LED lighting to create as near a cloased system for nutrients and water as is possible. The USP is that the food is incredibly fresh and of high quality. By growing the food indoors, the company provides all year round employment in a part of London that really needs it. He is providing social and environmental benefits in a sustainable business environment, and is really excited and proud of it all.

Which made me think. When I was in my teens, my career advisor offered the two sensible choices to a boy near Teesside; British Steel or ICI. When I asked about astronomy or biology, he just sort of glazed over. At University, the choice widened to include public service, whether teaching, research or even as spy (but that's another story). I have spent most of my professional life since as a scientific civil servant, providing the evidence to help policy makers to allow wildlfie to thrive on productive farmland.

It all seems so last century. Most of the policymakers have gone (at least from Defra), victims of cuts. The role of policy as such is much reduced, while innovation is now measured in patents, profits and start-ups. But this does not mean the end of public service, far from it. It has simply moved. Tom is one of many entrepreneurs with social and environmental objectives, to be delivered through a viable business model. HIs work reminds me of some of the many other ventures I'm lucky enough to get to know, the rapidly growing One Acre Fund, that is supporting smallholder farming in Africa to great effect; Incredible Edible Todmorden that is building a community through food production in the heart of the Pennines, and The Real Junk Food Project that bridges food waste and food poverty, first in Leeds and now around the world.

Academics are increasingly concerned with supporting private industry through stakeholder engagement, knowledge exchange and near-market research. The trick is to work fast enough to be of any use to our stakeholders as they face today's problems, yet to be canny enough to help them prepare for longer term challenges, such as climate change. Doing this and still publishing our research papers is not a trivial challenge. Also some important parts of our lives struggle to be converted into good business models; we will still need policy makers to allow wildlife to thrive on productive farmland, austerity, Brexit or no.

One of the challenges facing researchers in the Brexit world was always going to be maintaining the confidence of collaborators around Europe. Despite the warm words that nothing had changed, confidence was clearly slipping, and some British researchers were getting frozen out of project proposals. Last week’s announcement that the Government will honour research commitments made within the EU after we leave will surely be a big help, and hopefully British engagement with European research will go something like back to normal.

I confess I haven’t spent too much time on planning European projects of late, I’m more interested in the opportunities opening up further afield. The UK Government is pushing hard for a much stronger engagement with countries beyond Europe, support development and innovation. The Newton Fund is worth £735 million, and is about developing partnerships that promote the economic development and welfare of collaborating countries. I’m now involved in a major Newton Fund project with China (check our my blog from last February), that is looking at the implications of moving away from reliance on chemical fertilisers to much greater use of organic wastes. The Global Challenges Research Fund is twice this size, and is about supporting cutting-edge research that addresses the challenges faced by developing countries.

The N8 AgriFood Programme is proving well placed for this new focus on international work. This is partly from the way we are being seen as a valuable 1 stop shop from people who want to engage with UK research. So last spring, we hosted two major fact finding visits from Brazil, and we were able to identify some of the potential common research interests and bring on board some of the most relevant people from the UK. I’ll be there next month to explore further potential collaborations about sustainable land management, and to check out one of the research farms there, so that we can better build collaborations across continents using data on crops, livestock, soil, water, weather and so on. These data don’t mean much by themselves, but they are vital to build models and understanding to needed to develop tools and approaches to allow farmers to cope with the increasingly variable weather patterns we are all facing. Also, research is a social activity; it's important for us to meet people, work together, learn from each other, come up with new ideas and feel part of things. For me, it''s a huge part of what makes my job so enjoyable. 

My first reaction to the Brexit vote was shock, which is now giving way to anxiety, about so many issues. But here I want to focus on two issues seen as largely rural and fringe.

It's notable that in the Brexit debate 'environment' was largely presented in terms of 'regulations' that we can finally be relieved from. The alarm among environmental organisations is justified. European Directives are the basis of much of our environmental practice, notably the Habitats Directive, the Birds Directive and the Water Framework Directive. It's also been pointed out that Brexit has the potential to derail the Paris climate agreement. We need to transfer the Directives into national law to stand a chance of protecting what we have. The environment is seen as a fringe issue in politics, but the numbers engaged in environmental activities from watching Countryfile upwards are huge. I have now joined the RSPB and the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust so that I can now count clearly as one of these people. 

The other issue is food security. We currently produce less than 2/3 of the food we consume; given the likely pressures on global food production from extreme weather, this is not the ideal time to leave a continental scale free market in food. We must surely increase levels of home grown food production of we are not to face sudden crises in the future. This means valuing food, and valuing the land it is grown on. The downward pressure on food prices is making UK farming less viable, and the pressure on peri-urban areas is to build, not to farm.

And, of course, these pressures have been here anyway - its just we can no longer expect the EU to give us the support we need. As the Brexiter campaigners have said, we need to gain control. I agree. We really do need to gain control - control from the current, short-term political games that are wreaking so much havoc while the longer term issues are ignored.

Ahh. I think I get Donald Trump. Earlier today I read an article in the Guardian, which said the Donald Trump had said, 'There is no drought." The article continues: 'Trump accused state officials of denying water to farmers so they can send it out to sea “to protect a certain kind of three-inch fish.”'

Instead of thinking, more lies and nonsense, I though, wow. What a masterstroke. There is no such thing as a real problem, a real issue, that can't be blamed on government / environmentalists / migrants, that can't be resolved by a little pressure in the right places, that hasn't been exaggerated or distorted by the experts. It's not as if the usual suspects have solved the drought / the economy / the migrants, maybe it's time for a different approach. So what if it's based on statements that are not true? Can he really do worse than the others? And what do these so-called experts know anyway?

Politics, 2016 style, has embraced the idea that truth is relative, a point of view, to be used whenever convenient. Of course it's not just the US; both sides in the Brexit debate have been found telling porkies. But the one that struck me recently was not lie at all, it was the claim by the Brexit campaigners that a recent report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies was not valid because the Institute had worked for the European Commission. Yet more and more research can only be funded with stakeholder support and engagement. This means that the the 'bias' whistle is increasingly easy to blow, even by members of a Government which has consistently urged academics to work with, and by part-funded by, stakeholders. We are all biased now.

The idea that research generates truth which is to be respected by non-specialists seems increasingly quaint and so-last-century. I started work in what is now the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in 1991, and remit was quite clear, to produce high quality, public domain, evidence to support decision making by policy makers. Even when I led work on GM crops, the quality of evidence was rarely questioned per se; the key debates were about how the evidence should be interpreted and used. Now scientific evidence is merely a point of view, and the creation of that evidence is a political act. Indeed, are we reaching the point where being an academic is a political act? It wouldn't be the first time, after all.