Farming, Ecology and Landscape Recovery in the Brecklands of Eastern England

The Farmer-Ecologist Research Circle, an initiative of the Hudson Valley Farm Hub and the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program, is sponsoring a free presentation by our visitors from England, farmer Richard Evans and ornithologist Chris Sharpe. The presentation is hosted by the Bard Center for Environmental Policy.

Richard Evans, co-founder and lead farmer in the Breckland Farmers Wildlife Network, will describe his experiences and motivations for helping to run this organization since its inception in 2018. The Network’s goals are to “protect & enhance the biodiversity of the Brecks, [a geographical region in eastern England], help shape future policy to benefit this area, and consider the current & future impacts & balance of food production & ecology in the Brecks.” Chris Sharpe, an ornithologist who has helped gather avian data in the same region, will provide an ecologist’s view of the interaction of bird life and agriculture in that landscape.

Bard College
Rm 115, Olin Language Center
77 Campus Rd, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504

The talk is free and all are invited. It will be recorded and made available at research-circle.org.

East Anglia, England—and Breckland in particular—is one of the most intensively managed regions of the UK for food production. Its landscape and environment are consequently highly modified. Although these changes have often reduced biodiversity, some historical human practices have created the very environments upon which now scarce, often threatened, local species depend. The last few decades have seen significant efforts to document and understand the region’s biodiversity with a view toward restoring nature on both agricultural and non-productive land. A growing number of contemporary farmers have enthusiastically adopted nature-friendly management practices.

“This is a heart-warming story of collaboration and improvement, a narrative that often clashed with our general impression of the environmental effects of food production,” said Chris Sharpe. “I will provide insights into the sort of agricultural practices that benefit birds and biodiversity, many of which are obvious while others may perhaps be quite surprising.”

Evans and Sharpe will recount more than two decades of farming and wildlife interactions in the Brecklands and share lessons that they hope will shed light on how to organize a community around the values of conservation, both in England and beyond.

“Many of us here in the Hudson Valley are working to find our own balance between the need for our farms to succeed as profitable enterprises that feed our community, and as places that shelter and nurture native wildlife,” said Will Yandik, a member of the Farmer-Ecologist Research Circle. “I think our visitors from England will provide us the opportunity to evaluate our own lands with a fresh perspective.”

The Farmer-Ecologist Research Circle is an initiative of the Hudson Valley Farm Hub (hvfarmhub.org) and Hawthorne Valley’s Farmscape Ecology Program (hvfarmscape.org) for both farmers and ecologists who are interested in supporting biodiversity in a variety of ways across the farm landscape. If you are a farmer involved in producing crops and crop planning, or an ecologist who works on farms, please consider joining us as we create a community centered on biodiversity conservation and agroecology in the region. You can find more information and get in touch with us at connect@research-circle.org or by visiting research-circle.org.