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OVER a billion euros spent each year across the European Union on
environmentally friendly farming could be going to waste. A Dutch scientist has
found that a large “green farming” project in the Netherlands, designed to
benefit wildlife, doesn’t work.

Under the 20-year-old scheme, Dutch farmers are paid to delay the spring
mowing of their grass fields until June, to encourage birds to nest and hatch
their chicks in safety. But until now, nobody had thought to check whether the
birds have responded well to the idea. They haven’t, says David Kleijn of
Wageningen Agricultural University.

Kleijn compared bird life on 78 fields managed in this way with that on
nearby conventionally managed fields. He found “no positive effect on bird
species diversity”. In fact, most common birds nested less often on the
eco-fields. These included oystercatchers and black-tailed godwits. The
Netherlands is Europe’s largest breeding ground by far for both species.

Kleijn believes the plan backfired because it fell into an “ecological trap”.
Late mowing meant farmers were applying less nitrogen fertiliser to the soil,
which affected earthworms. “Birds avoided eco-fields because the soils contained
fewer earthworms,” he says.

Since 1992, the European Union has copied the Dutch plan for green management
of farmland. A fifth of EU farms now participate, at an estimated cost of Euro1.7
billion to the Common Agricultural Policy. Kleijn believes many similar
initiatives will fail because the logic underpinning them is flawed.

“They are based on simple observations that a certain system is associated
with high biodiversity,” Kleijn says. “So it is assumed that reintroducing some
elements of those systems will improve things. But ecosystems are more complex
than that.”

But there is one happy exception. Will Peach of Britain’s Royal Society for
the Protection of Birds says a scheme that paid farmers in south Devon to leave
stubble on their fields over winter caused an 83 per cent rise in numbers of
endangered cirl bunting, compared with surrounding fields.