School of Sustainability

Half the wheat, half again the profit

For two winters, an international research team that included researchers from the University of Göttingen watched wheat grow in nine landscapes around the city. The fields were worked three ways: conventionally farmed wheat with a strip of wildflowers along the edge, organically farmed wheat, and plain conventional wheat as a control. The question was plain - which of the two subsidised options is actually worth a farmer's while, and what each does for everything else living in the field.

On biodiversity, the two measures came out nearly level. Both the wildflower strips and the organic fields supported roughly 20 to 30 per cent more species than the plain conventional wheat, on the measures the team used. That is an awkward result for anyone designing subsidy schemes, because the two options ask very different things of the land and the farmer.

The economics broke the tie. The organic fields yielded only half the wheat of the conventional ones, yet their profits ran one and a half times higher. The study, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, does not say where that gap came from. It simply records that the lower-yielding system was the better-paying one, and that the wildflower strip, for all its ecological return, did not match it.

What the study does not settle is scale. Nine landscapes around one German university town, watched for two years, is a careful comparison, not a verdict for every farm. But it puts real numbers on a choice any wheat grower weighing the two subsidised routes will recognise, and it separates the two things subsidy schemes tend to bundle together: what a measure does for the field, and what it does for the farm's books.

Regeneration International · Read the source