By Fiona Torrance, PepsiCo FAB Project Manager and Farmland Biodiversity Advisor at the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust.
When designing a conservation project, you know there may be as many logistical ups and downs as the species you are trying to manage. With so many aspects contributing to a project’s success, including funding, communication, technical advice, monitoring and even policy implications, it can be easy to see how many projects fall before they even get off the ground.
One way to overcome this is to have experts in all of these fields come together, and we are very lucky to have that within the PepsiCo Farming Arable Biodiversity (FAB) group. This has been the case since the initial project started at Balgonie in 2014, when Kingdom farming started to work with the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, with the kind support of the landholder Balgonie Estates, to increase the number of grey partridges on the farm.
Since then, as our goals have evolved, so has the partnership. There are now seven organisations directly involved with the current project, demonstrating how productive farming and measures for farmland biodiversity can coexist, as well as the many farmers we work with across the country. Each partner brings their own expertise to the group, including the conservation crops we use (Frontier Agriculture), agronomical advice (Scottish Agronomy), policy guidance (NatureScot) and commercial support (PepsiCo). This has allowed us to reach a greater number of farmers over a much larger area. Since we started at Balgonie in 2014, we have subsequently scaled up to six and are now aiming to reach 50 farms across Scotland, something that would be difficult to achieve by a single organisation.
This has allowed the project to achieve greater deliverable results, not only for farmland biodiversity but also for farmers. In addition to increasing grey partridges by 300% at Balgonie as well as uplifts in many other red-listed birds, invertebrates and habitats, we have also created a valuable demonstration site to show stakeholders what we have (and would still like to) achieved, been shortlisted for the Nature of Scotland awards (twice), met the minister for biodiversity, appeared on Landward, and even managed to influence agri-environment schemes in Scotland.
Fiona Torrance, PepsiCo FAB project manager and farmland biodiversity advisor at GWCT says the format has worked due to each partner’s unique role in the sector: “Not only does each organisation bring their own expertise, but they also bring their wider teams, external networks and insights. This not only allows the project to reach for bigger goals, but also helps when it comes to overcoming challenges, something every project will face in the course of its life.”
As biodiversity continues to decline in Scotland there is obviously still much work to do. However, projects such as this demonstrate not only how these challenges can be overcome, but that more can be achieved by working together than on our own.
For more information, please contact ftorrance@gwct.org.uk.
