After the Second World War, technological advances and post-rationing initiatives encouraged intensive high-production based agriculture and many pastoral areas were ploughed up for arable crops. Intensive use of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilisers reduced the wildlife value of the area dramatically and the chalk downland habitat of animals, birds, insects and plants was destroyed or seriously threatened.
Since the 1990s, government initiatives for agri-environment schemes, such as the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, have encouraged farmers to revert back to more environmentally sustainable methods of farming and food production.
With the announcement in 2005 of the new, wider-reaching Environmental Stewardship scheme, farmland wildlife should be benefitting from more extensive farming methods like those we have been practising at Shabden Park Farm for eleven years.