Can productive farming and freshwater conservation work together?
13th October 2026
An interview with Dr Jenny Bussell, Principal Scientist and Head of Agri-environmental Sciences at Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s Allerton Project.
Freshwater Habitats Trust has been working with the Allerton Project on Water Friendly Farming since 2010 to test the effectiveness of land management measures in lowland farmed landscapes to find ways of protecting the freshwater environment without impacting farm profitability.
Here, Jenny tells us more about the Allerton Project and why research, a catchment scale approach and collaborative working with landowners is so important.
Can you tell us about Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s the Allerton Project and what makes it distinctive?
The Allerton Project is a research and demonstration farm run by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust at Loddington on the Leicestershire–Rutland border. It was established in 1992 with the aim of understanding how productive farming and environmental management can work together.
What makes it particularly distinctive is that it is a real, commercial farm with a scientific research team working alongside the farming operation. This means our research is conducted under real farming conditions, so we can measure their environmental consequences and understand the practical and economic implications for farmers.
We have built up more than 30 years of long-term monitoring data including insects, farmland birds and game counts. We also have long term monitoring projects understanding how land management affects soil health, soil carbon and hydrological processes. That combination of long-term research, commercial farming and demonstration is incredibly valuable because we aren’t just asking whether something works scientifically, we’re asking whether it can work on a farm and whether farmers can realistically adopt it.
What are The Allerton Project’s main priorities and why is freshwater research an important part of your work?
Our overarching aim is to understand how we can build productive, resilient farming systems that also support biodiversity and the wider environment. This means we need to look at the farming system as a whole, including soils, crops, nutrients and water, and how these interact.
Water is particularly important because of its role in connecting these elements. Soil, nutrients, pesticides and sediment can move through the landscape into streams and ponds. The way we manage the landscape can influence this, as well as having implications for flood and drought resilience. For me, freshwater research is therefore not really separate from farming research. It is about understanding the pathways between the farm and the wider landscape, and finding practical points where we can intervene to improve both farm resilience and water quality.
- Dr Jenny Bussell from the Allerton Project out on site
What does your role as Principal Scientist and Head of Agri-environmental Sciences involve?
I lead our group of agri-environmental scientists working at the Allerton Project’s research and demonstration site. We have a broad portfolio of research projects covering areas such as soil health, water, nutrients, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity and sustainable farming. A big part of my role is making sure that the research we undertake is scientifically robust, but also relevant to the questions farmers and land managers are actually facing. I work with researchers, farmers, industry and policymakers to develop projects, interpret results and communicate what we’ve learned.
Research is at the heart of your role. Why do you think it’s so important that practical conservation and land management are guided by rigorous research?
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to conservation and land management. Every farm, landscape and environment is different, and what works in one situation may not work in another. That’s where research becomes really important.
By understanding not just whether a particular measure works, but why, where and under what conditions it works, we can make much better decisions about how and where to implement practical solutions. That’s particularly important when we’re asking farmers to change the way they manage their land. We need to understand the environmental benefits, but also how a measure fits within a working farming system and whether it is likely to deliver the intended outcome.
Rigorous research gives us that evidence. It allows us to test ideas in real on-farm situations, understand what is driving the results, and then use that knowledge to develop practical, targeted approaches rather than applying the same solution everywhere.
The Allerton Project and Freshwater Habitats Trust have worked together on Water Friendly Farming since 2010. What have been the most important lessons learned so far?
I think one of our simplest but most important messages is that water doesn’t respect farm boundaries. We can put effective measures on one field, but its impact will be dependent on the context of everything happening upstream and downstream. That is why the catchment-scale approach has been so important in this project.
We have also learned that there is often a combination of solutions needed for improving water management. Water quality, flooding and biodiversity are influenced by many different factors, so multiple solutions are needed, such as soil management, reducing run-off and soil erosion, and creating or restoring ponds and wetlands. These all need to be implemented in the right place within the landscape to work.
How do you think the lessons from Water Friendly Farming will inform how we manage agricultural landscapes in the future?
I hope that the lessons learned from this project will move us away from individual interventions in isolation, and towards a joined up ‘landscape solution’. Thinking about the water at a catchment scale is far more valuable for finding solutions, and thinking about where particular interventions will deliver the greatest benefits within the landscape will deliver the best outcomes.
Water Friendly Farming takes a catchment-scale approach, focusing on whole landscapes. Why is working at a catchment scale so important?
If you only look at an individual field, you can miss what is happening elsewhere, so a catchment scale approach allows us to understand connections within a landscape and identify where interventions can have the best effects. It also allows us to stack interventions together to produce improvements on a far greater scale. It also gives us the opportunity to monitor at a catchment scale and see if landscape-level management change can make measurable differences across the catchment.
Bringing clean water back to our towns and countryside is one of the aims of the Freshwater Network. What role do you think agricultural land management can play in achieving this?
Agriculture has a really important role because such a large proportion of the landscape is managed farmland. But I think it’s important to avoid presenting farmers simply as a source of pollution, and certainly not the sole source of pollution. However, farmers are also land managers so there is a great opportunity to work with them as part of the solution.
How we manage soil, nutrients, cropping, drainage, field margins and watercourses can all influence the amount of sediment, nutrients and other pollutants entering water. There are also opportunities to restore ponds, wetlands and other freshwater habitats within agricultural landscapes, which can provide biodiversity benefits while also helping us manage water. The challenge is to identify the right measures in the right places, and to make them practical and economically realistic for farmers.
- A pond poached by horses at the Water Friendly Farming demonstration site. This shows the effect of the bank angle on livestock access.
Collaborating with local farmers has been a key part of the Water Friendly Farming project. What have you learned about engaging farmers with habitat creation and restoration and what makes collaboration successful?
Farmers are incredibly knowledgeable about their own land. They can tell you where the water sits and where machinery struggles, and this is all valuable data in understanding problems and potential solutions. It’s also important not to approach farmers with a prescriptive list of what they should do, instead have those conversations about the problems, and find practical solutions. For a project like this to be successful, a large network of farmers needs to be engaged, all with the different pressures of their individual businesses, which is why we need individual solutions, but on a landscape scale.
You will also be working with us on the Headstart project. Can you tell us about The Allerton Project’s role and what you hope this collaboration will achieve?
Headstart takes on some of the principles we’ve learned through Water Friendly Farming and asks how they can be applied more widely to headwater catchments, aiming to improve these habitats and drive wider nature recovery downstream. The Allerton Project will help work with farmers in our catchment and bring the learning from the last 10 years of the Water Friendly Farming Project to create that landscape change, recording the evidence of its impact. Our aim is to ultimately turn that evidence into something that can be scaled beyond the individual demonstration sites involved in the Headstart project.
There can sometimes be a perception that producing food and protecting freshwater are competing priorities. What has your research shown about how the two can work together?
The evidence shows that the relationship between food production and environmental factors is not antagonistic. In many cases interventions support both. For example, improving soil structure will help crops make better use of water and nutrients, whilst also reducing runoff and soil loss. Interventions aimed at improving nutrient-use efficiency can reduce input costs for farmers whilst reducing losses to the environment. There are also areas within a farmed landscape that could be better used for habitat creation, such as ponds, wetlands or buffer areas, without compromising the productivity of the rest of the farm. The key is targeted and connected interventions, managing the whole landscape so that food production and environmental benefits work together.
- New clean water ponds created in the Water Friendly Farming project.
We have good evidence for many of the actions that can benefit freshwater. What do you think needs to happen now to translate that evidence into changes in land management at a much larger scale?
The key to the Water Friendly Farming project has been the practical, on-farm testing. This means we’re not just gathering evidence about what works and where it works. We also understand what these measures cost to implement, what the ongoing management requirements are, and how they fit within a farming business.
We need to make sure farmers have access to this practical advice, and that environmental schemes support and reward effective outcomes.
The power of the project has also been its landscape-scale approach. By working across whole catchments, we can see how different interventions interact and understand where they are most effective. That gives us a much better basis for deciding what to do, where to do it and how different measures can work together.
I think the key to moving from evidence into wider adoption is making sure we not only have the science, but also the practical knowledge and the mechanisms to translate that science into action on farms and across whole landscapes.