With biodiversity declining at a worrying pace largely due to agricultural intensification, SHOWCASE aims to find management practices which can balance between maintaining food production and fostering nature conservation. An essential part of this process is to identify how farmers feel about such practices and what would motivate them to implement them. 

To that end, SHOWCASE carried out a survey in autumn and winter 2021/2022 including 50 farmers across 10 countries: the UK, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Romania, Estonia and Sweden. After carefully analysing the results, SHOWCASE’s team has now prepared a short handout with the main highlights of the survey, as they provide valuable insights about biodiversity-friendly farming and the motivations behind implementing it:

Which biodiversity-friendly farming practices are implemented already? Are public incentives promoting biodiversity effective? What affects farmers’ decisions to farm in a more biodiversity-friendly way?

Download the handout here to see what we found out.

Keep in mind that due to the small sample size, the results shown in this handout are not representative of the general situation in or across the study areas, but only reflect individual farmers’ views.

Photo: most farmers in our sample run mixed farms (23) that combine, e.g., animal husbandry and arable farming. Also specialised arable (15), orchard (7) and livestock farms (5) are included.