Sophie Alexander
2024
Sophie manages Hemsworth Farm, a 500-hectare organic arable and dairy farm in Dorset. Hemsworth Farm is part of a new collaborative project, funded through Innovate UK and Defra’s Farming Innovation Programme, with Agri-EPI Centre, AgriSound, Dorset Wildlife Trust, Pollenize CIC and Chirrup AI. The project is testing whether technology can facilitate 24/7 monitoring on farm, quantifying biodiversity and improving access to scalable remote technologies. Sophie has utilised both traditional ecological and innovative technological approaches to biodiversity baselining on farm and gives insight into where additional data generation can be valuable, but a holistic approach to biodiversity can provide even greater value still.
My Sessions
Sensing Change: Taxonomy or Technology?
Dr Laura James
Dr Niamh McHugh
Sophie Alexander
Patrick Barker
In this session we will be joined by two farmers who have taken different approaches to biodiversity baselining, and a farmland ecologist empowering farmers to take control of their own biodiversity data, to ask; ‘does farmland have a lack of biodiversity OR a lack of biodiversity data?’ and ‘Where does the value lie in biodiversity […]