Dr Felicity Crotty has been researching soil biology and soil health for the last ten years. Firstly, through her PhD where she was investigating the soil food web and subsequently as a post-doc in Canada and Aberystwyth. She joined the Allerton Project in 2015 and has been working on understanding how cover crops can improve soil health as part of Defra’s Sustainable Intensification research Platform (SIP), looking at “Soil Improving Cropping Systems”.

Felicity has been investigating the effects of agricultural management on soil biology (earthworms, springtails, mites and nematodes), chemistry (N, P, K, and other nutrients) and physics (compaction and water in filtration). Through combining her expertise in all three fields, she is starting to disentangle the real impact different management systems have on the soil and future crop yields. However, Felicity’s main research passion is soil biology, trying to understand how the interactions between different organisms within the soil change dependent on agriculture.