Patrick Barker
2024
Patrick farms with his cousin, Brian at Lodge Farm, a 1,300-acre arable farm in North Suffolk, where their core ethos is high yields and top wildlife conservation. The Farm is a LEAF demonstration farm, has just tied up its 6-year tenure as an AHDB Strategic Farm and featured on the BBC Wild Isles series showcasing the importance of Farmland for UK wildlife. Patrick has recorded a wealth of biodiversity on farm, including pollinators rarely documented in the region e.g. the Blackthorn mining bee, Blunthorn nomad bee and the Ruderal bumblebee, challenging the notion that farmland is a biodiversity desert.
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 […]