Update 2: The #Beneficial beetles Survey

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, Gang aft a-gley” -Robert Burns

I’m sure everyone has a tale of sadly cancelled plans this year, and PhDs are among the most woeful. The downfall of carefully planned experiments, time sensitive work, and seasonal sampling has seriously threatened the outcomes of many projects underpinning thesis work for Doctoral qualifications. I’ve been much luckier than most, in that my fieldwork was all out of the way (though Cov19 has hampered my sample analysis) but it did put a major crimp in the social science aspect of my work.

One of the many bees in my bonnet when it comes to science, is the way that it is not often tied to application- more often shoehorned in at the end of the project as ‘this could be used for’. Since my Undergraduate dissertation working with farmers on different sites, I have seen that the major factor in agro-ecological (farm/wildlife) science is the way it is applied by land managers. In my masters study, I discovered that this is mostly down to perceptions, attitudes, and the resultant decisions that farmers make on a daily basis. So I built this social science aspect into my PhD from the start.

I’ve never spoken to a farmer who didn’t like nature. It’s what makes their crops and livestock grow after all! Many have knowledge and deep appreciation of the natural world, and have been keen for me to tell them how they can adjust their practices to help nature. The problem is that our farmers already work under a cavalcade of constraints. They have to think about markets and economy, the British weather, and weeds/pest/disease outbreaks to say the least- and balance it with their own needs, and the needs of their families. Then ecologists come along and ask them to do something that might affect the productivity of their land!

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Luckily for my work, carabids are an easy sell. They actually have the capacity to help farmers. They are proven efficient predators of crop pests and weed seeds, and we know a lot about farm measures that could help boost their numbers. So, on the first glance it would seem all I need do is connect the dots- tell farmers how great carabids are, and how to help them. Well basically yes, but it’s a bit more difficult than that!

Firstly, how do I tell farmers how great carabids are? Farmers are busy people, they have a lot of information thrust at them on a daily basis, and it’s hard for them to find enough time and to know what is important.

Secondly, we don’t really know that much about what will help them, in application. The results of Agri-environment schemes for beneficial beetles are mixed- some studies find positive results of certain interventions, such as field margins in abundance of diversity of carabids, but it doesn’t always translate into carabid presence in crop areas, when they are needed. There would be no point in putting field margins in, if all the beetles preferred to stay there and not ‘spill-over’ into the crop, as many studies assume.

I had planned to pull these questions together with a social science study, getting farmers to come in for workshops, finding the best methods of communicating to them, and also finding out from them their needs and preferences so that I can design my final distribution models to meet actual needs.

Unfortunately, workshops involve lots of people working together in a room, and Cov19 scuppered that plan completely. So it was back to the drawing board. I decided to do some content that would work remotely, and appealed to farmers to take part in a wider survey: the #Beneficial beetles survey  https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/news/researcher-makes-internet-appeal-after-covid-19-stymies-her-research . I promoted my survey widely; using agricultural media- appearing on podcasts, in newsletters, and articles; and social media- my personal twitter and kind promotion by other academic and agricultural bodies.

Fortunately for me, many fabulously altruistic farmers recognised the importance of my work, and kindly took part.- I got over 160 responses to the first phase, much more than I expected. For the next phase, to discover a bit more about how to communicate, I designed some informative materials. With the talented Gary Frewin from Rothamsted’s comms team, I produced a 3 minute animation- it’s awesome- go look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNyTzU96yYA&feature=youtu.be . I also came up with a carabid ID quiz https://readingagriculture.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_byGTrOfFP9TG2Ud   and a pitfall trapping factsheet https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/sites/default/files/How%20to%20pitfall%20trap%20on%20your%20farm.pdf .  These were very successful, getting far more views and interaction than the survey responses alone!

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  Giving a zoom talk from the comfort of my home

 I then gave interactive talks to farmer groups on 3 occasions, telling the attendees about carabids, their ecology, and conservation in farmland. On a personal note, these talks really kept me motivated as lockdown began. I loved that I could still interact with farmers meaningfully. I always get so much from presenting, and it’s great that remote presenting can still deliver the same dialogue. Afterwards I asked attendees to look at the aforementioned materials and take my survey. The hypothesis being, that their perceptions and attitudes may be different to those farmers completing the survey without extra information on carabids.

I’ve still got to finish writing up the findings of the survey, but *SPOILER ALERT* there’s not as much difference as I expected (think this is due to self-selection bias of interested participants) BUT there is a key difference in future intent to implement measures beneficial to carabids, which has implications to how scientists might effectively communicate research to farmers. I can also report on which measures are favoured more generally and may be useful to target for agri-environmental interventions. Watch this space.