Additional information

Pesticide free field margins often provide limited benefits to farmers. But targeted flower mixes can help to deliver pollination - and pest control services – supporting the farmer. However, the effectiveness of field margins in delivering pest control services strongly depends on their botanical composition.

Currently, non-crop plants are typically chosen for one particular ecosystem service, often rendering them suboptimal for other functions.

Field trials in the Netherlands and the UK created new seed mixtures – taking a broad range of selection criteria into account (like their beneficialness for bees, hoverflies, parasitoids, farmland birds; their weed status, flowering season…… and costs!). These mixes provided multiple benefits for growers:

• Numbers of natural enemies in the flower margins were 2 to 6 fold higher, relative to control margins. The higher numbers of natural enemies clearly spilled-over into the crop, with elevated levels recorded up to 50m from the flower margin.

• Crop pests suffered more attacks from the larger contingent of insect predators and were effectively suppressed on the field side with the flower strip. 10-30% higher yields were achieved near flowering margins in two out of the three years and for three out of the four crops tested.

The “perennials seed list“ can be found on the lancaster.ac.uk site and contains useful information on the botanical composition of seed mixes – helping farmers to choose seeds/seed mixes that fulfil their requirements.