Biodiversity 4Agriculture: lessons from the Centre for Sustainable Cropping
The Centre for Sustainable Cropping (CSC) long-term experiment is a 42-hectare site over 6 fields at Balruddery Farm, Scotland. It was established in 2009 to design, test and demonstrate the long-term impacts of a regenerative cropping system on indicators of soil health, biodiversity and crop yield.
A split field design allows direct comparison of the effect of the regenerative/integrated system (Int) compared to standard commercial practice (Con). Agronomic details here.
The six fields are planted in a rotation of potato, winter wheat, winter barley, winter oilseed, spring beans and spring barley with all 6 crops present each year.
For each crop, 2–5 different varieties are sown in the 18m strips. The same varieties were sown in both the regenerative and conventional field halves to look at genotype × environment interactions. A “plot strip” is available for anyone wishing to test their own varieties.
There are 350 GPS mapped sample locations across the site at which indicators of soil health and biodiversity are monitored during every growing season.
Site layout at the CSC long-term experiment showing location of the six crops in the first year of each rotation (2011, 2017, 2023 etc). Arrows indicate the direction of crop rotation.
