CR2026_59

Title: Securing farm business economic resilience to wild pollinator losses

Lead supervisor: Jake Bishop, School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, University of Reading

Email: j.bishop@reading.ac.uk

Co-supervisor: John Redhead, UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology; Tom Breeze, University of Reading; Frederic Ang, University of Reading

UKRI funding only covers Home fees which increase annually. International students may still apply to this project, but will be required to meet the difference between the International and Home student fees themselves. 

It is widely documented that wild insect pollinator populations are under threat and that their population has already been reduced in a meaningful way. Future projections indicate that this will continue due to a combination of land use change, climate change and pollution. In this project you will contextualise the impacts of pollinator losses for farm businesses in the UK and help develop useful mitigation strategies.

The economic impacts of wild pollinator losses on the production of individual food crops are well established and have been used to quantify the economic cost of pollinator losses at larger scales, with Breeze et al., 2020 estimating that a 30% decline in pollinators could equate to ~£188 M/year yield losses in the UK. What such valuations tend to miss is how those risks manifest for individual farm businesses (but see Cong et al., 2014 for an example using hypothetical farms).

Some farms might be directly dependent on insect pollination for their primary production (for example, high value fruit farms) while others might be dependent on insect pollination for only a few crops in an arable rotation, or indirectly dependent (for example, livestock farms purchasing feed that is dependent upon insect pollinators). Understanding these impacts on farm businesses, and importantly, how farmers may respond to them, is crucial to support both farmers and wild pollinator populations.

We have a good understanding of habitat interventions at field- and landscape- scales that can support wild pollinator populations and other biodiversity on and around the farmland which covers c.70% of UK land area. There are also technological solutions that  farmers can use to reduce the impacts of wild pollinator losses, with varying success. These include switching varieties or species of crops to those with lower pollination dependence (e.g. Bishop et al., 2020), or introducing managed pollinators to increase the local population of pollinating insects. Additional technological solutions including robotic pollinators continue to be developed despite concern of their utility and safety from experts (Potts et al., 2018). There is a research gap around the absolute or relative cost of these different solutions available to farmers in time, economic and cultural terms (e.g. Scherfranz et al., 2025) and how they could change the resilience of farm businesses, in contrast to habitat management and better known dependencies like fertiliser or irrigation costs. There is a risk that by substituting for pollinator losses, farmers could trade one risk for another.

First, using data collected by the UK Government in the DEFRA Farm Business Survey (covering 2-3000 farms in England and Wales each year), you will quantify the resilience of different UK farm types to pollinator losses, including impacts on fodder and energy crop purchases. You will build upon existing analyses (Harkness et al., 2023) in tandem with information about crop pollination dependence (e.g. Bishop & Nakagawa 2021) to estimate how wild pollinator losses could affect the mean and stability of food production and profitability for different farm businesses across the UK.

Then, to understand how farm businesses might respond to these impacts, you will engage with farmers to identify how they may reduce dependency or substitute wild pollinators with agronomic and technological solutions, and/or what habitat management and biodiversity restoration activities they would implement. In this aspect you will be supported by ongoing work in an EU project (agri4pol.eu) which is engaging with farmers in locations across Europe.

You will then bring these two strands of research together to assess the relative impacts on farm business performance, land use and food security of wild pollinator restoration efforts compared to alternative solutions. You will explicitly model pollination services in a dynamic production model, allowing assessment of short-term costs and long-term benefits of a marginal increase in pollination services provision. This will allow us to compare habitat management and biodiversity restoration relative to other plausible alternatives and test the hypothesis that conserving wild pollinator populations results in lower costs for farmers.

The project will deliver world class research in ecology and farm business economics on a timely and policy relevant challenge to UK farming. The project will allow you to build interdisciplinary research skills through direct engagement with farmers, and will produce ground-breaking new methods for assessing farm business vulnerability to environmental changes.

Training opportunities:

You will develop widely translatable expertise in quantitative data analysis, with guidance from a supervisory team whose expertise spans from ecology to farm business economics. Through our partnership with UKCEH there is opportunity to develop spatial data skills and experience research in a non-university environment. This studentship is co-funded by the Edith Mary Gayton bequest, administered by the Farm Management Unit in the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development at University of Reading. You will benefit from a long history of farmer outreach, developing your communication skills and ensuring that your work addresses issues of relevance to policy and practice.

Student profile:

This is an interdisciplinary project and we do not expect applicants to have existing experience in all areas of the project. We will provide comprehensive training, making the project accessible to candidates from diverse backgrounds. The project would be suitable for students with a degree in biological or environmental sciences, economics, or data science. We need someone with enthusiasm to learn diverse data analysis skills and enthusiasm for this subject area, and the core vision of the Crocus DLA, which is train PhD students to be interdisciplinary, have strong quantitative skills, be entrepreneurial, and be sustainability-driven and inclusivity-minded. UKRI funding only covers Home fees which increase annually. International students may still apply to this project, but will be required to meet the difference between the International and Home student fees themselves. 

Co-Sponsorship details:

This project is part funded through the Edith Mary Gayton Bequest.

Reference

1. Bishop & Nakagawa 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.13830
2. Bishop et al 2020 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-58518-1
3. Breeze et al 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.13755
4. Cong et al 2014 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.01.007
5. Harkness et al 2023 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107676
6. Potts et al 2018 https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.06.114
7. Scherfranz et al 2025 https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108694