Discover pollinators on a farm near you!

Two NEW activities for Open Farm Sunday 2012

Lots of people visiting a farm on Open Farm Sunday will have the opportunity to discover at first hand the importance of nature and pollinators to their food in a fun and engaging way. Discover Pollinators and the Pollinator Survey are a two new activities that many farmers will be offering at their Open Farm Sunday events.

With the value of insect pollination estimated at £131 billion globally, ‘pollinators’ are very important to farmers and any research that can aid or improve pollination will be of benefit to the whole industry.New for Open Farm Sunday 2012 are two activities which are being supported by a long term sponsor and supporter of Open Farm Sunday – Syngenta, in partnership with researchers from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) and other leading experts. 

‘Discover Pollinators’ - a biological recording activity for you to do on your own as you walk round an Open Farm Sunday event.  Look out for five insects during your visit to the farm and to let us know whether you have seen them or not. The insects have been specifically chosen as they are very likely to be seen in June across most of Britain. 
If possible take a photo and upload your photo, farm grid reference and other information onto the CEH (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology) website – which will be easily accessible from www.farmsunday.org. It is a simple study but the records become even more valuable when CEH analyse all the results from across the country. This biological recording will give information on how common these species are and by repeating the study for years to come we can see whether they are declining, remaining stable or increasing.

‘Pollinator Survey’ - this is a national scientific survey for visitors to get involved in.  It will take approximately 15 minutes per person/family to do.  Visitors are invited to spend five minutes standing still counting the number of different types of insects visiting flowers in the crop habitat, then another five minutes standing still counting in the ‘other’ habitat.
Later in the year farmers will be able to download their farm specific data and the UK wide results from the website.

More information will be available here soon.

For further information: www.farmsunday.org or Annabel 024 7641 3911 annabel.shackleton@leafuk.org