Upton Estate near Banbury,
Oxfordshire

On the Upton Estate near Banbury, Oxfordshire that he manages, Rob Allan is providing large areas of habitats, including meadows and wild bird plots. He’s also become famous for his sandwich margins. Not the bread-and-butter item with cheese and Branston pickle, but something that’s every bit as tasty to all manner of small invertebrates and other wildlife.

This sandwich, explains Mr Allan, is a three-tiered fi eld margin with one part fl ower-rich habitat that provides pollen and nectar, one part clover-rich legume mix delivering food for bumblebees and butterfl ies and one part tussocky grass of the sort favoured by nesting birds, over-wintering beetles, bees and small mammals.

The point of this combination of habitats is that it can provide a range of benefi ts to all manner of animals, and the margins now
account for 10% of the arable land here. It’s just one example of Mr Allan’s extremely focused attitude towards providing some
breathtakingly attractive habitats for wildlife.

In fact, there is so much pioneering work going on around this 800ha (2000 acres) estate, thanks to a four-year-old partnership between Upton and the Wildlife Farming Company, that it’s become a bit of a Mecca for visiting study groups.

Upton has even had David Bellamy come to visit, which resulted in him enthusing about the 20m wildfl ower margins along some of the fi eld boundaries.

Upton is a fascinating place. It straddles the Oxfordshire/Warwickshire border and the land ranges from 300ft elevation to 700ft. It’s formed of a series of hills and valleys with a range of habitats and archaeological features, including a Roman villa and the site where the parliamentarian troops gathered before the Battle of Edgehill in the English Civil War.

In the eight years that he’s been manager at Upton, Mr Allan has worked hard to combine efficient farming with sensitive wildlife management. He brings a refreshingly pragmatic approach to it, too. “One of my ambitions is to make conservation pay. Until
then there’s a sense in which it’s still a hobby.”

He has certainly gone a good way towards achieving that ambition. As one of the star suppliers of conservation-grade cereals to
Jordans, he earns a very substantial premium over conventionally-produced crops. Upton Estate has also appeared in Jordans’ advertising.

He’s also in both the Entry Level and Higher Level schemes, and he reckons the income from these now replaces the losses from modulation fi ve times over.

The wildlife-enhancing work at Upton spans all manner of species. More than 60 types of moth have been trapped in the fields
in one night and 16 different types of bumblebee (including the rare Bombus ruderatus) have been found as part of Operation
Bumblebee.

They’ve also had some notable successes with barn owls. “There had been very few sitings of barn owls at Upton over the last 20 years, so we increased the habitats for small mammals and erected 28 nest boxes. In 2005 three pairs of nesting barn owls reared all their young successfully, and four pairs are feeding young this year,” he says.