Agriwilding study from Brussels and Louvain researchers finds food output need not cost biodiversity

A field experiment from two Belgian universities reports on Monday that farmers can boost on-farm biodiversity without measurably sacrificing food output, the latest empirical push against a binary that has shaped European agricultural policy since the early 2000s.

Researchers at the WILD research group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), working with UCLouvain, released results on 14 July 2026 showing that so-called "agriwilding" practices, the deliberate rewilding of unproductive corners, field margins and strips within working farmland, raised multiple biodiversity indicators while leaving yields within the range that conventional plots produced. The study, reported by Phys.org on 14 July 2026, sits at the centre of an unusually heated policy argument in Brussels over whether the European Union's flagship Green Deal farm targets are realistic, or whether the choice between food security and ecological repair is, as the farm lobby has long insisted, a real one.

What the trial actually did

The study drew on the EU Horizon-funded SHOWCASE and AGROMIX projects, which between them have converted a slice of European farmland into a patchwork of experimental plots. Working farms in several European countries, including sites in Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary, set aside portions of their land for wilding interventions: species-rich grassland, hedgerow restoration, beetle banks, and unharvested field margins. Researchers then tracked farmland biodiversity using standardised indicators including pollinator counts, bird species richness, and earthworm biomass, alongside standard measures of food output from the parts of the field still under cultivation.

The headline finding, that biodiversity indicators improved markedly on agriwilded plots without statistically significant yield losses on the productive portions, is not a one-off. Earlier work from the same research network, including a 2023 analysis published in the journal Nature, has suggested that European farmland harbours a large stock of "under-utilised land": unproductive margins, corners, soil patches, and field edges whose economic contribution to a farm's total output is often small. The Belgian study builds on that line: if the land being rewilded is land farmers were not really harvesting from in the first place, the friction between food production and biodiversity may be smaller than the rhetoric suggests.

The lobby that disagrees

The European farm lobby has resisted aspects of the EU's Green Deal and the related "Farm to Fork" strategy precisely on the argument that any land taken out of production is land taken out of food. Copa-Cogeca, the bloc's main farmer confederation, has framed the legislation as a threat to food security, especially in the wake of high input costs and the disruption to grain markets caused by Russia's war on Ukraine. Belgium's own Boerenbond, a member of that confederation, has been among the more vocal national voices pushing back against what it calls "paper-pusher agriculture".

The Belgian field study does not directly contradict the lobby's central concern, because the agriwilded strips in the trial were largely land that was already marginal. But it narrows the gap. If unproductive margins can be rewilded without dragging down a farm's commercial output, then the policy that pays farmers to do exactly that, the EU's eco-schemes under the Common Agricultural Policy, looks less like a yield tax and more like a transfer to farmers for a service they were, in effect, already providing.

The structural picture

For two decades the binary has served powerful interests on both sides of the debate. Input-heavy conventional agriculture has a multi-billion-euro industrial base in fertilisers, pesticides and seed, anchored in Europe around companies including Bayer, Syngenta and Corteva, whose revenues depend on maximum land utilisation. On the other hand, a growing coalition of retailers, food processors and consumer-facing brands has built sustainability claims around the assumption that farmland can be spared at scale. The argument that any spare land must be spared has, in turn, justified public subsidy flows worth tens of billions of euros per year through the Common Agricultural Policy.

What the WILD group is offering is a more boring and more useful answer: the land being rewilded was often, in yield terms, not really farmland at all. The same hectare that produces a marginal tonne of barley in a wet Dutch polder can, the research suggests, produce more bees, beetles and birds per euro of income forgone, with the farmer compensated for the gap through eco-scheme payments. That is a harder political message to simplify than either "biodiversity versus food" or "biodiversity free of charge", which is part of why it has travelled more slowly.

What to watch next

The next operational test is whether the EU's member states, who co-administer eco-schemes through national CAP strategic plans, can be persuaded to design payments around marginal land in a way the data actually supports. The European Commission is due to publish a review of eco-scheme performance later in 2026, and Belgium's federal and regional governments are negotiating a new round of agri-environment scheme rates through 2027. Researchers at VUB and UCLouvain say they expect their data set to grow as more SHOWCASE demonstration farms report in.

The unresolved question, the sources note, is whether the agriwilding result holds under sustained input cost pressure and weather volatility. A field that loses a marginal strip to wildlife in a wet year is one thing; a farm that loses productive hectares in a bad season is the case the lobby has been making for years. The Belgian data is encouraging on the first, silent on the second, and policymakers would do well to read it as the first rather than the latter.

Monexus framed this against the European farm lobby's "food versus nature" talking point, where the wire led with the laboratory finding. The structural point, that the land being rewilded was often not commercially productive in the first place, is what turns an academic result into a usable policy lever.