By Caren Queiroz Souza, Alistair Campbell, Richard Heathcote, Tony Harding, Blandina Felipe Viana, and Lynn Dicks

A flower strip planted between rows of eating apples in an English orchard. Some flowering species, such as red campion, black knapweed and oxeye daisy, were planted for pollinators. Others, such as common daisy and creeping buttercup, have self-seeded.
Photographer: Megan McKerchar

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Planting flowers is a simple yet high-impact way to support declining pollinator populations, providing more diverse and consistent food sources for our small flower-loving friends. Fruit farmers ought to be leading champions for this conservation measure. They have access to areas of land for planting, and they have a vested interest in supporting pollinator populations because their crops depend directly on pollination to produce good quality fruit. Yet flower strips or patches are not particularly popular among any farmers as an agri-environmental measure.

We worked with apple and blackcurrant farmers in the UK to understand what motivates them to plant flowers, or not. We used the ‘Theory of Planned Behaviour’ – a well-established framework in psychology that helps understand what motivates people to take particular actions. Our results reveal that UK fruit farmers understand their crop’s dependence on pollination well. They felt very positive about planting flowers, seeing it as a way to improve wildlife and fruit yields on their farms, but also to reduce pest numbers and make their farm more visually attractive. These positive attitudes and farmers’ own perceived ability to plant and manage the flowers successfully, were the main predictors of their intention to plant flowers. In our sample of 83 farmers, only about half had planted flowers on their farms in the past year, so there’s plenty of room for improvement. We were rather surprised to find that what farmers felt others expected of them (the perceived ‘social norms’), including their customers, the government, or even neighbouring farmers, had little influence on their intentions. Usually, social norms are an important influence on behaviour.

Our study indicates that the most useful things conservationists could do to encourage fruit farmers to plant flowers for pollinators would be to provide training, showing them how to manage flower strips for pollinators, and demonstrate the benefits of doing so, in terms of pollination and pest regulation for their crops.