Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

This is a mixed method data collection. The study is part of the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme. This project investigated the links between quality food production and biodiversity protection by asking the question: can production systems that use and maintain biodiverse natural grasslands, translate that into a source of additional product value in the production of meat and cheese and therefore benefit rural economies? The aim was to inverse the conventional understanding of landscape or environmental quality as the outcome of well managed farming to explore the idea of natural grassland biodiversity as an input into more sustainable farming and as an integral component of product quality. Ecological data from this study are available at the Environmental Information Data Centre of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. Further information for this study may be found through the ESRC Research Catalogue webpage: Eating Biodiversity: An Investigation of the Links between Quality Food Production and Biodiversity Protection.

Main Topics:

Farming practice, biodiversity, botanical composition, farm business, meat quality, consumer responses to meat quality, food production, food, meat, cheese, grassland, dairy farming, animal husbandry, consumers.

Purposive selection/case studies

Volunteer sample

Convenience sample

Face-to-face interview

Observation

Transcription of existing materials

Focus group

Chemical analyses.