The Protecting Farmland Pollinators Operational Group project encourages farmers in Ireland to make small changes on their farms which will make big differences to pollinators. These changes include providing habitats on their farms that will offer food, safety and shelter for wild bees and hoverflies and increase biodiversity in general. Pollinators are essential for farmers growing insect-pollinated crops, fruits and vegetables. However, there are many factors, including intensive specialised agriculture, which have led to a wide-scale loss of wild pollinators on farmland over the last fifty years. In Ireland, one-third of their bee species are threatened with extinction (All Ireland Pollinator Plan). Improving agricultural systems to reverse the degradation of ecosystems would create significant and sustainable economic value and improvements to the health of the environment. Saorla Kavanagh - The National Biodiversity Data Centre, Operational Group project manager explains “Pollinators are basically a proxy for biodiversity. If you help pollinators, it will have knock-on effects and you’ll help biodiversity.” They created a scoring system which would help farmers to understand how pollinator-friendly or not their farm currently is, and to identify the type of simple, low-cost management practices they could take to improve their score. Saorla says “It is not about making huge changes, but integrating small actions that will allow biodiversity to coexist within an already productive farming system.”