A new Federal Environment Agency study has established that the widespread use of plant protection products in intensive agriculture deprives farmland birds in particular of their food source. Wild arable plants, bugs and caterpillars are killed off to protect crops and therefore no longer available as food for other animals. The increasing loss of biodiversity is inevitable. But there is another way: buffer areas of flowering strips and fallow land can substitute as a habitat for bees, butterflies and birds and thereby offset the effects of the use of chemical plant protection products.