Beneficial insects often lack enough food supply and nesting spots in orchards. Most of the measures to enhance biodiversity also require investment for implementation. Alternate mowing is a cheap, easy and fast implementable measure to raise food and nesting supply of natural antagonists. The workload decreases, and therefore it saves time and costs. Alternating mulching preserves the driving lanes and increases the diversity of other indifferent plant and animal species in the orchard.

Although much is known about the general taxonomy and biology of earthworms, knowledge about their impact on soils, their interactions with other soil organisms and the influence of farming practices on their populations is increasing only slowly.

Earthworms are usually the most abundant soil animals in agricultural soils. They are known to improve physical, chemical and biological properties of soils. Together with soil microorganisms they have a great potential to enhance soil fertility.

The publication takes readers on a journey to 15 organic plant and animal breeding initiatives in Europe. Every initiative is presented by a person involved in the initiative. For each initiative, the aims and challenges are described. The selected examples give a good insight into the great diversity of initiatives to maintain and promote biodiversity in organic crops and animal species.

Reconciling crop productivity and biodiversity maintenance is one of the main challenges of agriculture worldwide. Moreover, the importance of weed diversity in mitigating yield losses has been identified as one of the top five research priorities in weed science. We tested the hypotheses that (1) not all weed communities generate yield losses and (2) that more diversified weed communities can mitigate yield losses.