I AM Adeola Alo, a researcher at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester supervised by Doctors Richard Baines, Nicola Cannon and John Conway.

I am writing to invite you to consider becoming a co-researcher in the above PhD study. In return, the study will help you profile your production, climate change challenges and possible strategies for mitigation.

Climate change has been identified as having major impacts on agricultural production both locally and globally, and this could lead to decreasing yields as well as reduction in profits for farmers. Furthermore, farmers on the Marlborough Downs and Cotswold Hills may face these challenges earlier than others.

This participatory research is designed to look into how arable farmers in the Cotswold Hills and the Marlborough Downs areas currently cope with the issue of climate change and to discover the adaptation measures undertaken. The project will also look into the effect of government policies on production.

I would like to ask you to complete an initial questionnaire and followed by interview to discover the challenges climate change is likely to present you. The study will then explore the ways that you might be able to build resilience into your farming systems in relation to climate change predictions. I will also be inviting groups of farmers to the Royal Agricultural University to discuss these important issues and to find out how others are coping with the challenges of climate change which we are already facing and likely to continue experiencing.

This project will begin at the middle of this year 2014, and ends June 2015.

I will appreciate it if you would consider being part of this. If this is something that would be of interest to you, please contact me and I will send the relevant information to you.

ADEOLA ALO

PhD Office, School of Agriculture, The Royal Agricultural University, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 6JS Email: Adeola.Alo@student.rau.ac.uk