Farming Today bases Saturday programme on Pasture for Life farm
Summary
Farming is a major contributor to climate change. An estimated quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture – mostly in the form of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. So, what can farmers do to reduce the impact their industry has? Charlotte Smith visits a farm in Worcestershire to learn more about changes the family there are making, in order to farm in a more environmentally friendly way.
Presented by Charlotte Smith and produced by Emma Campbell.
Section One
Next this morning Charlotte Smith will ask what agriculture can do to reduce its impact on climate change.
CS- Good morning, what have a tractor, a freshly dug field and a gassy cow all got in common? Don’t worry, it’s not the start of a really bad farming joke; the answer, they are all contributors to global warming. Well, I’ve come to a farm in Worcestershire this morning to discuss agriculture’s connection with climate change. To look at all the issues, and indeed some of the solutions. An estimated a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture. Primarily in the form of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Which in a farming environment are most commonly released by machinery, livestock and fertilisers. Which brings us here to Phepson Farm in Worcestershire. I’m with two generations of the Havard family here, David and his son Rob. We are in beautiful sunshine this morning. David, tell me about your farm? How long has your family been here?
David- My grandfather came here in 1919, so Robert is the fourth generation.
CS- And what do you farm?
David- Now? Just beef cattle.
CS- In your time on the farm here David, how much has the way you farm changed?
David- Oh, enormously. What Robert is doing, is a long way removed from what I was doing, spreading fertiliser, using sprays, and feeding cattle in the winter, on concentrates. Now, we’re grass fed, all year round, and the cattle stay out. There’s a lot of difference.
CS- Rob, you’re behind the difference. How easy has that change been?
Rob- It’s been helped by dad. I think one of the key drivers for us has…myself I’ve worked in ecology, and still do, so I had that interest in the environment, but the other side of it was being really hard on the costs side, so that’s really driven a lot of what we’re doing and I think helped, with dad seeing a different approach, but when you can see the margins working for you, and when you can see your costs coming down, that always helps when you’re trying to change something.
CS- You still work as an ecologist, you’re actually an advisor for Natural England on grazing. A Farmer and an ecologist, in a family, lots of people would imagine that makes for lively discussion David?
David- It has happened. (laughter) Father and son. Things in all walks of life are changing enormously. I realised we have to do something. Just hope that he’s got it right.
CS- Let’s hope you have. How much of what you are doing is driven by your desire to cut emissions, with climate change in mind?
Rob- It’s not just driven by that, I’d never say that. The ecology and the diversity, the wildlife on the farm, I think that’s really important to me and I think also, with a young family growing up on the farm, having things like that, and when they see the environment improving, see the wildlife improving. So, there is a lot of other reasons there, but I think, probably the key drive is me looking forward in thinking that I’d like our family to still be farming here in the future and basing in on that, whilst caring for, you know at the bottom line, our back pocket, but at the same time looking after the land which has got to look after another generation as well.
Section Two
CS- Let’s hear from COP 23. The twenty-third session of the conference of the parties. It is currently underway in Germany and has been concentrating a bit on agriculture this week. It’s the decision-making body of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, it’s the bit that’s responsible for ratifying the Paris Agreement back in 2015. Well I spoke to Nick Nuttal, he’s spokesman for the UN Framework about the role of agriculture in global warming.
NN- By some estimates, something like 24-25% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, that’s the pollution going into the atmosphere that’s causing climate change, is actually coming from global agricultural systems.
CS- And we’ve had lots of meetings over many decades now, about this. Is anything changing in agriculture?
NN- Enormous things are changing in terms of the global response to climate change, and national responses too. I mean, two years ago, we managed to secure this universal agreement of all nations, The Paris Climate Change Agreement, and as part of that process, governments were actually asked to put down their best efforts, their national climate action plans, in terms of what they felt they could do, to deliver on The Paris Climate Change Agreement, and agriculture in a sense, has lagged behind the curve, and that’s why governments have actually put agriculture on the agenda, in a very explicit way, for in some ways the very first time.
CS- It is more complicated perhaps, when it comes to agriculture though, and there are issues with financing the change. But also with maintaining a food supply, while you are changing the way you do things.
NN- I think there is a great deal of low hanging fruit, I mean one of the most extraordinary things in agriculture and food production generally is this stark and very sobering fact, that something like a third of all the food that we do produce is actually wasted. It’s something like 28% of the worlds agricultural lands are growing food that’s never eaten.
CS- Some people say actually, we just need to be more radical about this, we need to stop eating meat, or eat considerably less. Reduce livestock farming, no-till arable farming, lots of big changes, eat differently, problem solved.
NN- I think it’s very difficult for the UN to preach the global population and say ‘thou shall not eat meat’, it depends I think on horses for courses. I mean in Africa for example, there’s been a lot of studies on farmers who have moved for example to organic agriculture, and many of them have seen their yields go up, often because they are actually putting mulch into very thin soils that dry out very quickly, and they get longer growing seasons, and also it’s cheaper for them, but there are so many other things that you can look at. Waste water; I was looking at one figure the other day, that a city of ten million flushes enough nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium away, to fertilise about 500,000 hectares of agricultural land. So, it’s all about how we manage these systems and we must do something about agriculture, because if we don’t do something about agriculture, we won’t meet the targets under the new Paris Climate Change Agreement, which is what the world is all signed up to.
Section Three
CS- There is nothing like coming into a field and being greeted by an enthusiastic herd of cattle come running towards you…they associate Rob, who farms here, with food. I think you’ve slightly disappointed them Rob because you’ve just brought them a mineral lick.
Rob- Yeah, that’s it, we just give them that now and again, but the reason they usually come running is because when I turn up, I’m going to give them a new break of grass, so we move them onto a fresh patch every time, and you can see, they are always excited about that.
CS- Now this grass, that I’m standing on here, plentiful, lush, how do you get it like this, without putting stuff on it?
Rob- Well that’s the key thing for us, keeping our costs down, and if we put stuff on it, in terms of fertiliser then that’s going to cost us lots of money. So, what we try and do is work with biology of the plants themselves. We vary what we do when they’re grazing, but one thing we never do, is we are never grazing a patch for more than four days, and we usually move them every two days. What we want to do is leave that to regrow and what we are trying to do is let the grass, that stores all the energy in the roots and crown of the plant, and that then can be used to regrow that plant when we graze it off. If we graze it again before it’s had time to replenish those stores, then we’re going to have to use a fertiliser to put it back on, and we’re working against the biology of the plant.
CS- Now you’re relatively new to this farm, which is rented.
Rob- Yeah, that’s right, so we started this on this farm in January, and it was farmed conventionally previously, quite intensively, what we considered very well, it was a very good farmer here before, but the owner was very keen on having an organic approach, and we were nearby, and so we’ve put half the farm that was arable back down to grass, and then we are grazing the other half at the moment with these Angus Heifers, the pedigree Angus Heifers that we’ve taken on.
CS- So, from a climate change point of view, what difference have you made here?
Rob- I suppose the biggest change here in terms of climate change for us would be putting the arable land into pasture, so the organic carbon levels in the arable will be much lower. The government’s own figures from research that they used back in 2006 will show that, I think over the next twenty years we will be putting about 140 tonnes of carbon back into those arable soils by putting it back to pasture.
CS- Even so, fundamentally isn’t there an argument when people say you have to bite the bullet, you have to eat considerably less meat, or no meat, you have to have a different approach?
Rob- It’s about management of the cattle. If we get our cattle management right, and our farming, then I think that we can ameliorate a lot of the inputs from agriculture, and then it’s up to the other industries to then look at what’s happening elsewhere.
CS- Well there is a lot of research in this area, not least in trying to reduce the emissions from cattle by changing what they eat. Scientists at Rothamsted Research though are taking a slightly different approach. They’ve been analysing the emission levels of individual cows, as Emma Campbell found out when she met up with researcher Graham McAuliffe, at the centre’s Northwyke site in Devon.
Section Four
GM- We have three different pasture systems here in Northwyke. On each of the systems we have thirty Charolais, Hereford, Friesian cattle. The aim of my research was to calculate a partial carbon footprint of individual animals, which had not been done previously.
EC- How do you go about calculating the carbon footprint or hoofprint of an individual cow?
GM- Doing it individually is based primarily on the level of data that we are collecting here at Northwyke. So, we had farm staff and technical staff who weigh the cattle every two to four weeks, which allows us to calculate the emissions on a two to four week period for those individual animals.
EC- How does knowing their weight tell you how much they have been emitting in terms of greenhouse gasses?
GM- It comes down essentially to how much feed they are consuming, as they get bigger they are consuming more feed, which means there is more crops in the rumen for the methanogenic bacteria to produce more methane, and when we analyse the data, we are able to plot it on a graph, so we can see, well this animal grew on average, let’s say, 0.8kg per day and produced X amount of methane, but we are able to do that for every animal, so we could see the emissions were generally higher or lower based on efficiency.
EC- So it’s down to how well each animal is converting the food that you are giving them into weight on their frame and therefore how much is being lost and wasted as methane, is that correct?
GM- yeah, precisely.
EC- Thanks very much Graham, well also joining me here is Michael Lee who is the head of site here at Rothamsted Research at Northwyke. Michael, what are the implications of Graham’s research when it comes to the work that farmers are actually doing on the ground?
ML- The research we’re doing here at Northwyke is really about unpicking the complexities of sustainable production. So, what is the role of ruminants, what livestock cattle, as part of food security. The whole premise on sustainability is around efficiency. So, it is about efficient capture of nutrients. Really, we want nutrients to transfer from the soil into the food that we consume and reduce the loss to water and air. So, what we do here at Northwyke is measure all the different nuances around sustainability. Particularly the main focus is on nutrients transfer.
EC- So, If Graham’s research is allowing you to see that cow A produces this much methane and B produces that much methane, what’s the implications in farming terms? Is it then that you cull cow A and breed from cow B or what does it mean for a farmer?
ML- The best farmers are already doing this. They are selecting the best animals as part of their breeding programmes. What we’re showing is, if you do select the correct animals based on numerous key performance indicators, that you are also selecting animals for lower emissions. Animals emit. Our research is showing that we shan’t just ignore that fact, and say ok, animals emit, let’s get rid of them; let’s work to reduce the impact of these animals.
CS- Michael Lee from Rothamsted Research there.
Section Five
CS- You are listening to Farming Today, this week, with me Charlotte Smith…I’m standing in a field in Worcestershire, and we are digging a hole. I am with farmer Rob Havard, whose family have farmed in this area for some years. What are you doing?
Rob- We are just going to show you the difference between our arable soils that we are putting down to pasture and the old permanent pasture.
CS- So what am I looking at here then? This is from the field that we are standing in.
Rob- You can see how dark and brown, it’s got a chocolaty brown colour to it, even though this is quite sandy soil, because it’s got all this carbon in it. You can also see all these roots and the soil life that is associated with the plants growing on the soil. So, all of this is all carbon that’s stored in here. That if we ploughed it up, and we didn’t have that network of roots, the network of fungal hyphae, the soil biology, the little bugs, the beasts that are in there, they’re all made of carbon. So, the more life we have, the more carbon we have in the soil.
CS- And this field has been down to pasture for how long?
Rob- This has been down for as long as we can remember. So, this has always been permanent pasture.
CS- We are going to trudge across the field, to one that we prepared later, in fact, because the field we are going to look at has just been down to pasture for, what? Less than a year now?
Rob- yeah, it was in arable, and we seeded it down this summer.
CS- Well, this field is a little bit different to be honest. So, it’s a little bit wetter underfoot, and it is a bit soggy isn’t it.
Rob- Well it is, and I think that is one of the things that ploughing and cultivating soil does, it takes a lot of the soil structure out. So, it will get compacted easily if you’re not careful, whereas the sod that we brought from the permanent pasture, you can see is nice and fluffy, and if I dig a hole here, you can see, this is going to break my spade. As you can see, the soil from the permanent pasture, its friable, its dry, its full of roots, you can see there is plenty of oxygen in spaces for the air in there, loads of room for life; whereas we see this compacted soil from the arable land, which actually has a different smell, it smells a bit funky, you’ve got a few roots in there, but, it’s going to take us five or six years to sort out this with what we’ve planted in here. We’ve got Ribwort Plantain, we’ve got Oxeye Daisy, Birdsfoot Trefoil and lots of clovers. So, lots of native wild flowers, mixed with some productive grasses, and that diversity helps to have extra soil diversity which is going to help us with our soil, and then that helps us farming in the future.
CS- Well, standing alongside us watching all this is Dave Stanley, who farms just down the road, and is also an independent sustainability advisor. So, you’ve worked on climate change, you’ve worked in agriculture for many years. How many solutions can agriculture offer, while people are talking about climate change at COP23?
DS- In terms of the potential that farming can contribute to me mitigating climate change, it’s just worth remembering that there is as much carbon in the worlds’ soils as there is in all the biomass, the forestry, the atmosphere and the surface of the oceans combined. So, clearly a small percentage of increasing carbon in soil will have quite a significant benefit.
CS- Also though, people are trying to work out how to feed a growing world population, and so in many ways, you think fertilisers and so on has been massively beneficial to us over the years.
DS- Fundamentally, there has been a doubling in terms of grain production through the use of nitrate fertilisers over the last, say, 40 years or so, but at the same time, soil organic matter, which is absolutely essential for crop growth overall, has halved over that period, and with it, there has been the loss of that water retention capability.
CS- Rob, conventional farmers will be shouting at the radio by now. There are other ways of improving things aren’t there?
Rob- I agree actually, I think that where the really interesting things happening in agriculture is where organic agriculture and conventional high production agriculture meet, and that boundary line is getting blurred all the time, projects all over the place, very intensive farmers now really looking after their soils, looking at ways to do that, and I think we have just got to start working together, share information, and we can move forward together.
CS- I am very aware that we have talked an awful lot about emissions, and there are other issues when it comes to agriculture and climate change, not least pests and diseases, which are changing because of a change in climate. Is that something you’re aware of yet or worrying about in the future here?
Rob- I think it is something that we’ve got to keep an eye on. I mean, the healthier we can keep our stock, the healthier we can keep our crops, by having healthy soils, that’s going to give us that resilience to that change.
CS- Well, as I said, there are concerns that because of global warming, it is giving pathogens and insects all sorts of things farmers really don’t want to see a really good chance to spread. Howard Shannon has been down to see one farmer who says he’s already seeing a change.
Section Six
HS- Well, I’ve come to Surrey and I am with arable farmer Peter Knight. Peter, looking around your farm here, is there any evidence of climate change affecting your farm?
PK- Yes, there is definitely a change in the weather pattern, we’re inundated with aphids on cereals at the moment, and I’m fairly certain that is due to the mild Autumn that we’ve had. The situation we’re in as arable farmers, is it is very difficult to control a disease once it is in the crop, so we are trying to eliminate the disease, or prevent the disease from coming in in the first place. We, generally speaking, have to choose the chemical we are using, or adjust the rate based on what we think the weather is going to do for the next three weeks, as it becomes more difficult to predict that weather. I mean the met office struggles to predict the next three days, never mind the next three weeks, it makes our job much more difficult.
HS- Looking back to the beginning of your farming year, do you recall seeing pests and diseases appearing earlier in the year?
PK- Now we are having to routinely treat crops in March to keep the level of disease down in the crops, and that’s mainly due to increasing in temperature and the fact that diseases are not getting killed off by cold winters.
Section Seven
Dr Eleanor Webster works for the Royal Horticultural Society, and is the author of a report looking into the potential implications into climate change. So, what are her conclusions?
ES- Well, the main thing really is that climate change is going to disrupt the host and pest and or disease interaction, and what I mean by that is that pest and disease out there, distribution depends on climate and the environmental conditions and also how healthy the actual plant is they are trying to attack, and climate change is likely to affect all of these things.
Are there any plus points to climate change, I mean perhaps, the increase in ladybirds perhaps, who are beneficial predators?
ES- Yeah, there are absolutely will be, so the warmer climate will mean an increased life cycle for some species, so these beneficial insects, like you say ladybirds and others, they are likely to be able to be active for longer, which is great because that will coincide with the longer growing season, which is definitely an advantage.
Meanwhile, and back in Surrey, and Peter Knight has half an eye on potential invaders.
PK- There is no doubt that we are getting warmer, we are not getting the cold winters to knock down the background population, so we do stand a chance of importing diseases and pests from further down in Southern Europe, even possibly as far down as Africa, they are going to eventually make their way to the UK.
Section Eight
CS- Peter Knight there, well I’m wondering across a field in Worcestershire with Rob Havard who farms it, why are we wondering across this field?
Rob- This is a twenty-acre field here where we are going to try a new project, where we are going to put a load of trees in this field, partly because we want to try and make sure that our farming is good for the environment, and trees are really good for the wildlife here, partly because we think we can use some of the trees in terms of productivity. So, we can use some trees for forage to balance the nutrition in the rumen of the cattle, but also, we can grow some timber for the farm without really losing any grazing.
CS- So, this is agroforestry really?
Rob- That’s right, essentially, we are trying to get the same productivity from the field, but also get some other products from it.
CS- Well, one company which has gone for forestry in a big way, is one that you might not perhaps expect. It’s the Lakes Free-Range Egg Company, it supplies lots of the major supermarkets, but actually has won awards for its work with trees. David Brass took Caz Graham for a stroll through the woodland and explained how and why the environment became more important to them.
Section Nine
DB- We started planting trees in 1997, these are some of the first ones as you can see there.
KG- They’re really big aren’t they, really mature, very tall, and underneath them, this lovely soft ground and an awful lot of hens.
DB- Yes, well, they love it, it’s a nice day today, and they’re racing around, they’re scratching on the leaves, it’s just a perfect time of year for them, berries and things falling, they like the cover of trees.
KG- How many trees have you planted David?
DB- Here, on this farm, around about 70,000 thousand, across the company probably 200,000. When we started planting trees, we did it because it felt like a good idea, the chickens looked as though they were happy underneath them. We then approached our customers saying we need woodland planting, they kind of said, well ok, we are interested, prove it, so we then linked up with FAI, Farming Animal Initiative in Oxford, Oxford Universities old research farm, and they proved it scientifically that chickens are actually healthier, less mortality, more production, better quality, all from having places like this where they can scratch around in and it gives them a stress-free life effectively.
KG- Well, David, planting trees isn’t the only thing you are doing here, you have also this year clocked up a first for the egg industry because you have become carbon neutral, you’ve got biomass boilers, heat source pumps, a thousand solar panels, we can see some of them just down the hill in that field right in front of us there, and something that’s really new, which is a virtually carbon-free egg packing plant. Can we go and take a look?
DB- And welcome to our factory, carbon neutral, we process here about 1 million eggs a day. We were really lucky in that we had a greenfield site to start on, so all modern technology could be included right from the start. So, rainwater/greywater harvesting, solar panels, efficient heating, underfloor heating, ground-source heating, all the stuff you want in a modern building.
KG- Didn’t all of this cost a phenomenal amount of money?
DB- Millions, yes.
KG- Do you find though as well that growing a business in a way that is carbon neutral is really good for the people who buy your eggs from you because they want to do their bit for the environment as well, and they want to say, we buy our eggs from a carbon neutral supplier?
DB- Every retailer and food service in the country want to be environmentally friendly, they all have their own corporate statements, if you can fit with that, that’s got to work.
Section Ten
CS- David Brass in Cumbria, well here in Worcestershire, I have to say, it is getting a little bit chilly, so we are sheltering from the wind in in the lee of the land rover here. I’ve got two generations of a farming family in front of me, and we’ve been talking about emissions and climate change all morning. David is the senior generation here. When Rob, your son, starts banging on about these things, do you think this is the future for our farm, or do you worry?
David- To me now, this is the way forward, we have to look after the land, we are duty bound, in my opinion, to look after the land for the next generation and generations to come.
CS- Because Rob, your kids are all under ten, so say I came back in ten/fifteen year’s time, how different do you think this place will be?
Rob- Hopefully, we will have all those children involved in the business and it’s going to give us that opportunity to take that forward and from the wildlife point of view, you know, just this year it’s been incredible, we’ve seen the female hare raise five leverets this year on here, we have got kestrels coming back, hunting all the voles, we’ve got a lot more small mammals within the long grass, and I mean they even come and follow me, the kestrels when we’re moving the cattle, my kids have called it the fattest kestrel in Worcestershire because it just hunts for about half an hour and then it’s done for the day.
CS- So we’ll see you then in about fifteen years…thank you very much for your time this morning. That’s it from us here in Worcestershire.
