Category: Insights

I’m Izzy, the FCT Agricultural Data Analyst. I have been part of FCT for six months now, but I am still constantly blown away by the passion and expertise shown by our Team when they start digging through a farmer’s soil and eyeing up herbal leys.

Each day in this job can be different, thanks to the breadth of data that FCT collects and uses. From tractors to goats to nitrogen and anaerobic digesters, we count it all. The speed with which our projects progress means there is a great demand for efficiency in handling the data, and so I get to employ every coding technique I can to make the data flow as smoothly and insightfully as possible. The end of July saw us compiling a full data set of carbon footprinting data to calculate the emissions and sequestration for 82 members of the First Milk dairy cooperative.

There is such variety in the farms that we work with, their livestock, crops, inputs and building materials rarely fit easily within one category. Our Farm Carbon Calculator has been built with an eye for detail designed to capture the complexity of the farming world as best we can, but it still makes analysing the data an exciting challenge. As FCT continues to engage in large projects and extend its reach across the UK and beyond, we will be developing and advancing the software we use for collecting and mapping out our data to give us further insights into the way farmers can lead the charge against the climate emergency.

Read more about Izzy and the rest of the team here.

Written by Stefan Marks one of our Farm Carbon and Soils Advisors.

July marks the midpoint of 2023, with the first half passing by swiftly. It has been a varied year thus far and trying to encapsulate what a typical day might look like working for FCT can be difficult. A week can be a mix of farm days, office work and deadlines but perhaps this milestone provides a good opportunity to reflect on the progress made in the first 6 months.

So far this year my involvement in projects such as Farm Net Zero and the Duchy of Cornwall have been somewhat limited though they are certain to be a key focus in the coming months. The foundation of my projects this year have been varied including sampling in the South West for FERA, remote GIS work collating our GPS sampling data for Yeo Valley and the completion of the Durham AONB project.

The Durham AONB project has been a singular focus with a significant amount of sampling and an equally significant amount of data to process from the 29 farms in the North Pennines. Much of this was conducted over the winter period with considerable efforts from samplers in some rather adverse conditions. Indeed, whilst sampling myself I observed first hand some of the difficulties of farming in such a challenging landscape. So, when we returned at the end of May, marking the end of this project, it was fantastic to see the North Pennines at their best with nature in full flow!

To conclude the Durham project, we ran 3 days of farmer focused events in which we presented the results of the soil analysis and potential options for improving soil health to consider on farm. These events provided an excellent forum for a positive dialogue and knowledge exchange between those in attendance. I found being part of this discussion hugely beneficial providing me with greater context of farming in this distinctive landscape which does not closely resemble many farms I visit in Cornwall.

From my own experience I have found farm events are the highlight of the job and these were no different with such genuine interest and active discussion initiated by the farmers themselves. Among the discussions there was an emphasis on enhancing the natural environment and tailoring on farm operations to benefit the unique wildlife in the AONB.

It has been a busy and rewarding 6 months ending with Groundswell 2023. An opportunity to see some familiar faces, catch up with the FCT team and listen to inspiring talks from some from some of the industry’s best. I am looking forward to the second half of 2023!

Read more about Stefan and the rest of the team here.

Cover crops are usually planted within arable rotations between cash crops. They provide a multitude of benefits including building soil fertility, improving soil health and enhancing above and below ground biodiversity.  

As a non-cash crop, it is important to evaluate your soils to identify any issues and decide what you want to accomplish on a field-by-field basis before you sow any cover crops. Species selection should be based on what solution you want the cover crop to provide.

Above: Cover crops (left to right) oil radish, winter vetch, phacelia and rye

There are many reasons to grow cover crops

Cover crops can offer solutions for soil compaction, fertility building, pest management, livestock feed, cover over winter and more generally, improved soil health.

Addressing compaction issues with deeper rooting species will aid in breaking up the soil and improve porosity, leading to better water infiltration alongside nutrient and gaseous exchange. Incorporating leguminous plants, such as clover, will fix nitrogen, reducing dependency on artificial fertiliser for subsequent crops. Incorporating forage crops into covers which can then be strip or paddock grazed with out-wintered livestock may reduce costs from bought in feed. If arable only, it presents an opportunity to integrate livestock from a neighbouring farm.

Maintaining ground cover and persistence of living roots in the soil can also reduce competition from pests. Certain species of cover crops can even be selected to control the lifecycle of predators. For example, in a Farmer’s Weekly case study, a farmer described his strategy for controlling the population of free-living nematodes that were destroying his vegetables and sugar beet. In this case, a specific oil radish was used that stimulated the hatching of nematode eggs whilst simultaneously providing hostile conditions for their growth, causing slowing and ultimate cessation of nematode reproduction.

Improving soil health

Cover crops are also a useful tool to build stable aggregates to improve soil structure and increase soil organic matter and soil carbon to feed the soil biology. They act as a ‘savings account’, scavenging and assimilating residual nutrients from previous cropping which will then be released upon desiccation for the next crop.

Diversity in cropping is often mooted as a key method to improve soil health and productivity and incorporating cover crops is a fantastic way to introduce much needed diversity into the arable rotation. The idea is that a diverse mix of crops will bring along a diverse mix of rooting types, structures and lengths. Each root will support an array of bacteria and fungi with different apparatus to cycle the nutrients whilst extending and expanding the root network. Above-ground you are also providing a mosaic of solar panels of all different shapes and sizes, keeping the soil covered and maximising the surface area for photosynthesis, utilising the sun’s energy and pumping carbon back into the soil.

Practical tips for establishing and destroying cover crops

For optimum results you need the cover crops to progress quickly therefore warmer soils are usually required – late summer is best for legumes and phacelia, however, brassica and grass species can be sown as late as October. It is good practice to sow multiple species in any one field to optimise competition and gain maximum benefit. This can be especially good for controlling persistent weeds.

Destruction options vary depending on weather, crop type and available machinery. Some cover crops may die off with winter frosts or in hot weather a crimp roller can usually do the job. Ensure a clear plan is drawn out before sowing cover crops and allow a 4-6 week window between destruction and sowing the next crop.  

Using cover crops to increase profit margins

It’s important to think of your bottom-line productivity when assessing whether to go for cover crops. It is an added expense, but the potential savings from reduced inputs could outweigh the additional cost. The benefits of having living roots in the soil all year round, alongside cover to buffer against adverse weather conditions will also improve soil quality, protecting our soils for future harvests and most importantly building business resilience. 

This blog was written by one of our Farm Carbon and Soils Advisors, Tilly Kimble-Wilde. Find out more about her and the rest of the team here.

As the Calculator Manager, I keep the Calculator running for our thousands of users and our expanding team of soil and carbon advisors.  

Monday morning means a remote team meeting at FCT. In just a 45 minute conversation, I heard about advisory work going on in Aberdeen, Lincolnshire, Cumbria, Dartmoor and the Isles of Scilly. 

Next up I spent time catching up on some research into specific products used in potato storage to inhibit sprouting, where they come from and what their carbon footprint might be. This was followed by an hour to respond to some user queries around how to enter data in our Calculator (including questions on batches of chickens, how to include anaerobic digestion, and requests for new specific brands of fertilisers to be included).

I squeezed in a conversation with a project partner who is helping us improve the interoperability of our Calculator so that users will be able to do more with their data, as well as one with an agronomist in Italy to discuss the needs of footprinting farms outside the UK. 

After lunch it was onto a weekly meeting to check in with our software developers who are working with us to improve the interoperability of our Calculator, solving  issues and scheduling the testing for the week. 

There’s a lot to keep track of in the Calculator and people use it in all sorts of different ways. My next meeting was with another project partner for whom we are footprinting, not only the farms who supply them with fresh produce, but also the rest of the downstream supply chain. Engaging the whole supply chain is important if we are to understand the opportunities for decarbonisation, reduce GHG emissions and support farmers in the long run.

Towards the end of the day, I was sent some news about the release of an academic paper on hedgerow carbon sequestration, so I made sure that that reached a colleague and then  rounded off the day with some prep for welcoming Michael Oldman, our new Technical Support Officer, feeling very excited that we are growing the team at FCT.

Meet all the FCT team

Find out more about Lizzy and the rest of our friendly team here.

A short blog written by FCT’s CEO Liz Bowles.

I was lucky enough to attend two events in May which got me thinking – the first being an afternoon seminar hosted by the Dutch Embassy in London and LEAF (Scaling up Regenerative Outcomes-tackling the challenges to mobilise change on May 3rd) and the second hosted by CiWF (Extinction or Regeneration on 11th-12th May). At both events there were distinct areas of commonality, mainly around how we produce food in the future, with livestock farmers involved with both events and key questions around how we need to produce food to respond positively to the climate and nature crises we are in.

A key driver for change amongst farming businesses requires a greater level of understanding of the impacts of regenerative or agroecological farming practices; a greater understanding of their financial impact and better mechanisms for monitoring the impact of changing farming practices on farmland biodiversity. At the moment without such evidence the case for change is not obvious to all and hinders action.

The future role of grazing livestock is another key area of debate, but increasingly there is acknowledgement that if we are to reduce our reliance on artificial fertilisers which lead to emissions of nitrous oxide then we need animal manures. Alongside that we know that grazing livestock provide for other wildlife to flourish on farms as well as consuming food that cannot be processed by humans (namely grass) and large parts of the UK are incapable of producing harvestable crops. Taking this together with the high quality of food produced by ruminants for humans (high quality protein and micronutrients) the case for grazing livestock is strong. Less strong is the case for intensive livestock production where those animals consume food which could be eaten by humans and where their production has negative impacts on farmland biodiversity and degrades soil. For the sake of human health we should reduce our overall consumption of meat products and where possible move to “better” products from extensive systems.

At both events it was clear that doing nothing is not an option.

Linked to the need to change how we produce food for the sake of all of us is the need to consider what future farming supply chains need to look like to support this revolution. It is not clear that we can make the changes we need to in production systems without changes to how supply chains work. At the moment it is those businesses buying from farmers who are leading on how they want farming practice to change, yes, to support a positive response to the climate and nature challenges we face, but, also to ensure that they can reach the self imposed targets they set themselves through such initiatives as the “Science Based Targets”.

Linked to this is the question – can we separate the food that farmers produce from the potential new income streams which farmers may be able to tap into such as the voluntary markets for carbon, biodiversity net gain and nutrient neutrality? In response to this a new farming cooperative has been formed called the Environmental Farmers Group. It brings farmers together to harness scale and member cooperation to secure the best environmental results and financial returns for a wide range of natural capital goods and services. This is the first such group in the UK and operates nationwide.

Alongside ensuring that farmers are properly rewarded for the changes in practice they make to increase biodiversity and store carbon, the key requirement for agriculture which is often being lost at the moment is how best for individual farm businesses to forge their own path to net zero. The first requirement is to know your baseline and one of the best ways to establish this is to use the Farm Carbon Calculator provided free to farmers by the Farm Carbon Toolkit. Once you have established your baseline you can start to look at all the opportunities to both reduce emissions and store more carbon on your farm. Farm Carbon Toolkit offers a comprehensive toolkit providing information on all the main ways to reduce emissions and showcases how farmers are already making changes and the benefits they are finding.

Contact us

If you would like more information for your business please contact info@farmcarbontoolkit.org.uk

Written by Rob Purdew, one of our Farm Carbon and Soils Advisors.

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend the final farm meeting wrapping up an Innovative Farmers trial looking at the use of diverse forage mixtures for overwintering. Apart from being the perfect demonstration of how empowering farmers to be able to trial new practices on their own farms can produce results far greater than the sum of their parts (especially when compared to multi-million pound research projects) the big take home message for me was how powerful diversity is in our farming systems, at all levels.

A diverse mix of plant species above ground is reflected in increased diversity below the soil surface and the benefits this brings are many fold. Increased organic matter, nutrient availability and the ability of the soil to hold water are just a few. When out on a farm you can always guarantee that the best soils occur where the above ground diversity is greatest, relative to the surrounding area. This is one of the reasons that herbal leys have received a lot of much deserved attention over the last 10 years. 

Having had firsthand experience grazing large groups of animals on herbal leys I can certainly vouch for their benefits, and spending a lot of time digging holes on farms has only reinforced this. And where the establishment of new herbal leys don’t fit or are unaffordable, simple changes to grazing management or stitching additional species into existing pasture can be equally effective in bringing diversity into your sward. These are the things that get me up in the morning, that and the views from one of the many fields I’ve been soil sampling in recently.

Find out more about Rob Purdew and the rest of the team here.

This article was written by FCT Director Andrew Rigg for the RSA blog in December 2021. We are reposting it here with permission:

Farmers have a huge part to play in the fight against climate change. Andrew Rigg, FRSA,  a farmer, and Director of the Farm Carbon-Cutting Toolkit CIC, explains how his community is taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back in the soil. But, he cautions calculating the net gains and losses is far from simple.

In 2020 the RSA awarded The Farm Carbon-Cutting Toolkit Community Interest Company a Catalyst Scaling-up Grant to look at carbon sequestration on farms. We have a long name, but it does tell you what we do, and it underlines our approach to our farming community: we’re run by farmers for farmers. The award came at a time when interest in farms and carbon, and in particular soil carbon, was rising rapidly. To us, this was no surprise as the biological world, and so of course farming, offers one of the very few effective mechanisms for drawing down carbon from the atmosphere. Put simply, the total size of the soil carbon reservoir exceeds the total mass of carbon in vegetation and atmosphere combined. There is room for more to be stored, and with about 45 per cent of global soils under some form of agricultural use, farming has a vital climate mitigation role to play.

The grant enabled us to scale up our existing soil carbon sampling, develop improved measurement protocols, and examine how farmers might be remunerated for climate services. We talked to a lot of people over the year as interest grew in the subject. While some questions were answered, many more emerged and assumptions got challenged amidst a wide array of parties and conflicting interests in carbon measurement.

Satellite companies are seeking to measure soil carbon from space, some are flying drones over farms to assess carbon locked into hedgerows. Former derivative traders are trying to work out financial instruments to allow trading of reliable farm carbon offsets. Food companies are trying to understand how carbon flows from field to fork, and farming service companies are seeking to integrate carbon into their services for their farming clients. Meanwhile, farmers are looking to not only improve their soil, but to see if their lost EU payments can be replaced by payments for carbon.

As carbon increases in value, the question “Who owns the carbon” is of increasing importance.

There is a race to get to net zero. Measurement of carbon in natural systems is complex, so how will we know, not only when we are making progress, but how to prioritise the most effective strategies? Farm Carbon Toolkit has developed a farm carbon calculator for farmers to better understand how carbon flows through their farms. This is a “tool” rather than an “audit”. So, recent lower yields and a damp harvest (requiring extra energy to be used to dry grain in store) means the author’s wheat footprint in 2021 is much higher than in the dry and high-yielding harvest of 2020. Variability is everywhere.

Nevertheless, we need the measurement, recording, verification and the appropriate allocation of carbon. Codes exist for woodland creation and peat-land restoration. We are members of a team working on a Farm Soil Carbon Code, and recently started work on a code for hedges. These codes are vital to give confidence to any organisation that may be entering a financial contract with respect to carbon. DEFRA is looking at “blended financial instruments”: how might public payment for public goods be combined with private sector offsets to best achieve carbon drawdown, the removal of carbon from the atmosphere? This is particularly relevant where biodiversity and carbon interests overlap.

Even with a robust set of codes, many questions remain around carbon offsets. Measuring small amounts of carbon absorbed per field is costly both to verify and to aggregate into a financial “instrument”. Consideration needs to be given to the length of the agreement, and the fact that offset values may vary as the price of carbon changes. The permanence of the management changes must be secured; legal agreements need to be drawn up.

If the offset is delivering other co-benefits such as biodiversity gains, does this alter its value? If the sequestration has been achieved because of other funded activity it is perhaps not allowable? Importantly, would an offset interfere with other supply contracts that the farmer wants to sign; can their produce still be considered low carbon if they have also sold carbon offsets?

Crucially, will the offset provide real net gain? A switch to a farm management practice that delivers carbon sequestration in one place, may, if the result is less food being produced, have the effect of creating a bigger carbon footprint elsewhere. This is known as the “leakage issue”. As we achieve local carbon sequestration, can we be sure that collectively these national improvements are not actually making the global situation worse? We in the UK have off-shore some of our manufacturing footprint to China. Can we be sure that a UK offset is not actually increasing the problem? Imported food may have a bigger carbon footprint than home grown produce.

There is a great deal to consider, and complexity to manage, but putting in place financial incentives in order to accelerate carbon sequestration while continuing to produce food is an urgent and important task.

Land use change can be one of the biggest emitters of carbon in agriculture as previously locked-up carbon is released. The potential extent of land use changes implied by the extra food needed in Africa (the UN projects there will be twice as many people in Africa by 2055 than in 2025) makes it imperative that farmers globally not only understand their most carbon-efficient way of farming, but also integrate sequestration into their farm management. In addition to carbon, there are also social and ethical reasons why the global food trade needs to be better managed. But avoiding land use change is possibly the most critical issue in the food chain, for both biodiversity and climate reasons.

Climate futurist Alex Steffen writes that “We’re not yet ready for what has already happened.” We need to also prepare for what is about to happen. The balance between population, diet, climate and biodiversity is set to dominate the next decade. In the UK’s parochial race to net zero, we must not lose sight of global net gain.

Collectively we all need to get a whole lot smarter about how carbon flows through the food chain so we can develop effective strategies for change.

Our work in accounting for carbon within our farming communities continues; you can find out more on our website here.

As well as being Director of the Farm Carbon-Cutting Toolkit, Andrew Rigg farms a 400-acre family arable farm in Hampshire. He co-founded the Environment Centre in Southampton in 1992 and was its chair for 18 years.