FEATURE
FARMER FOCUS
CLIVE BAILYE
It is hard to find much positive about a global pandemic but if pushed to do so I think my answer would be the rise of the webinar. As soon the first lockdown was imposed it became clear that the many shows and knowledge exchange events that usually fill the farming would not be possible. Previously unfamiliar to many software applications such as Zoom, and Teams become so familiar that even grandparents were using them to keep in touch with friends and family. It was like someone had pressed fast forward on the internet, websites like The Farming Forum, Farm Marketplace and Farm Classifieds with which I’m involved suddenly saw a big increase in traffic as those not previously interested in using such communication platforms had little choice but to try them and found value in using them. Meeting online has its downsides, I suspect in the last 12 months we have all had a situation where our broadband connection has let us down at a critical moment, issues talking over one another or that funny moment when a meeting participant speaks up… with microphone still on mute! Ultimately there is little that replaces the personal connection that face-to-face human contact can provide. However, these downsides are to a great extent outweighed by the accessibility that the almost limitless geography of the internet offers. Pre lockdowns attending a meeting or event often involved a full day out of your working schedule, travelling (with environmental impact of course) , small talk before and after, lunch and multiple coffee breaks all reducing the efficient uptake of the information you had really come to digest. In contrast an online event allows turning up just a moment before proceedings start, no travel time or cost and most importantly as a result a far wider range of both speakers and participants. As a BASE UK committee member, I have been involved in helping organise speakers for the group over several years now, our choices have often been limited by speaker’s diary and more often geography. Flying in speakers from New Zealand, Australia or the Americas is simply just too expensive, yet these are some of the most knowledgeable people in the world on the subject that members want to learn from. Online meetings have made such speakers accessible and viable options and the number of attendees such events have attracted is testament to a desire to learn from them. In a year when an organization such as BASE would have been expected to struggle to maintain its remit of organising such knowledge exchange events it has in fact done more than ever and as a result membership has grown to new highs. Hopefully in a world where lockdown and travel restrictions soon become distant memory, we will not abandon this newfound interaction and the efficiencies, accessibilities, and environmental benefits it can bring. Off the many meetings I have attended some of the most exciting have been based arounds the subject of carbon sequestration and storage and how farmers will be able to sell this and other ecosystem capital benefits in the future.
50 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
Whilst DEFRA’s ELMS scheme (now know as the Sustainable Farming Incentive “SFI”) has bold vison to pivot productionbased subsidies to natural capital and public goods payments the complexities of creating trading systems for Carbon seems now to be a step too far for them to get involved in. This has created opportunity in private sectors for certification, sale, and trading of this in demand asset and along with that a healthy amount of debate in to how this should all work.
The first point of difficulty when considering sale of Carbon is quantification or how much (if indeed any) you have available for sale, sound easy? but its anything but frankly! To start with these is the debate about whose balance sheet carbon should sit on, I have seen it suggested that a farmer using synthetic fertiliser should have all the Carbon produced in its manufacturer on his balance sheet, to me this is an utter nonsense or are we really suggesting that Yara, Europe’s biggest commercial buyers of natural gas, are carbon neutral? If a fertiliser manufacturer is going to push their carbon footprint into me then I’m going to push mine on to my grain merchant customers, logically they then will pass it to their customers and the entire carbon footprint of everything ends up with the consumer, who has little do much about it. Far more logical and consistent is for each part of the chain to take responsibility for the carbon they directly produce, remove this crazy idea that a farmer is responsible for carbon involved in the production of synthetic fertilisers and UK agriculture suddenly looks a lot more like nett zero already and those of us farming in regenerative ways certainly have a new product to get selling. Focus is always on sequestration of carbon, after all removal from the atmosphere is what we all want, but of equal yet often neglected importance is the storage service that farmers and land managers also provide. A scheme that currently pays to plant a tree for example is only positive whilst that tree is growing, cut it down and use it as fuel and the saving as all lost! How do we sell and provide guarantees around the future storage as well as the removal tools is another question to answer? Then there is measurement, soil sampling is a huge can of worms (pun intended) with so much differing opinion and issues around consistency that right now it has very little to ISSUE 13 | APRIL 2021
