Precis chris knock

“THE INTEGRATION OF CARBON-FRIENDLY POLICIES INTO SUSTAINABLE FARMING PRACTICES IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES” Chris Knock, Suffolk farmer, probably best known for establishing professional hog roasting services in the eighties, and who is now working for the East of England Development Agency as a rural development manager, travelled throughout Europe on a Farmers Club study tour at the end of 2007. He • • • •

Visited Brussels and discussed the likely composition of the Climate Change Green Paper due out in November 2007 for consultation.

Visited Switzerland to gain a non-EU perspective of the climate change issues for agriculture.

Visited Sweden to understand just why they are so far ahead in the use of renewable forms of energy.

Visited Germany to study how to successfully provide incentives to expand farm investment in bio-digesters.

The wish to make definitive changes in these countries in how they operate is impressive. The common elements in how to both reduce the effects of and adapt to climate change will become apparent as you read on. Food security is back on governmental policy agendas, only DEFRA seems in denial of this. The countries visited were selected as leaders - they proved to be; and they are willing to help other countries to catch up or leap-frog to new positions of strength. A lot is going to happen in 2008!

2008 promises to be the year climate change has a major effect on the future direction of agricultural policy in Europe. The science is accepted, and the mapping is now detailed enough for policy makers to structure future strategies which will both reduce climate change effects and also lead to significant changes in our behaviour as we have to adapt.

This is perhaps the first global issue where it is possible for each individual to understand how their own actions can make a collective difference. It will be the truest test to see if humankind can literally change the world for the better. We should not be afraid of the magnitude, for example if globally we can reduce CFC’s in the atmosphere and thus mend the ozone layer, then we can achieve a huge amount by working together towards the common goal – saving the planet!

Climate change will bring about a sea change in how our economies operate – with the likelihood in future of each citizen being taxed on the carbon cost of their lifestyle.

As sea levels rise half of the world’s major cities are in increased danger of flooding. As stable climate patterns become erratic the increased risk of localised drought and flood increases. Volatility is set to be the new world order.

However politically the world economy needs to remain stable, and so both local and world leaders have to strike a balance between making the right environmental adjustments whilst still maintaining the economic and social fabric of communities.

The climate change debate is dominated by carbon. Not so for agriculture. Whatever the intensity of production systems, there is an underlying balance of carbon used and stored in soil, plants and products on one side, with the carbon cost of planting, nurturing and fertilising those crops. Thus UK agriculture only accounts for 1% of UK carbon emissions because the 7% carbon cost is nearly negated by a 6% carbon benefit. It is therefore a very achievable goal to bring UK farming into Carbon balance.

So for UK agriculture the main challenges are methane and nitrous oxide. Methane is mainly emitted from waterlogged soils and bogs, and from livestock, and livestock manures. The majority of methane is belched from ruminant animals, for the most part cattle, but sheep, goats and deer also figure. Small adjustments in feed ration formulation can alter the amount of methane produced, but since that involves the extra use of expensive cereals it is no panacea.

The whole point of the rumen as the first of four stomachs in ruminants is as a giant vat which allows cellulose to be digested, in the process of which methane is expelled. So ruminant animals fed high cellulose rations of maize and grass will always produce methane, so the main way to limit this methane would be to keep fewer head of stock.

Northern European countries though rely heavily on dairy and meat products in their diet, and so any meaningful reduction in total stock numbers will come from a societal change away from choosing animal and dairy protein sources. However measures could be taken to make sure that as many unproductive ruminants as possible are culled.

Methane from livestock manures can be utilised via Anaerobic Digestion. It can be reduced by covering manure stores, and promoting anaerobic rather than aerobic forms of decomposition in the heap before the manure is spread and quickly incorporated in the soil.

The technology may be developed to scrub methane from the ventilation air expelled from pig and poultry units.

Nitrous oxide is produced naturally in soils through the microbial processes of denitrification.

These natural emissions of N2O can be increased by a variety of agricultural practices and activities, including the use of synthetic and organic fertilisers, production of nitrogen-fixing crops, cultivation of high organic content soils, and the application of livestock manure to croplands and pasture. All of these practices directly add additional nitrogen to the soil, which can then be converted to N2O. So the world needs to adopt innovative land management practices to kerb N2O emissions, such as planting cover crops and minimum

2

tillage. Converting land to less intensive uses will not be possible if the world has to feed itself.

From Brussels – EU compulsory modulation is set to rise considerably, to fund a new climate change policy.

A lot of emphasis will be placed on risk management plans and introducing flood and drought insurance. For agriculture the GHG issues are methane and nitrous oxide. The EU targets are for agriculture to half methane emissions and reduce nitrous oxide emissions by 70% by 2020. Methane is best tackled by using it not emitting it, so comprehensive use of biodigesters (Anaerobic Digestion) will be promoted. Livestock numbers will decrease, mainly by the keeping of unproductive cattle and sheep being penalised. Animal rations will be adjusted. Manure stores will be covered.

Nitrous oxide emissions will be curtailed by farmers cultivating less and putting on less nitrogen fertiliser. There might be rotational rules added to cross compliance, for example only cultivating two years out of four. There will be increased interest in clover and legume catch crops to fix nitrogen from the air for fertilising succeeding crops.

Biomass planting – trees, short rotation coppice, miscanthus - will be grant aided for several reasons, the extra sequestration from perennial crops, the carbon they store, the soil they protect, the energy they yield, but also because they are perennials then no annual cultivations take place so saving nitrous oxide emissions. The only caveat will be they will need to be situated where water availability is secure.

From Switzerland – Climate change is affecting farmer’s ability to produce now due to freak weather events, so the gradual increase in temperature over the next twenty years is not seen as so relevant. Risk management plans, coupled with increased insurance will be key in the future. Organic farming is not the solution for two reasons. It lowers our productive capacity, and it excludes effective tools which will be very necessary to have available as the weather effect grows.

The arable solution is precision farming. The way to reduce GHG emissions is to move the soil less, and so promoting ley crops and perennial crops achieves this. For the next twenty years market price fluctuations and the global liberalisation of trade will have more effect than climate change on farm incomes. In twenty years time technological solutions will mean that we will use a third of the energy we do now to produce the same or even more.

From Sweden – Perhaps “local” is better than “organic”. If a national climate change advice system was to be introduced, maybe each farm will then have a GHG audit. Risk management and insurance will be major parts of climate change policy in the future. Climate change policy needs to be an integral part of the overall national energy policy. The “Focus on Nutrients” programme which has run for the last six years has been a very effective way of reducing nitrogen and phosphate pollution. Part of the global methane solution should be for us to eat more vegetables and a little less meat. The approach should be improved citizen health via a better diet. The Commission report on “Making Sweden an Oil-free Society by 2020” is highly regarded, and now has cross party support. Sweden is a world leader in biofuels with 28% of energy now coming from that source, and is willing to export their expertise. They have large scale housing developments using 30 kilowatts per square metre of energy, which compares well to the UK average of 200! Very few people or organisations are prepared for climate change.

3

From Germany – When we plough we should plough deeper to increase the carbon sink capacity of the soil. Germany needs to produce more. They feel an ethical obligation to produce more to be able to send excess production to other EU states where climate change will affect their ability to grow even sooner. If Germany was to sum its new policy up in three words it would be “environmentally-friendly intensivication”. The science behind biofuels is dubious, what is sustainable in the longer term is biogas production from biodigesters.

The GHG debate in German agriculture centres around methane, and little is discussed about carbon and nitrous oxide. There are now over 3,600 biogas plants in Germany, but with the recent increases in crop prices there is now only a profit to be made from farmers who have a market for the heat as well as the electricity. German environmentalists wish to include methane in emissions trading. This would create huge problems for the farming industry.

The information made freely available to me on this trip highlights one of the most underutilised aspects of modern day living, that the world wide web has changed societal attitudes to who benefits from accessible information. The success of nations, and sectors within nation states in the world today is not driven by access to new and original information and technologies, it is driven by their ability to access freely available global information to adapt processes already working in other countries.

My overall conclusion is that the UK is way behind our European cousins in adopting climate friendly agricultural practices due in the main to the masking effect of North Sea Oil on government thinking, but that there is absolutely nothing stopping us catching up fast, not by developing our own solutions but by buying in what they have already proved to work.

It might be highly original to be inventive, and our place in the recent history of the world as the seat of the industrial revolution might steer us towards inventive solutions; but pragmatically the most innovative stance for us to adopt at this moment in time is to utilise the existing continental solutions as we adapt our agricultural practices. Who will seize the moment? Farmers themselves might move faster than government! There’s nothing wrong in that.

What will happen by 2020? Farming can become carbon neutral, remain highly productive in the middle of the field to provide over three quarters of the food the nation needs, increase the quality of habitat around the field edges, and make serious inroads into reducing methane and laughing gas emissions.

4