Short chris knock

THE FARMERS CLUB CHARITABLE TRUST

POST-GRADUATE TRAVEL AWARD 2007

“THE INTEGRATION OF CARBON-FRIENDLY POLICIES INTO SUSTAINABLE FARMING PRACTICES IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES”

Chris Knock, Manor Farm, Battisford, Stowmarket, Suffolk IP14 2HE

Contents –

Page Number

1. Executive Summary

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2. Context – Climate Change

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3. Main Points to be drawn from the meetings

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4. Ten ways we can help ourselves

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5. Conclusion

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1. Executive summary: Itinerary – • • • •

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 we 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!

There are some general points to make from the outset – We should refer to Greenhouse Gases (GHG) not carbon – in farming carbon dioxide emissions will improve with straight-forward energy efficiency measures, and agriculture only accounts for 1% of UK total carbon emissions. What we have to concentrate on is adapting future agricultural practice to reduce methane and nitrous oxide (37% and 67% of UK emissions respectively). We need to take care here with statistics because methane and nitrous oxide emissions are quite often reported as carbon equivalents.

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In 2007 world crop commodity prices doubled as the global market realised there had not been enough harvested this year to feed us next year. Some of this reduced supply can be attributed to climate change, for example by floods and droughts affecting yields, but there are other forces at work, and the demand for oil, and oil substitutes, figures equally in this mix, as does the liberalisation in world trade.

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.

Visits – I attended the launch of the overall EU Climate Change Green Paper on July 3 rd in Brussels, where there was a surprising amount of consensus on what Europe had to do. The global issues are more stark than Europe’s, poor countries have less chance to invest in adaptation measures, the two biggest killers in our future world will be diarrhoea and malaria, mass migration will present us with huge political pressures, and more freak weather events happen in the tropics and southern hemisphere than in northern temperate latitudes.

I met with Maria Fuentes-Merino of DG Agriculture. She is one of the authors of the EU Agricultural Climate Change Green Paper due out in early December. We discussed that 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 or AD) will be promoted. [AD does though have the little publicised side effect of releasing CO2.] Livestock numbers will decrease, mainly by the keeping of unproductive cattle and sheep being penalised. Animal rations will be adjusted, and 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 mainly because since 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.

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To fund the climate change measures EU compulsory modulation is set to rise considerably, from 4% this year, 5% next year, the Commission will ask for that to rise to 15% in 2009 (!) to fund a new climate change policy. A lot of emphasis will be placed on risk management plans and introducing flood and drought insurance.

I then travelled to Switzerland and had meetings with their senior climate change researcher, Dr Juerg Fuhrer, and also their national director of agricultural policy, Dr Eduard Hofer. We discussed how 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. They were also keen on risk management, coupled with insurance. Organic farming is not a climate change 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.

Next I travelled to Sweden and had a series of five meetings in Malmo and Stockholm, meeting researchers, government agencies and the LDF, their farmers union. There was a consensus that 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, Germany has led the way on this aspect.

The Swedish “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 Swedish 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 all of their energy now coming from that source, and they are 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! We concluded that very few people or organisations are prepared for climate change.

In both Switzerland and Sweden they said “it’s so good you’re going to Germany – the way they have encouraged farmers to invest in bio-digesters is an example to us all”. So in Berlin I met with the head of planning in the Ministry of Agriculture, Dr. Rainer Geissuebel, and later with the DLG, the farmers’ union, to discuss this achievement as well as more general issues.

The Ministry of Agriculture and the Farmer’s Union think the EU Soils Directive is poor red tape.

Only in Germany was it suggested that when we plough we should plough deeper to increase the carbon sink capacity of the soil. As a nation Germany needs to produce more. They feel an ethical obligation to produce more to be able to send excess production to other EU states

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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 seen as 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.

2. Context – Climate Change: The development of man as the predominant species on the planet has increasingly affected the surrounding biosphere. With the advent of the industrial revolution two hundred years ago that effect started to accelerate, and with the increasing use of ever more advanced and wasteful technologies by a growing world population, the harmful effects have been growing exponentially.

Although these effects were starting to be measured and concerns voiced at the end of the last century, powerful economic and political factions held the predictive science off by tagging it as alarmist. Over the last seven years however world opinion has changed, and in particular 2007 was the year the world woke up to the future dilemma of how to keep the keep the world temperature from rising more than two degrees centigrade in the next fifty years as an ever more affluent world population increases and world food supply has to double.

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.

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

3. MAIN POINTS FOR AGRICULTURE – •

Refer to Greenhouse Gases (GHG) not carbon – in farming carbon dioxide emissions will improve with straight-forward energy efficiency measures, we have to concentrate on adapting future agricultural practice to reduce methane and nitrous oxide. We need to take care here with statistics because quite often emissions are reported as carbon equivalents.

From Brussels – 1. EU compulsory modulation is set to rise considerably, from 4% this year, 5% next year, the Commission will ask for that to rise to 20% in 2009 (!) to fund a new climate change policy. A lot of emphasis will be placed on risk management plans and introducing flood and drought insurance.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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4. 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.

5. 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 – 1. 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.

2. Risk management, coupled with insurance will be key in the future.

3. 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.

4. The arable solution is precision farming.

5. The way to reduce GHG emissions is to move the soil less, and so promoting ley crops and perennial crops achieves this.

6. For the next twenty years market price fluctuations and the global liberalisation of trade will have more effect than climate change on farm incomes.

7. 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 – 1. Perhaps “local” is better than “organic”.

2. If a national climate change advice system was to be introduced, maybe each farm will then have a GHG audit.

3. Risk management and insurance will be major parts of climate change policy in the future.

4. Climate change policy needs to be an integral part of the overall national energy policy.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. The Commission report on “Making Sweden an Oil-free Society by 2020” is highly regarded, and now has cross party support.

8. Sweden is a world leader in biofuels with 28% of energy now coming from that source, and is willing to export their expertise.

9. They have large scale housing developments using 30 kilowatts per square metre of energy, which compares well to the UK average of 200!

10. Very few people or organisations are prepared for climate change.

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From Germany – 1. The Ministry of Agriculture and the Farmer’s Union thinks the EU Soils Directive is poor red tape 2. When we plough we should plough deeper to increase the carbon sink capacity of the soil.

3. 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.

4. If Germany was to sum its new policy up in three words it would be “environmentally-friendly intensivication”.

5. The science behind biofuels is dubious, what is sustainable in the longer term is biogas production from biodigesters.

6. The GHG debate in German agriculture centres around methane, and little is discussed about carbon and nitrous oxide.

7. 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.

8. German environmentalists wish to include methane in emissions trading. This would create huge problems for the farming industry.

4. TEN WAYS WE CAN HELP OURSELVES Sub-title: We can produce more by using less in agriculture Point Number One: We will achieve our goals using technological advances, not by extensification and simplification. We need 40% more food in the world by 2020. Extreme weather events around the world this year mean that harvest predictions are for 607M tonnes of wheat, with demand expected to reach 614M tonnes, and we only have a 40 day buffer of stock in 2007, and none predicted for 2008. So the volume of production needs to increase from a land area which is reducing.

Point Number Two: Single issue groups are just that, they exist to beat their particular drum. They have become vocal in seizing on climate change as a reason to push for less polluting and more carbon friendly production systems. It is easy to paint a picture of organic production systems being more environmental friendly but wait a minute, if they only produce half the volume as conventional farming, is their system capable of delivering global solutions, and with the extra cultivations under organics just how much extra nitrous oxide gets emitted from an organic rotation than a conventional one per unit of output?

Point Number Three:

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Countries need to have comprehensive energy policies, and now that bio-fuels are on the agenda, these energy policies should also include food. Food is after all energy, energy for humans. Farmers should be treated as energy producers. You cannot have a proper debate in the EU on making transport fuels more carbon friendly by introducing 5.75% biofuels by 2010, three years time, if you have not reconciled the use of land to produce it with what is required to produce food. The basic three tennents of life are food, warmth and shelter – policy makers should remember this. The UK food self-sufficiency levels have dropped from 78% in 1982 to under 66% now due to environmental and conservation measures deintensifising agriculture. [I can remember Mr Natura 2000 in the EU commission telling our party of visiting farmers that he was proud of having got 15% of farmable land into wildlife habitat by 2004 and his target was 25%. Isn’t that a luxury it is irresponsible to afford?] Sure we should keep our fantastic wildlife, and conserve species, but should it have over-riding priority over food production? A better balance needs to be made.

Point Number Four: Farmers should be embarrassed by being misled by herbicide production companies into using “manufacturers recommendations” for so long in the 1960’s, 70’s and early 80’s. Only in the late 80’s and 90’s with agronomists taking over the recommendation of inputs on farms did we come to understand that a quarter rates applied at a particular point of crop growth, or a fifth rate using a different sprayer nozzle for example could have the same effect. That’s why in the UK we have more than halved herbicide and pesticide use since 1990 and still produce the same volume of food per hectare. What needs to happen now with the dawning of the realisation of how much artificial fertilisers cause GHG emissions is the same savings to happen with fertilisers as with spray chemicals. This is very feasible, firstly by only putting on the fertiliser when the crop can take it all up, so rather than two applications of nitrate in the spring, we could well put 80% on in three applications and have the same effect on yield. Secondly by using nitrogen fixing plants within the rotation, so we catch crop clover and legumes, maybe keeping clover and trefoil growing under wheat canopies, and maybe having more peas and beans back in the rotation?

The embarrassment doesn’t end there though. Government policy makers and government agency heads should be embarrassed by being taken in completely by “the environment is god” line, and conservation and wildlife a close second, without it seems a thought for a better way of combining it all in a balance of sustainability. Sustainability is as much about sustaining communities and feeding the populace as it is about keeping every living creature alive as part of our inherited responsibility. What is so noticeable in other EU countries is that this cultural balance is being achieved to a far greater extent.

Point Number Five: Globally, we need every country to sign up to a Kyoto-style pledge to reduce Green House Gases (GHG) year on year in their own countries, with penalties for not achieving this paid into an international fund for work in international waters. Large scale GHG problems such as logging of rainforests might need UN enforcement to create change. There should be international agreement that the whole business tax system should be based on energy used as well as profit made. Governments need to engage every individual by giving them the responsibility for reducing their own energy use and to alter their way of working to reduce emissions. If voluntary pledging does not work then regulation and taxes will need to be put in place. In the EU this will start to be brought into the rural development framework with the

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Healthcheck in 2008, so a route towards reducing GHG’s will be broadly outlined for individual national governments to then produce their action plans within.

Point Number Six: Market forces and the liberalisation of world trade will have more effect on the direction agriculture takes than climate change will. So please view climate change in that context.

From May to August 2007 world wheat prices have more than doubled. This is the market recognising there will not be enough wheat in the world next year. When looking at why this has come about it is all still about energy, the USA worried about how near “peak oil” is, and so diverting 44M tonnes of maize into bioethanol has had a huge effect on global food supply and demand, for example. So we need to view climate change as just one of the key change activators, not the most important one, or the only one.

Point Number Seven: The recent FAO report called Livestock Long Shadow has been widely denigrated for the conclusions it reaches, because ridding the world of all unproductive cattle causes huge cultural problems for some countries, India immediately springs to mind. What the report does well though in the first part is map the issue and put some global figures together which is very useful. Countries with efficient beef production systems should use the fact that if 18% of the world’s methane comes from cattle, 5% comes from efficient systems and 13% from extensive, inefficient systems. What the opulent western societies should do, as they debate this report, is tie the general conclusions of the world needing fewer cattle into the fact that the ideal diet for a population which does little hard physical work would benefit from eating a little less meat and a few more vegetables and fruit, so the policy makers should drive the demand for meat through the market by influencing people to live healthier lives with better balanced diets.

Point Number Eight: Micro power generation has a huge part to play. Policy makers seem split as to its value, but they ignore the fact that this is something every citizen can take part in, so its uptake should be considered to be socially binding. For example if in the next ten years all the new equipment purchased for our homes uses half the electricity and gas that the old ones did, and one million houses had fitted solar panels and improved insulation levels, then we don’t need to build four new nuclear power stations because we won’t need the energy. Observers get hung up on pay-back times, for example three years pay-back on solar hot water heating.

They start talking about the embodied energy involved in producing the panels. That embodied energy is only relevant in relation to the alternative embodied energy for what those consumers are spending their disposable income on. Energy saving and efficiency, coupled to small scale energy production will go a long way to reducing the GHG footprint of humans on the planet. Fantastic new technologies will be the way forward. Some of the feedstock for those new systems will come from land use.

Point Number Nine: Climate change is happening now - it is not something which will impact in twenty or fifty years’ time. A lot of time, energy and funds have been put into dis-information on this topic, making the media sceptical, and so half the public now cynical. There is a PR battle to be won. The extreme weather events that have affected us in Europe since the turn of the

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century are already having a pronounced impact. Floods and droughts, heat waves and vicious storms are more prevalent. In agriculture we see the effect in less crops reaching harvest. How are we going to protect our need for consistent supply? As we put policies in place to reduce GHG emissions we need to preserve our ability to produce.

Point Number Ten: This is a time for clear signals, for true leadership to prevail. There needs to be consensus on the way forward, and then knowledge transfer mechanisms put in place to enable everyone to understand how they should alter what they do as a householder as well as a business person or organisational worker. It maybe a small point, but what we call things matters. The continent has adopted positive, descriptive words; the UK uses scientific and negativesounding words. For example – • biogas in the EU, methane in the UK. • Laughing gas in the EU, nitrous oxide in the UK. • Biodigesters in the EU, anaerobic digesters in the UK. We should use the more upbeat descriptors.

We need to communicate everyone’s collective responsibility to the world we rely on to sustain us. We have time, it is possible to see a way forward, and there’s no reason this region cannot play a real part in our society moving from using the resources of three planets to using the resources of one.

5. Conclusion: 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.

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