My Ambition is to

Stephanie McEvoy, Farming Carbon

Begin with the end in mind.’ That is how this journey started. At a turning point in my career, all I knew was that I wanted to make a di erence in the world, that the rising global temperature was changing the world around us and that in a battle ‘between changing weather and human life, I knew that we would lose.

The imperative to drive meaningful change was beginning to feel overwhelming. The end I had envisaged sounded like something dreamt up by an ambitious group of seven-year-olds before the world taught them to give up and ‘do something more sensible.’

To save the insects, as here in the UK and Ireland we have some of the highest rates of biodiversity loss internationally. To create a safe habitat for birds and small mammals. To support an ecosystem of life.

Growing trees seemed like a good place to start, as it is common knowledge that plant growth (through photosynthesis) is the most available, easy-to-implement and immediate way of locking atmospheric carbon into the plants themselves and the soil. It was this carbon overload in our atmosphere that was causing increasingly erratic weather, alongside other greenhouse gases.

However, trees do not offer as much opportunity as our farming community does. I collaborated with a family farm who have been investing time, energy and resources into sustainable farming for the past five years. Not only could farming attain many of the same benefits as forestry and rewilding, but it can do so while supporting healthy soil in a functional food system. This will help us to maintain food security while we face continued disruption to weather patterns.

My ambition is to make a social and environmental impact. This is what Farming Carbon does through sustainable farming. Farming Carbon is a framework, a work in progress and a collection of lessons learnt on the journey towards regenerative agriculture. It is a functional food system that supports and celebrates biodiversity – not to separate the wild from the farmed, but to see them as interconnected.

We can help to equip the soil to become more adept at coping with the changes to our climate. Healthy soil with a solid structure is less susceptible to erosion. It is more porous, which means during periods of flooding it can soak up and retain the moisture that will see it through the droughts. These are both meteorological experiences that we will have to better manage, presently and in the near future (IPCC).

We can support the rural community by communicating examples from this farm; it can support their changing experience of our land patterns. The people who own the land have the best tool in the toolbox to help us collectively deal with our continually changing weather patterns, but they also have the additional pressure of producing the food that sustains us. It is not reasonable to assume they have the resources, financial or otherwise, to be the people who drive innovation in this space. Businesses and individuals need to empower them; which is what we facilitate at Farming Carbon. Sharing knowledge and experience and listening to people who have invested time and energy into more sustainable practices. We developed our podcast, ‘This is Climate Action’, to facilitate conversations to demonstrate how our society is innovating across generations and geographies to make the world a better place for us to live in.

While I was working in construction as a bid writer, I could see how businesses not only had a budget for sustainability and social responsibility, they also had a business case for it. A business with a long-term outlook is better placed to weather any storms that occur in the macro economy (KPMG). It makes business and financial sense to invest in the space around us. The benefit is felt by our communities, our families, our farms and our planet.