Editor’s View: Let’s get farmers and eco lobby on same page
© Tim Scrivener Grappling with the intricacies of the carbon market for a feature in this week’s Business section, I was struck by how much more could have been discussed about whether there is much money out there to pay farmers to reduce emissions.
More (much more) could have been said about the progress – or lack of it – of the agricultural offsetting market, and of the varying fortunes of the companies operating in the sphere as brokers, advisers and investors.
There are the woodland and peatland carbon markets – both of which we have written extensively about in the past – that continue to have their own challenges, but are more underpinned by government-backed rules than other areas.
See also: Farm emissions fall but progress uneven across England
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At some point, the AHDB will have a lot more to say about the findings from its Environmental Baselining Project, which seeks to better quantify the environmental impact of agriculture in Great Britain.
We got a hint from what it may find from a separate study by Rothamsted Research, which revealed this week that farming emissions in England are falling.
This is for a variety of reasons including less nutrient run-off (good) and a fall in livestock numbers (troubling), while also highlighting inconsistencies between modelled data and what’s happening on the ground.
And this final point is the essence of what turns a chunk of farmers off this whole topic.
Too often they feel like they are being prodded into changing what they do by an unsympathetic corporate and government blob that wants to scapegoat farming as the root of the climate change problem.
Witness what the Ulster Farmers’ Union had to say amid concerns from its members that carbon auditing of their farmland would lead to new requirements for their businesses.
“These decisions should be commercially driven,” said president William Irvine. “If the market requires carbon data, then it must also recognise the cost, time and investment involved for farm businesses and provide a fair return.”
This is at loggerheads with the aforementioned blob which, some say, will be wanting this sort of information from farmers as the price of doing business.
How can this conflict be reconciled?
Is there a reason to accelerate the pace of measuring and reducing on-farm emissions (and perhaps storing more carbon in soil) that is to the economic benefit of farmers and the supply chain?
The answer to that is a combined effort to deliver better food security and resilience.
Each lorry load of hydrocarbon-manufactured red diesel and fertiliser that farmers can manage without, insulates them a little more from imports and global turmoil – if food production can be maintained.
Retailers want to secure supply chains, and farmers want lower volatility. Win-win.
At the start of the Iran war, a Bloomberg columnist said that we are in a shift from the old ESG of environmental, social and governance factors shaping boardroom decisions to a new ESG of economics, security and geopolitics.
If conducted in good faith, the latter is the language that will get more farmers to engage than some of the well-meaning but fluffy talk that has gone before.