Opinion: LENs foster invaluable co-operation in food chain
© Jim Varney Farmers often don’t get listened to, so it makes a welcome change to be involved with Yorkshire Landscape Enterprise Networks (LENs).
This initiative encourages demand-side companies, such as Nestlé Purina, Diageo and PepsiCo, to work with supply chain partners to build production resilience and support on-farm sustainability, biodiversity and water quality initiatives.
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Openfield acts as a “supply aggregator”, engaging farmer-customer networks and developing proposals in collaboration with farmers looking to secure funding through LENs.
The aim from day one was to be more sustainable, but not at the cost of limiting production. The processing partners realised early on they needed “raw materials” to manufacture their product.
They had the foresight that it was better to be realistic rather than idealistic.
It soon became apparent that farmers and processors needed educating about each other’s business models.
The processors had perhaps paid too much attention to Gabe Brown’s book on hardcore regenerative farming, and the growers had to realise that compromises had to be made so food manufacturers had a good, green, sustainable story to tell the consumer.
We meet as a group three to four times a year, and have a well-mannered, lively discussion of what is achievable at farm level and what isn’t.
As a group of farmers running quite considerable agri-business enterprises, we know what we are capable of and what it costs in lost yield/output to deliver a green, sustainable outcome to crop and animal production.
Some of the measures are very practical – for example, utilising our home-produced FYM more effectively, reduced cultivation, using nitrogen-fixing crops and introducing livestock back into arable rotations.
All good and achievable things.
Some innovations require a bigger leap of faith – for example reducing the carbon footprint of fertiliser by feeding the plant through the leaf, not the roots, with a foliar feed and taking that one step further by using a nitrous oxide capture technique to allow the plant to utilise nitrogen from the air.
Growing cereals with no nitrogen input at all, two-year fallows with a cover crop, all funded to a level where you would have a punt but not go the full hog and put the whole farm into the scheme.
Farmers have bills to pay, so it takes some, not all, of the risk out of the farm-scale experiment, giving the aggregators a first-hand view of what is achievable and what isn’t.
The point the farmers in the group make is that getting the basics right in agriculture provides the best return in sustainability and carbon capture.
If you get the fundamentals right, everything else follows.
Knowledge transfer
LENs UK is involved in a land drainage blueprint at the Allerton project, for example.
This is where this group excels. We listen to each other and the knowledge transfer is immense, benefiting both parties to generate an outcome we can both work with.
The other benefit of the group is it gets you off-farm. We have open days on other people’s farms and are hoping to roll this out into other LENs groups.
There’s nothing better than looking at what other farmers are doing, borrowing their ideas, or realising some ideas just don’t suit your system.
As with most meetings, more is learned chewing the fat, within the side conversations, than sometimes the main subject matter brings.
It’s a bit like Young Farmers 2.0 – but with less beer and more innovation.