Industry and retailers come to a consensus on implementing regenerative agriculture, but with few practical solutions on how farmers will manage it, or how they will afford it
Conferences like Sustainable Foods London, held at the end of January, tend to have one major flaw. It was a flaw that NFU president Tom Bradshaw pointed out in the Scaling Regenerative Agriculture talk on the first day – a distinct lack of actual farmers in the audience.
Getting farmers to raise their hands, he counted around a dozen in the busy auditorium. He said that farmers were on the frontline of everything being discussed at the event, being pushed towards two different outcomes. “We are being told to build soil resilience, but we have to afford that transition. Farming could be net zero tomorrow, but who would produce food?”
As the talk continued, with comments from Natalie Smith, head of sustainable agriculture and fisheries at Tesco, Frederik Aagaard, CCO at Agreena, and Ali Belhaj, president of Hippone Holding, Mr Bradshaw continued to point out where farmers were already working hard to limit the environmental impact. He said that farmers already used synthetic fertilisers judiciously because of the cost, and that we could not demonise the use of fertilisers at a time when the global population was growing, and we needed to produce more food than ever.
“Plants need food,” he said. “The idea of completely cutting chemical use will work for some niche markets, but if we all do it, those markets will no longer be niche.”
He added that regenerative farming had become a divisive term, a catch-all descriptor to sell products and potentially greenwash products throughout the food chain. “It has an impact, but is it really saving the world? What about those farms on heavy clay, where cover crops keep the soil wet, and data and evidence support high input, high output practices for a low carbon cost per tonne?”
Mr Aagaard agreed that regenerative was a very specific term, being used too broadly and argued that Agreena’s carbon credit verification could be used to distinguish between real on-field data and marketing. He added that there was money available in other sectors to support growers, but that there needed to be action first. “Nobody is pricing in carbon resilience. It’s a nascent market that needs regulation and clear guidelines to minimise greenwashing.”
A checklist of previous announcements
Farming Minister Dame Angela Eagle gave the keynote speech, highlighting the financial struggles of farmers and families up and down the country who were struggling to feed themselves. She rallied against the fact that obesity and poverty now went hand in hand, and vowed to tackle this with clearer, more affordable healthy options.
There was little specific to farming in the speech – at least little that hadn’t been announced previously – but the promise to look at fairness within the supply chain, including the review of combinable crop contracts. Aims to work at a local level to boost the availability of healthy food could see opportunities for diversified farming businesses, but these ideas all came up against the same problem:
If growers are not being paid enough, and the public cannot afford to pay more, or at least cannot afford the healthy, British-sourced options, what can the industry do?
Conversations around the event focused on this, and a change in mindset was noted several times. That if we could get across that properly sourced food was more calorific and that healthier proteins would fill up a person quicker, then you could feed a family for the same amount of money, even with increased prices, meaning that more went to the farmers, despite the fact that it would look like less food.
Part of this could come from companies such as Wildfarmed, according to co-founder Edd Lees. “There is a lack of emotional engagement, which has hampered sustainability efforts,” he said during a panel that included Baroness Minette Batters, Bob Mulder, UK&I managing director at FrieslandCampina, Dr Chetan Parmar, senior vice president of technical services at FoodChain ID and Candy Siekmann, director of climate smart ag at ADM.
This was a crowded panel, with no one member having the opportunity to speak in detail about sustainability within agriculture. It was Baroness Batters who was able to make the biggest impact, following the publication of the Farm Profitability Report at the end of the last year.
“We are at a crossroads and have two years to sort this out,” she said. “Half of farmers do not earn the national median income, and this requires a new economic model. Government can be the key to this and can give confidence to growers and the industry. This transition will have a cost, and food prices will need to go up, but farmers want the same thing as we do.”
Government support
One of the more controversial comments came from Andy Howard, co-founder of CSX Carbon, during the Restoring Biodiversity in Food Systems talk. He said that not only had the Common Agricultural Policy kept growers farming in an unsustainable way, but that doubling the Sustainable Farming Incentive – as suggested by Tom Bradshaw earlier in the day – would only act as another crutch and would stop people thinking differently about their businesses.
“No farmer wants to be accused of depleting nature,” he said. “There needs to be fair value for any of these environmental benefits. This needs to come from the supply chain, which needs to be supportive and help manage costs.” He added that carbon calculators and biodiversity net gain were all currently based on assumptions, and real change would come when the industry moved away from modelling to show causality between regenerative practices and improvements in yield and nature.
Neville Ash, director of UNEP-WCMC, and Fraiser McIntosh, head of external affairs & sustainability at Suntory Beverage & Food, appeared to agree in principle, although Mr Ash did disagree on the subsidy argument. “Our food system has had the greatest impact on nature, and we are just realising that we rely on nature. Consumers pay a premium because of the 25% of food wasted, but subsidies do need an overhaul. Only £200b is spent globally on nature recovery, compared to trillions on intensive agriculture. A reversal of this could help growers to transition effectively to regenerative practices.”
Locally sourced
On the second day, Nigel Murray, now CEO of North England retailer Booths, highlighted that before World War 2 just 30% of food was produced domestically – something that became a stark issue when war broke out. By the 1980s, this had increased to 78% but had since dropped back down to 60%.
He added that Booths had maintained availability throughout Covid-19 due to the vertical integration of supply networks within the company, but that this was not a silver bullet for all retailers and suppliers; there needed to be long-term partnerships and collaborations to ensure food and energy security on a national scale, while protecting local communities.
During a talk titled Supporting Farmers to Drive Sustainability at Farm Level, we did hear from two farmers, James Osman, who farms 263ha on the Isle of Wight, and Andrew Loftus, who oversees 133ha of low-input grassland in North Yorkshire. Both are part of ABP UK’s Prism programme, in collaboration with Andersons and Harper Adams University, to establish the current footprint of growers using the SRUC Agrecalc carbon tool.
Mr Loftus said that he had seen the threat of climate change and had used several carbon calculators in the past, but the difference in results had been over 100%; now the difference was around 10%, and he had taken steps to reduce the lifespan of beef cattle to limit methane emissions.
Mr Osman added that inputting the data was the easy part and that actions based on the results were harder. “You need to pick a metric that is actionable and works for the farm,” he said. “We saw soil testing and increasing organic matter as the best option and have worked to increase organic matter by 47% over the last six years.”
“There are some easy wins,” concluded Mr Loftus. “You can adjust the feedstock quickly and see environmental gains, without the potential public pushback that the livestock industry sees.”