Net Zero Carbon agriculture: 3 options to develop in arable farming this year

It is easy with everything going on at the moment to forget that UK agriculture is committed to a net-zero carbon future by 2040. A while back I was invited to present in a session on perspectives on net-zero carbon agriculture by 2050 at a conference organised by the Department of International Trade. In my research for the presentation I found this graph from a report by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy outlining how well different sectors have done in “decarbonising”.

Alas, I cannot find the report anywhere on their website but the Government’s Climate change Committee have produced similar ones on reducing or measuring the progress on reducing the carbon footprint of individual sectors which essentially say the same thing.

Some, including the energy and waste sectors, with a near 60% and 70% reduction respectively, from a 1990 baseline, have done remarkably well, albeit from what I imagine is a very high starting point.

Others such as industrial processes I was not so sure about. Was that a genuine reduction or does it reflect a “deindustrialising” of the UK; have we exported our emissions rather than reduced them?

Transport still remains an issue, but what about Agriculture?

Using a baseline of roughly when I started in the industry, not much more than a 15% reduction has been achieved.

What are the chances therefore of getting to zero anytime soon, given that apparently we have very little time to do it and how on earth could it be achieved? One thing is for sure is that continuing to do what we have been doing will not succeed. I took the figures from the graph above and plotted them to get a feel of what the prognosis was.

A 15% reduction in 25 years translates at the current rate, according to my calculations, to a zero-carbon endgame sometime around 2135 – nearly 100 years too late to avoid climate change.

That said, Bayer is active in this area having pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the production and use of its own portfolio of products, as part of its sustainability commitments by 2030.

So here are three areas in arable farming in which I am eager to see more development this year once we have got a handle on the current pandemic. Perhaps this could help shift the transformation towards net zero agriculture.

1. Understand what things really contribute to the problem: Start with better targeting the carbon intensity of fertilisers and pesticide use?

Looking at where emissions in arable agriculture arise might be a good place to look. According to AHDB, fertiliser production and field emissions make up over 75% of the problem. I am certainly not knocking fertiliser use – why would I? – but the idea of reducing the carbon intensity of fertiliser production, together with a smarter understanding of targeting their use would seem an important part of the solution. Likewise, a hard look at pesticide “carbon-use” and how often a tractor visits a field would also have an impact.

Surely that is what digital farming is all about- if we understand our farming better at an individual field level, then we can target inputs to where they are really needed, something that Bayer’s Climate Corporation has been doing for nearly 15 years with products such as FieldView.

2. Plant breeding innovation

Surely a big step in the right direction would be the adoption of technologies that continue to increase the amount of food you can produce per unit of land, with a view to increasing the amount of food produced per kilogramme of carbon dioxide (or equivalent) emitted. New breeding techniques can help identify varieties with low fertiliser and water requirements, or help find crops that produce good yields in less than ideal circumstances.

3. Reduction in ploughing – the Min-till Revolution?

We know from extensive research over the last 20 years that the adoption of minimum or zero tillage agriculture, facilitated by GM herbicide tolerant and crops in North and South America has massively reduced the amount of fuel used in those crops – 1.1 billion litres in 2017 alone, equivalent to a reduction of 2.9 billion kg CO2. In addition, the carbon capture of not ploughing – ie, return of carbon to the soil equated to removing 6.9 billion kg CO2 from global agriculture. Decarbonising and carbon capture working concomitantly is surely worth putting more effort into?

Ok, so maybe the UK is not yet ready to adopt GM crops as a way of reducing ploughing, but we do have to do something - wringing our hands and saying that achieving serious and meaningful carbon reductions is too difficult, is not an option. And it may not be popular with some activists, but the continued availability of glyphosate will be essential for our current min- and zero-till activities in the UK.

What is clear is that solutions involving exporting our carbon emissions to another country by just importing more of our food just to make us feel good, would not just impact on our food security but would be a sham and a mockery of other sectors’ attempts to get their house in order.

As I’ve said earlier, Bayer is active in this area having pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. What are you doing to ensure we can achieve a net-zero carbon agriculture in time to have an impact on climate change?