Tackling the climate and biodiversity crisis head-on

Feeding our growing world population without adverse environmental impacts remains one of farming’s biggest challenges.

Farmers are now expected to deliver much more than simply food. Storing carbon, conserving biodiversity and mitigating floods are among the multitude of ecosystem services that we expect from our farmland.

Delivering these benefits while staying financially afloat can be tricky, but farmers throughout the UK are rising to the challenge.

Regenerative agriculture is the new buzz word. It focuses on restoring soil health and biodiversity to strengthen the ecosystem processes that underpin production.

Although the climate crisis, in particular, has seen our livestock industry face increasing criticism, my Twitter feed is full of innovative livestock farmers trialling new practices targeted to increase the resilience and sustainability of their systems, such as mob grazing, agroforestry, multispecies swards and integrating livestock into arable rotations. The farming community is experimenting, learning, adapting and, perhaps most importantly, sharing their findings – not just their successes but also their failures.

It can, however, be difficult to comprehensively determine all the outcomes of management change. Yield, or more importantly, profit margin, is a measure that most of us are used to, but what about the hidden benefits, or indeed costs? Has the soil’s capacity to store carbon and water improved? What are the impacts on our pollinators or the multitude of soil invertebrates that are fundamental to nutrient recycling? What about the impacts on workload and the family unit?

Clearly, to accurately evaluate management change, robust userfriendly metrics are needed. Such metrics should enable us to benchmark farm performance with respect to the three pillars of sustainability: economic, social and environmental.

To try to capture the wide variety of practices that farmers are trialling, and to share ideas on how wider outcomes could be monitored, SRUC embarked on a SEFARI Gateway-funded project which established online think tanks, allowing farmers, researchers and policymakers to work together to generate hundreds of ideas.

We now wish to draw on the wealth of knowledge and expertise within the livestock industry to help evaluate these ideas.

Our management practice thinktank aims to identify management actions that could help grassland systems deliver the three pillars of sustainability, and our metrics think tank aims to identify a suite of userfriendly indicators to help farmers monitor and rapidly benchmark their farm’s performance with respect to social, environmental and economic outcomes.

Please visit this board to evaluate which metrics you think are user-friendly and robust. Developing metrics that capture the three pillars of sustainability will help inform future agricultural policy.