It might be time to get the spare bedroom painted
Today will see the launch of the Farming For 1.5 Degrees report, a joint effort between farmers and scientists to work out the best way forward for Scottish agriculture to meet the challenge of limiting global warming.
The report will make interesting reading for the farming sector – for while the industry has spoken about the issue of climate change for some time and has cut greenhouse gas emissions considerably since the 1990 base, most of this has been as a result of a sharp fall in both cattle and sheep numbers.
Outside of this the thing has been viewed with a sort of “we really must get round to redecorating the spare bedroom” degree of urgency.
But with this key report being published within a fortnight of the Scottish Suckler Beef Climate Group’s recommendations, real signs that the issue is being taken seriously are beginning to emerge – and despite the hindrances of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ball really seems to be rolling now.
And it would be fair to suppose that more reports and blueprints will be getting pulled forward on to the front burner as Brexit approaches and we enter the three-year “Stability and Simplicity” interlude in which Scotland’s “steady-as-she-goes” move away from area support allows the opportunity to pilot these proposals.
The first pilot scheme aimed at ushering Scottish agriculture forward along the road towards net zero emissions was actually launched a few weeks ago in the form of the Sustainable Agriculture Capital Grant Scheme.
One thread which seems to run through all these plans and proposals seems to be the importance which is being placed on carrying out a “carbon audit” on the farm’s activities.
This idea has, of course, been around for some time – across industry as well as farming – and although gauging the carbon footprint of a farm is incredibly difficult, it’s only really going to be possible to move forward by drawing up a baseline. Some have been moving down this road – with the un-loved Beef Efficiency Scheme (BES) marking one of the first initiatives to require such an undertaking (although it also highlighted the need to keep schemes both practical and acceptable to the industry).
But anyone who had completed the carbon audit for the BES actually found themselves getting a leg-up on the pixiepoint collection front in the recent capital grant scheme – a fact which has not been missed by farm advisers and consultants around the country.
And last week in an industry webinar, a leading consultant highlighted carrying one out as an action point for any farmers who wanted to be on the front foot for any future support measures.
Like any emerging technologies and approaches though, there are several different tools around to carry out carbon audits – and as they use slightly different processes, different ones tend to give different results.
SRUC is pushing hard to have its Agrecalc accepted as the VHS version – and in its attempts to have others pushed into the Betamax position, it even recently introduced a module which could give some indication of the amount of carbon sequestered, a factor omitted from official calculations so far.
The system might at first seem overly complicated – and it has to be admitted that it does take a fair bit of time to complete (or so my son told me after he was delegated to the job) but it has seen a degree of acceptance across not only government schemes but also other sectors.
In fact, SRUC principal Wayne Powell told me some time ago that it is set to be used by the banking industry when vetting large-scale farm loans to show banks have addressed the issue of climate change.
So it does look like climate change will play a key role in the agenda for future support.
And although the metaphor might not stand up at the moment – when it comes to that spare bedroom, you could say it’s a bit like we’ve just heard that the in-laws are coming to visit in a fortnight…