ScotGov funds for farm carbon
A range of projects aimed at tackling climate change and enhancing competitiveness in Scottish agriculture and food production sectors have just received funding of more than £370,000 through ScotGov’s Knowledge Transfer and Innovation Fund.
The seven awards focus funding on projects intended to maximise resource efficiency, cut emissions and enhance business viability – and which, through knowledge transfer and learning, spread information about these on-the-ground farming improvements to a wider audience of people that might then adopt them.
Rural Affairs Secretary Mairi Gougeon said: “We have ambitious targets across the agricultural sector in terms of net zero goals, enabling the essential role of agriculture and addressing the need for food security.
“These are issues that affect us all and investment in these successful projects will contribute to meeting these targets.”
The successful projects selected for funding include ‘Date driven decisions in Potatoes’, an initiative facilitated by the Scottish Agricultural Organisation Society, which received £36,000 to help improve the productivity and competitiveness of Scottish ware potato growers, while reducing their impact on the environment and biodiversity.
Scotland’s Rural College was awarded nearly £63,000 for its ‘Trustable IoT’ project, which seeks to develop a set of open source standardised processes for ‘internet of things’ sensors and digital devices that measure and triangulate biodiversity baselines and improvements.
‘Reducing Inputs’ facilitated by organic body Soil Association (Scotland) was awarded £24,000 for a knowledge transfer project aimed at inspiring farmers and growers to reduce their use of external inputs including synthetic nitrogenbased fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides; to reduce their carbon footprints, tackle disease resistance, improve soil health and ecological performance, protect natural capital and boost financial resilience.
With an eye specifically on Scotland’s distilling industry, nearly £37,000 was found for ‘Decarbonising Scottish malting barley production’, again facilitated by Scottish Agricultural Organisation Society, with the primary aim of raising the awareness and understanding amongst farmer producers of the emissions associated with producing malting barley.
‘Agroecology: enabling the transition’, facilitated by Nourish Scotland, has been given a KTIF award of £112,500 to build on the work of its previous project ‘Agroecology – facilitating mindset change’, with the aim of widening and deepening understanding of agroecology specifically through a farmer to farmer/
OCTOBER 22, 2022 crofter to crofter co-operative learning programme.
Birdlife conservation charity, RSPB, was given nearly £28,000 for its ‘Wader friendlyfarmers: Building a stronger network’ project, which will look to increase the number of farmers and landowners who are engaged with the ‘Working for waders’ initiative, increase the area of land positively managed for waders and improve data collection from the projects.
In line with the Scottish Government’s drive to make farm carbon audits the foundation of future farm policy, the final award was to the ‘Farm carbon storage network’, which is a project facilitated by Scotland’s Rural College, which received nearly £86,000 in funding to develop a representative farmer group that will estimate their farm carbon stock using soil testing and LiDAR surveys.