“It’s been a while since we last posted. We’re glad to be back!” This isn’t from us at the Digest (we posted only seven days ago and would never use an exclamation mark); it is the opener from the Defra farming team’s first blog since the general election was called.
New ministers are now in place and top of the to-do list is to revive confidence across the farming sector. Defra secretary Steve Reed last week promised to “restore stability” and this week his team of officials confirmed they’re wasting no time in producing policies that are farmer-friendly.
“Over the past month, we’ve been welcoming Defra’s new ministerial team,” the blog reads. “Defra’s ministers have said they don’t want to overturn the applecart and are fully committed to environmental land management schemes (ELM). We’ve been working with ministers on how we can optimise our schemes and grants so that they produce the right outcomes for farmers, food security and nature recovery in a fair and orderly way.”
Spirited stuff. Reed has also committed to “clean up Britain’s rivers, lakes, and seas“, yet his focus appears to be on the water companies. Tackling agricultural pollution is also crucial, noted Sustain this week as NGOs and industry groups continued to publish their open letters to ministers. “Current policies lack provisions to incentivise intensive pig and poultry farmers to transition to agroecology,” the campaign group wrote. “Strong regulatory baselines and moratoriums on new or expanded intensive livestock units are also vital. Local councils can introduce strong planning policies to ensure applications are properly scrutinised,” it added.
From polluted waterways we move to farmers drowning in data – or more specifically greenhouse gas emissions data. “If supermarkets and processors are going to request more and more information in an attempt to fulfil environmental goals, including net-zero, they need to understand it comes at a cost, and should be willing to pay for it,” said Herefordshire beef farmer Ian Farrant in a short, but thought-provoking piece for Farmers Weekly.
Farrant has just completed his fourth carbon footprint in two years “using three different online calculators, requested by three different companies”. Each calculator requires slightly different information and seems to want it in different formats, he explained. “What’s more, they come back with an alarmingly varied set of results, none of which I completely understand.”
Standardisation is on its way – at least in terms of the calculators (in June, the three major farm carbon calculators signed a memorandum of understanding to help harmonise the methodologies used in calculating the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture). Will the corporates demanding the data also find harmony?
Maybe. Front of pack eco-scoring scheme Foundation Earth has just been “integrated into” EIT Food, the huge innovation community funded by the EU. “The integration of Foundation Earth into EIT Food will provide the expertise needed for important advocacy work to develop internationally-recognised standards surrounding the use of data to assess the environmental impact of food,” reads a statement. The move has created the International Alliance for Food Impact Data, which it is hoped will standardise approaches to environmental scoring in the food sector.
“Environmental data is a key lever of change for food systems transformation,” said EIT Food chief executive Richard Zaltzman, and the new alliance “will enable us to take strides towards our shared mission of transforming the food system with credibly collected, measured and evaluated impact data.”
A growing number of different methodologies and labels are in use globally, but they all adhere to different standards, which makes it tricky for policymakers, companies and consumers to assess the environmental impact of different food and drinks. Standardising the approach should help food companies who want to use eco-scores stay on the right side of the EU Green Claims directive.
As Adele Jones notes in an interview with Meat Management magazine’s summer issue, data is going to be important not only in improving transparency but also in understanding “where and how future money should flow through. In turn, this will ensure farmers can be adequately paid for delivering public goods such as soil health, clean water, animal health and welfare, and the wellbeing of workers and the community they serve,” said the executive director of the Sustainable Food Trust. “It will also allow us to regulate the practices that are causing harm based on actual information about what’s happening on the farm rather than the ‘blame game’ that we sometimes see at the moment,” Jones added.
In our other stories this week the changing climate results in good news for producers of English wine. Morrisons meanwhile has turned up the temperature in its freezers to cut emissions and help it towards net-zero operational emissions. And new research by consultants at Wood Mackenzie shows how regulation and voluntary action hasn’t yet sparked the circular economy for packaging.
