96: Food and farming in a net-zero Scotland

How do agriculture and food production affect climate change and biodiversity, and can we fully decarbonise this industry?

Becky, Fraser and Matt are joined by agriculture and environment consultant Keesje Avis, and Mike Robinson, Chief Exec of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and Co-Chair of the 'Farming for 1.5 Degrees' report.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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You're listening to a Bespoken Media production.

Becky: Hello, and welcome to Local Zero with Becky, Matt and Fraser.

Matt: We are recording around lunchtime, which means my stomach is grumbling. No bad thing, because we are thinking about what we put on our plates and in our mouths, and how agriculture and food production affects both climate change and biodiversity.

Fraser: Yes, indeed, and In particular, we're looking at the outcomes of Farming for 1. 5 Degrees Inquiry, set up by the National Farmers Union for Scotland and Nourish Scotland.

Becky: And we've got two great guests on the show today who were both key to the delivery of that report. We're joined by Mike Robinson, who's the Chief Exec of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and he co chaired the report.

Becky: We're also joined by Keesje Avis, one of the researchers on Farming for 1. 5 Degrees.

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Matt: Okay, so no kick about before the interview today. We'll get stuck in after today's episode is all about food You've had the appetizer time to bring in the main course.

Keesje: Hello. My name is Keesje Avis For work, I'm an associate director in the land team at RICARDO, an international environment and energy consultancy.

Keesje: And in my spare time, my husband and I run Burnston, which is a small holding and group accommodation space in rural Perthshire.

Mike: My name is Mike Robinson. I'm the chief executive of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and I was co-chair of the Farming 1.5 inquiry.

Becky: Welcom Keesjeha, welcome Mike. It's lovely to have you both with us today and we're very excited to dive into this conversation.

Becky: Uh, but Mike, I'm hoping I can just pick up on something you mentioned, which was the farming for 1. 5 degrees inquiry. So maybe you could just tell us a little bit more about what that is or was.

Mike: Yeah, sure. The principle of it was really to try to bring the whole of the agricultural community around the table.

Mike: to talk about how agriculture had a role and how it could deliver against the whole net zero agenda. It was unusual because it brought in, uh, farmers from every major farming sector, but it also engaged everybody from policy experts and campaigners to scientists and rural economists and all sorts of others.

Mike: So it was actually one of the greatest Really greatest pleasures of being involved in it was just the breadth of opinion and diversity around the table.

Becky: Amazing. And Keesje, you were, you were involved in that. And as you say, you sort of live, uh, live this life as well. So, you know, how, how did that play out for you sort of working in this space, living in this space and really bringing together the different things around, um, farming, agriculture and climate and why this is such an important topic.

Keesje: Yeah, I was the clerk for the project while I was working at Nourish Scotland, uh, which is a food systems charity, um, in Scotland. It was, it was really important for me. It's why, um, I applied to do, to do the job because it was trying to make all of that theoretical stuff become actually real to the people who were living it while respecting the people who were living it.

Keesje: It's become such a divisive subject. And, you know, as Mike said, one of the great pleasures was actually how everyone gave each other the time to speak and also were really vulnerable about what they didn't know. So they were really happy to learn new stuff, um, despite the fact that they were all already experts in their fields.

Keesje: Uh, and yeah, it was, um, it doesn't mean any of the conversations were easy. Sometimes they were really quite difficult, but they were informed, uh, they were, they came with respect as a cornerstone, uh, and I think everyone was really proud of, of the results that came out of it.

Matt: When we talk about net zero, I would say from the outside, looking in that food and agriculture doesn't tend to command the same headlines, particularly as energy transport, yet it's something that we involve ourselves with every day.

Matt: I think food is something that we do discuss in the context of climate, maybe lesser agriculture, but I just want you for our listeners to situate the importance of agriculture and the broader climate change debate, we can get into biodiversity and ecology later on down the tracks, but for climate, how big a problem is it?

Matt: And how important is it that we tackle it, uh, way ahead of are these targets coming down the tracks?

Mike: Obviously it's absolutely vital that we tackle land based emissions and agriculture. It's one of the biggest sectors in the UK. It's also one of the few that has not really seen any emissions reductions over the last you know, 10 to 15 years.

Mike: And so along with transport, one of the sort of critical areas that we need to tackle the thing about agriculture that also makes it important is that we actually need our land and agriculture community to go beyond net zero. Otherwise the nation cannot hit his net zero target.

Mike: So it's an absolutely fundamental player in this space. And I think the other thing that was important possibly in the period that this inquiry was set up by Nourish and the NFUS and others was a recognition that agriculture needed to step up more. Um, but also for me personally, you talk about food and agriculture.

Mike: Now, agriculture is about our choices around land and land management and production of food. very much. The issue around what you might choose to eat is sort of a separate thing in a way. That's more of a, a customer led choice. It's not necessarily an agricultural choice. You're catering to a market. So the market determines what you need to grow and what you don't need to grow.

Mike: Um, and actually it was really important to sort of make that distinction because there are lots and lots of things that you can do through land management to either improve the reduction of emissions from like tillage, um, you know, nitrogen, all these sorts of issues. There's multiple gases that come into play as well, multiple greenhouse gases.

Mike: There's loads of things that can be done, but the conversation, when this inquiry was established, it sort of got mired in a conversation about whether you should eat less meat. And Farming community was struggling with that. They, they're very defensive around that, but it was also just very one dimensional conversation.

Mike: And so actually what was really important is to diversify that conversation and to hang on, there's loads of things that can be done here. I need to be done here and sort of get beyond that, that sticking point into the, what actually will you, what can you get on with now? What actually will make a difference quickly and how do we engage?

Matt: Okay. That's, that's really interesting, Mike, because there are, there are carbon emissions, but they're connected. If you are looking at sort of IPCC speak, uh, intergovernmental panel and climate change speak or climate change committee speak, these are about land use. So about carbon sequestration. So is, is there a carbon when we're talking about agriculture?

Matt: Are we also in this basket as part of this debate talking about CO2 with how that land is managed, that might be the extent to which you've got grasslands, woodlands, peatlands on the farm producing that food is, is that in or out of scope as far as your report and, and, uh, considerations are.

Mike: It is in the, all the greenhouse gases were in scope because they have to be.

Mike: Nitrous oxide and methane are bigger direct concerns from agriculture itself. Carbon dioxide though still has a role within some of the land management aspects of it, and yes in machinery and things. So they're all, they're all in play. I think going back to your question about the sort of, while we're trying to sort of perpetuate business as usual and and tone it down for its greenhouse gas impact.

Mike: The answer's no. We were trying to work out what would it take for agriculture to get to net zero across all the greenhouse gas spectra. The issue about, you know, as you know, all the greenhouse gases have a sort of carbon dioxide equivalent anyway, so in a way that's a sort of shorthand, but it absolutely is a reference to all of those areas where emissions are a problem, how on earth could we do things differently and what would need to change?

Mike: Some of that is about land management and, and um, even things like, you know, forestry and use, use of land as much as it is about the practice on the land.

Fraser: Keesje, you're, you're someone who sort of practices what you, you preach on this for, for you, what does, if it exists, what does sort of best practice look like or what does a net zero farm in future look like?

Keesje: Well, what we try to do is we try to make sure that we are matching our production to our land capabilities. We've chosen to go down the more regen route, uh, with organic principles. So we don't use fertilizer. We will use antibiotics and so on. If our, uh, our animals absolutely need it, we planted a range of different agroforestry pockets with multi species trees across our, our tiny bit of land. And they're not, the end result is not necessarily for firewood for these copses, but they may be a mix of fruit trees, nut trees, trees that can provide our animals fodder over the winter so that we're not importing any concentrates. But I mean, we're on a tiny scale.

Keesje: We're not at a large scale and a lot of the emissions Are from much bigger farms. So, you know, it's easy for me to talk about the small stuff. Um, but actually it's, it's It's some of the larger operations that if they make a change, it will make an immediate difference to the, to the emissions. We have a lot of small farmers in Scotland, a lot of farmers who are really struggling financially.

Keesje: Um, and they feel that this conversation is almost a, um, a barrage at their culture and their values. And it's, it's about a lot more than just, are you, you know, contributing to climate change or not. It's kind of, actually, I'm at the forefront of climate change because I'm the one who's getting hit by the storms, by the too much water, the too little water, all of that kind of stuff, which sometimes we forget about.

Keesje: That's in far bigger situation than the energy or the transport sectors need to deal with. Um, but it's, it's some of those bigger farmers. I think if they were given the kind of space to go, Well, actually, this is a really good idea. And it's not just a good idea because it's going to save us money because actually quite a lot of these things, particularly when it comes to nitrous oxide and to methane, when you cut that, you're actually saving yourselves money, but that your neighbors are not going to go, Ha ha ha.

Keesje: What the hell are you doing? You should just be doing whatever your dad did before.

Mike: I think you can overstate how unchanged agriculture has been for centuries. I mean, you know, it varies and adapts all the time. And there are certain practices that are more embedded than others, but it does adapt and it has adapted in lots of different ways.

Mike: And, but the trouble is, I suppose that the primary adaptation has been to, to the market and the free market at that. So you've had a move towards much bigger companies and, and a lot of different uh, you know, responses around that. I mean, Scotland is not food secure, really. It's not tried to be. It is largely, um, hinges its success on how much it manages to export.

Mike: And most of its arable land is for barley, for whiskey, or for livestock feed. So we're not, you know, that isn't, that's not really what we're farming for. I think the question is, I guess the inquiry was trying to look at how we farm as much as what it's for. And there are a number of things that are actually probably more traditional in scope that we're trying to re engage and re encourage.

Mike: We've become very, very monocultural, you know, and I think actually it's not just true of production. Ironically, I've been brought in recently to a number of different flood incidents that. you know, directly pertain to land use and land management. And, you know, we've done, we keep exacerbating problems by not questioning the direction of travel.

Mike: You know, agriculture has a number of things that it can deliver. One of them, of course, and a very fundamental one is food, but it's not the only thing. It can also deliver a high quality environment. It can deliver biodiversity measures. It can deliver a healthy water system. It can deliver all sorts of other things.

Mike: And it's about valuing more. than just short term money. And I don't particularly mean farmers, I mean the market, I mean society. I mean we need to, we need to broaden the things that we recognize as having value. Because actually the one thing about agriculture is it's got the ability to deliver against several of those necessary values.

Mike: But we've got to, we've got to want them to do that and help them to do that. And I think the most fundamental thing is also just to get this moving. We've got to get beyond a sort of a confrontation point, you know, in every sector, there's, there's a, there you'll hit a clash, a buffer because there's a, A very oversimplistic, one dimensional version of what the problem is, which then suggests that there's a single silver bullet solution.

Mike: And of course, if you've spent any time in this sector, there isn't, it's a plethora of. answers and solutions that are required across a number of spaces that connect and make sense. And some of them are easier, so let's get on with them. Some of them we agree on, let's get on with them. And the ones we're not so sure about, well, let's take our time and work that out.

Mike: But we're sort of letting the ones we're not sure about stop us doing any of the others often. And I think in some ways that was sort of what was going on in the farming space.

Keesje: We did identify that it was, um, we needed, we needed leadership. In the sector when we were writing a report and, uh, you know, that was, I don't know how many years ago, four years ago, um, and leadership in all sorts of bits and pieces has changed, but, uh, there's always something more urgent, it seems than acting on climate for the, for those leaders.

Becky: Feels the same way, whichever sort of, uh, dimension we're talking about. Actually, I feel I can't, you know, count the number of times I've said something to that effect when thinking about, you know, the energy system as well. But I just wanna come back to that, uh, notion of, you know, there's not one silver bullet solution.

Becky: There's lots of different things that we could be doing as a sector recognizing there's a huge diversity across the sector. And, you know, Keesje, you talked about how, you know, from sort of quite small, uh, small farms through to much larger producers. And so, I mean, Mike, I'm wondering if you can just reflect back on, on the report and obviously if things have changed since that, but maybe can you outline what some of those key actions

Becky: are that we could be taking right now to move us forward.

Becky: And importantly where those need to be coming from. So is this all about farmers changing the way they're doing things versus, you know, what is the role for kind of policy within all of this? So, so what do we need to be doing and really who do we need to be getting involved to, to facilitate that happening?

Mike: Goodness. There's loads of, well, there's a lot. We have. you know, 15 major recommendations in the report. And it's everything from stopping wasting nitrogen to changing, um, well, even things like even genetics in cattle, whole farm approaches, you know, needing to take a holistic approach to the whole of the farm and not just aspects of the farm and how you actually manage and plan what you're going to do.

Mike: But it was also again about, it was into cropping. It was all these sorts of things about just the really good soil practice, the good. the good land management practice, the good, it's good livestock practice. One of the great stories, actually, one of the, one of the members of the panel, um, is an organic farmer based near Pitlochry and he's been a big proponent of agroforestry.

Mike: And I was up at his farm just chatting to him and, uh, he'd come out one morning and lost all of his cows. And, uh, he realized that the weather had been really horrible. And they'd all managed to make it out of the field and into a woodland at the top of the hill. And he walked up to the woodland. It took him a while to realize.

Mike: And, uh, they were all in this woodland scratching themselves and having a lovely time and hiding from the weather. And He realized from a welfare angle alone, actually the cattle wanted to be in the woodland. They didn't, you know, we, we stick them in a field with grass and put a big fence around it and then have a woodland somewhere else with a big fence around that.

Mike: And it's just not a natural system. It's a very, very strange and monocultural system that we've become very used to. But he actually started implementing agroforestry as a welfare measure because it's been a It made his cows happy, you know, and so that it's just some of the things that we want to see are not, some of them are more radical and yes, they need policy intervention, they need the names, the right funding mechanisms to drive the right behaviors.

Mike: You know, there needs to be a bare minimum set of requirements for, for access to funding because we need to make sure that certain things are happening across the board and at scale. Because otherwise it's not happening in any real way, but there's, it's the process, I guess, part of what we were concerned in as well as how do you even get to that point where that is where the majority are moving.

Mike: And I think that's, that's a bit certainly I'm interested in still, because I think there's still a lot of work to be done.

Becky: And maybe Keesje, can you reflect on notion of making these changes as somebody who's actually doing it and living the practice? And were there any particular. Challenges that you faced in terms of trying to make your own smallholding more environmentally friendly.

Keesje: So if this is where the scale question kind of comes in. Um, so I mean, I, I talked earlier about this, the methane and the nitrous oxide. And one of the other recommendations we had in the report was that we looked at actually having targets for methane reductions and targets for nitrous oxide reductions.

Keesje: And because I don't have enough slurry, or I don't have any slurry, uh, that's quite difficult and it's not something I would necessarily, um, work with. And I think that's where things are quite tough for some farmers, particularly with farmland manure or covering slurry tanks because it gets quite expensive.

Keesje: Um, but since the report, you know, when we're talking about financing mechanisms. I think it's quite interesting to think about how not just government, but other private, uh, companies could be funding that kind of stuff and almost have a methane price and a nitrogen price. So rather than just talking about carbon pricing, you're actually, getting companies as part of their scope three to reduce their scope three emissions to pay for these things, because they're never going to make financial sense for that farmer.

Keesje: And actually they don't really make financial sense for governments either. Do you know, we're talking about hundreds of farms needing hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on, on, on covers. So, do you know, I think that's quite an exciting time to kind of be in that as, as we better understand these different gases, what those kind of much larger emissions would be?

Keesje: Because that's again, my point is, it's not about the people who are kind of fiddling around at the edges, it's about the ones who've got a lot of animals, massive dairy farms, or large beef wholesalers, or very large arable farms over on the east coast. There is that question of, should we be targeting particular people?

Keesje: Should we be targeting particular sectors? Or is this about fairness and we should all be doing a little bit? And I do feel that we all should be doing a little bit because I think there's that constant kind of thing. Oh, well, someone else is worth doing worse than I am. So therefore I'm not going to do anything.

Keesje: I'll just let them do it, but it is all back to us. So I suppose what we do is we try and make sure we've got, um, a lot of, um, clover in our fields. So that's replacing the need for any, um, nitrogen fertilizer and actually our neighbors who are not organic have done the same thing and their, um, their lands are, are looking amazing.

Keesje: They're doing really, really well. Their soil has managed to really respond to a lot of the wetness we've had over the winter. Um, you know, it's managed to stick together because they have this multi sward. They've got loads of, going back to Mike's point actually about monoculture, instead even in a grassland you can have loads of different plants all together rather than just perennial ryegrass.

Keesje: So, and for them it's been a different approach. You know, they've, they've had to step away from what they expect their neighbours to do. And I think it has been slightly easier for them because they've come into the sector later rather than doing it. If they've not taken over their father's farm, for example, and I think, you know, we, we keep going back to this culture, but, but it's, it's about, having the guts, I suppose, to do something that is going to be slightly different to your neighbor. And that is difficult for anyone, regardless of whether you're a farmer or anyone else, to be stepping outside. But people are, you know, they are more and more stepping outside what they're expected to do.

Keesje: It would just be great for that to be something that you're led from the front rather than you feeling like you're on the sidelines all the time.

Fraser: I think that's a, that's a fascinating point and a really important one as well. That, that idea of do you target any subsidies or any action, or do you try and get everyone to do a little bit?

Fraser: And I wonder from your point about culture change of getting everyone to do a little bit is maybe more conducive to that culture change. Sort of everyone pulling in a direction in a way,

Keesje: aren't we in an emergency?

Fraser: I think that's a fair,

Keesje: I mean, I've been doing this for 20 years and people are going, Oh, just do a little bit.

Keesje: I'm like, right, you know, my little bit when it comes to being a consumer rather than a farmer, my little bit really has not made any difference in, in, you know, I mean, yes, okay, it makes, when I used to live in a town, it made my neighbors feel guilty. But, you know, I actually think we need to get the people who are doing, who are making the biggest impacts, pay the price.

Keesje: Do you know, uh, and I, and I'm not suggesting that necessarily the farmer could be the mix of the farmer plus the salesperson plus the end seller. Do you know that's, that's, it's not about an individual responsibility there, uh, which is again different to energy where it's just one, you know, coal fired power station or whatever.

Keesje: I don't know, Mike, what do you think? Because we had this conversation a bit in, when we were doing the report as well.

Mike: Yeah, there's lots of things I could say. The first is that there's always a danger when in, in recognizing the emergency and the amount of time we've both spent in this immersed in this emergency to, to panic that there's no time left to do stuff.

Mike: And then what you need to do are more and more significant interventions that get more and more pushback because they're more radical. And so actually at one of my greatest regrets is it took me 15, 20 years to, to realize that education was one of the critical answers to all of this. Because originally when I first really got heavily involved in climate change, I didn't think we had time to educate people.

Mike: I don't think we have time to educate children, but I think we absolutely as a matter of priority should be educating people in the workplace because there's a huge skills deficit in what we require from what people currently know. One of the great frustrations as well as the policy system is very laborious sitting in a government advisory body for the last two years, they've basically been saying that even if we bring about some of the changes, we won't see them until 2027. And you're like, well, how the hell are you gonna hit a 2030 target if you only start in 2027? You know, that's just not gonna happen. So people know that they reckon.

Mike: So there needs to be interventions now that are meaningful. But in order to get those to happen, we need to do several things. And one of them is we need to give more traction and profile and credit to the right behaviors. We've got to stop funding some of the wrong behaviors because some of the subsidies are still helping do the wrong things, but I also think it's really important that we get beyond this idea that this is all optional.

Mike: This is all, you know, this isn't a yes or no. This is an A, B, or C. I need you to do something. You have to do something. It's not optional. And the reason it's not optional is because farming's already being massively impacted by climate change anyway. I've been called out to two incidents in the last two weeks where farmers have lost vast amounts of topsoil, most of their seed potatoes, to two significant rainstorms that lasted 20 minutes.

Mike: And nobody's won out of that situation. But this idea that Well, I don't need to adapt, or I don't need to change, or I don't need to do anything. We're way beyond that, but we still haven't sort of won that argument. It's still presented almost as a choice.

Fraser: Yeah, I think that's crucial. We brought it up before.

Fraser: We've treated it as a conflict in a lot of ways, rather than trying to make it a collaborative process. Something that you've both touched on there that I think is important to get into is the fact that we are in a And in an emergency and agriculture around the world, but also locally increasingly is, is feeling that a huge impact from that.

Fraser: Mike, you and I live not too far from each other, but agriculture is a sort of primary industry. A whole load of that top soil from the end of last year ended up in my back garden and in my kitchen, which was good fun as well. But what we're seeing Is increasingly, and as we understand it, due to the climate crisis accelerating, we're seeing more frequent floods, more heavy rainfall that makes it very difficult, not just in terms of the physical impacts to sort of farm and land itself and to the surrounding roads and infrastructure, but also in terms of getting things planted, getting things grown when you're trying to get that done.

Fraser: Do we collectively, and I mean sort of as a as a society, as a country, do we understand those impacts and how, uh, severe they are becoming? Do we understand those well enough? Yeah, I'll go to Mike with that first, in that case.

Mike: Oh, short answer, no. We don't seem to, I don't think we're very good at putting two and two together.

Mike: And I'm constantly surprised at how true that is. Recently, there's been a lot of discussion in the media. I just, sorry, we're going back to flooding, which of course is not quite the same issue, but it's related. There's a lot of issues about how people have been affected or how they've banded together to bail out a property or a business that has been particularly impacted.

Mike: But people aren't really talking about, so why exactly is it flooding? And what's causing that? And what's exacerbating that? And some of what's exacerbating that, I mean, you know, some of it is about what we're choosing to do, what we're choosing to, to, to lead on as our land practice. So a lot of farms used to use end rigs when they plowed a field that a lot of them don't seem to do that anymore.

Mike: They're plowing to the edge of the field. They're doing plowing downhill instead of across contours. That was for the water to run down, um, there's no bonding or protection or hedging to stop mud and topsoil disappearing onto the roads or wherever else. There's a whole load of choices that we're making almost inadvertently in the different systems that we're setting out that might, they aren't necessarily what they used to be, but we're not, I think what we're sort of lost sight of is being responsive and reactive.

Mike: Presenting people with the issue of climate change isn't some fundamental threat by weird people to their lifestyle. It's, it's the latest thing that you need to be aware of. How can you keep running a business if you do not understand the direction of travel? Both of the likely impacts but also of changing policy, customer requirements, legislation, everything around it.

Mike: It's all shifting, but people are sort of behaving like nothing's shifting. And I think that's actually the biggest disconnect, actually.

Fraser: Keesje, you touched on these impacts as well. Um, and it's, and it's not unique to Scotland, right? It's around the world in different ways. We saw it including with things like cost of living, right?

Fraser: At least part of that was down to climate impacts affecting affecting farming elsewhere. Are we doing well enough to join the dots, either in the sort of wider public consciousness about the impact of climate on farming, but also then in terms of the, the solutions within the industry to address it?

Keesje: Well, I think on the wider scale. There are other countries in a way worse situation than Scotland is. I mean, I think that's almost one of the issues is that the UK are so far getting away with climate change much easier than, you know, Pakistan, for example, or parts of India. The human costs are huge in these places.

Keesje: And that is what the focus is and rightly so. I think it's very scary. And I think that it's possibly something we don't want to spend too much time thinking about. And also when we go into a supermarket, you know, the supermarket going to. make sure that they've got stuff on the shelves, regardless of what's happening in different countries around the world.

Keesje: You know, that's how our system is set up. So we're not going to see a news report one day and then go, Oh, well, where's my rice the next day? Cause there'll just be another type of basmati rice.

Matt: I do think one of the complications here for consumers is to pick apart the cost of climate on their food and the cost of mitigating and adapting for climate change.

Matt: And so, you know, the former there is about the disruption. Okay. So let's say you've had tremendous drought or flooding, but then actually the baked in cost around some of the changes that you've outlined in your report. Um, and also the adaptation part of that, which it carries a cost. So I do think there is Probably quite an important educational point here about informing consumers, uh, cause that is a really difficult one to pull apart.

Matt: Let me come to my question, which is about what's happened in the last few years since the report has come out. We've, we've seen that certainly in the UK and it's not just the UK internationally, the debate on climate change, change, I would say, has shifted quite considerably since 2021. Mike, have you seen a shift in the debate around agriculture?

Matt: And climate change since then and if so, how have the terms of that debate changed and where are we today?

Mike: I think there probably has been a shift and I think the shift is I think I think actually I would trace the trace the sort of positive vibes back to about 2019 with all the school strikes globally and that show of concerned by younger generations that genuinely deeply affected people and people of all ages.

Mike: And I work across a number of sectors and every single sector felt like it wanted to step up and do more. You saw businesses lining up to commit to net zero commitments, governments declaring climate emergencies and all sorts of other responses happening. It sort of gave permission to the people in every sector that are trying to do some of these things and trying to protect their industries and things to do that, to go and do that.

Mike: And I think what's happened since is we've slowly lost sight of that. Not unnaturally because of COVID that was a massive distraction. It's very difficult to overstate that. Then we came out of that into cost of living crisis. There's lots of reasons for that. And again, we just kept failing to join the dots.

Mike: You know, how do you actually tackle the bigger issue of climate change, which is right around the corner and upon us in some ways, and also tackle these sorts of things? How do you complement both of these things? So it required a little bit more long termism. And I think if anything, the problem is that we've gone back to very short term thinking.

Mike: I think climate is terribly badly presented in the media still. There was recent reports, the rough summary was the most expensive thing we could possibly do is not to do anything. The next most expensive thing is to delay taking action, and the least expensive option is to actually start to address climate change properly.

Mike: But that wasn't presented like that, it was presented as, we can't afford to do climate change. Which is just such an insane interpretation of that set of economic figures. And so, and they're not unique, we keep doing this and keep making this mistake.

Matt: Keesje do you agree with Mike's reflection? Has it shifted?

Matt: Or in a different place? I

Keesje: I think it's got more negative, personally. I think it's fallen off the radar. I think the conversation has all become about food, food security, which makes me chuckle when we live in a country where most of what we produce isn't food, it's alcohol. I'm not saying all farmers have to be producing food all the time, but I think there's a lot of work going on behind the scenes and by governments and particularly in the EU, where they're trying desperately to hold on to this aim of moving farming towards a more climate friendly, but also biodiversity friendly and rural areas friendly, you know, future. But you've got people demonstrating in the streets in Brussels and in Paris and everywhere else getting rid of really important bits of legislation. They're stopping the new nature restoration law, stopping the pesticide law.

Keesje: There is a massive pushback against a lot of this stuff.

Matt: If I could just Just pick up on the short termism point. I was in central Wales and speaking to the farmers there and they're absolutely, the fields are absolutely obliterated from the, you know, record where it's the current got the cattle out.

Matt: They're really worried about the future. Now, to what extent is this sort of short termism point? I mean, many of the farmers you've spoken to must be worried in the short term about flooding happening again. Are they connecting the dots between weather and the climate? Because I would say that climate now is in the short term.

Matt: Is it not?

Mike: Yes, it is. Our understanding of climate is, um, it's not very, um, it's just not where it needs to be. I think what's happened actually is that the scientific community have been ahead of this for a long, long time, but Of course, you know, their answer to everything is to do more science. So we've gone round and round and round doing more and more and more science.

Mike: It basically says, yes, there really is a problem, but we haven't really then gone and done the next thing. And there's always the next thing to do, by the way. I think where we are at the moment is that in a sense, politicians started to wake up to this issue and probably quite quickly during 2019, 2020, 2021 and started to accelerate their, their response to that body of scientific opinion saying we're not doing enough, we need to do more.

Mike: But I think where we've not quite got it right is I just don't think we've actually brought public opinion in that same space. I think we're, I, I think we give too much credence to a very small group of angry people, but actually I do think we probably just haven't done enough to explain what some of this looks like and what it means more broadly.

Mike: Some of it is quite radical and quite different. Some of it really isn't, but we're just not helping people make those connections. And if we don't, then the public opinion looks like it's trailing behind the political will. And so that's exactly where we are at the moment. Most politicians think they're going to lose folks if they start being over committed on environmental issues, which is bonkers.

Mike: Years back when wind farms were first being mooted, The first reaction was that, um, they, you know, they were anathema, nobody wanted them. And actually the more research that started to happen with, you know, time and time again, the percentages were very, very similar. I actually was involved in a research project myself on exactly this.

Mike: And about 20 to 25 percent of people vehemently opposed them. And 70 percent of people thought they were actually pretty okay. And as soon as politicians realized that they started to approve wind farms. And that's why local authorities ducked the planning issue. And because they knew it'd be called in by the Scottish government and then probably be approved.

Mike: They were sort of just chickening out and making decisions that they knew someone else would make for them. But the reality is we were, people got beyond the barrier that a small group of very vociferous people that didn't want this to happen. Would just. Blocking the whole thing up. And when you get round them, you often find this far more willingness to deal with these things than you might realize.

Becky: I'd like to close out by asking you both, zooming out first, do you think it is possible? Can we feed all of humanity with net zero agriculture? Can we get there and what does that look like? Zooming all the way back in to the very real, very practical, very now, if folk that are listening to this are very excited about what you're saying, what can we start to do, what can everyone start to do today to change things and shift us on that journey?

Keesje: Well, considering a third of the food in the world is wasted, yes, I think we can. We just have to do a better job of not actually wasting the food before we do anything else. I think we need to be slightly kinder and stop having such divisive conversations about this. Someone once said to me, getting someone to change what they eat would be harder than getting them to change their religion.

Keesje: That is how baked in it is to our selves and our cultures and our values. So it needs to be this bigger question, which Mike said at the beginning about what do we want our landscapes and etc to do for us, rather than as a consumer, what am I necessarily going to eat? Because yeah, it's a really tricky question.

Keesje: It's a tricky question, but stop wasting food would be my number one.

Mike: Can we feed people with net zero? Yes, of course we can. And, and it isn't, it absolutely food waste is just part of that. And I mean, the reason we don't currently feed people is political choices, poor distribution and, and in other reasons, it's not because of food production.

Mike: But, but the other reason I'm absolutely confident we can, is that when we're actually properly commit to a direction of travel, that's what drives innovation. If you give certainty to, to the direction that we need to move, then you get investment, then you get innovation. The problem we have at the moment is we're not getting that certainty.

Mike: We're not getting clarity. We're not getting a long term commitment. Where we are we're seeing massive gains. And you are seeing, I mean, even solar panels, which had been around since the 1950s, you know, NASA launched satellites into space using solar power. But the, the ability of solar energy to, or solar panels to be more efficient has increased in exponentially over the last few years, as well as the uptake.

Mike: Once we commit to something and we know it's a solution, that's when people get behind it. Technology gets invested in it, you know, the investment comes in behind it, it actually starts to drive exponentially. And so we just need to set the parameters. At the moment, in a funny way, we've let the parameters be set by just purely by monetary mechanisms and nothing else, as if that's the only thing that matters.

Mike: And lo and behold, it actually has knock on consequences.

Matt: And I'm going to be cheeky and just add a bit on the end here. Should our listeners be voting with their shopping baskets?

Mike: They already are. It's one of the few powers most of us have. And actually, if you want agriculture to change. If you want there to be fewer livestock, don't buy as much meat.

Mike: Obviously farmers cater to a market. It's not a domestic market, but it is a market. If the market changes, they have to adapt. I don't remember oat milk when I was growing up, you know.

Matt: Nor do I. Thanks Mike. Thanks Keesje. Fantastic. We will always extend the invite to have you back. Thank you. See you again soon.

Matt: Thanks guys.

Becky: Bye. So team, that was amazing. A very, very interesting discussion, lots and lots of stuff for us to think about, and we'll make sure we put all the relevant links, particularly the farming for 1. 5 degrees report into our show notes. Um, but given how much there was, I know we don't usually do this, but I think it'd be good to maybe chew over some of the things that we heard.

Becky: Matt thoughts.

Fraser: About this podcast, ideally.

Matt: Well, many, um, varied.

Matt: Yeah, there was a lot of really interesting stuff in there. There's a note you've got here, Becky, which I agree with around similarities with the energy sector. And I was taken aback with Mike's point is, you know, technology and innovation is critical and we'll get, get us a long way there, but it's not the whole way.

Matt: And it's very much about changing people's psychology and, uh, and realigning, reconnecting, uh, evolving people's cultural identity. And obviously that's very, it occurred to me, I think halfway through the pod that agriculture is so different from other issues around transport and energy and buildings, maybe less so buildings, but it's so intertwined.

Matt: With people's cultural identity and sense of self, you know, these, these rural communities have, um, to start to change the type of food that they're producing or how that they, how they produce that. And I was not connected to this cause it's not food, but I was, um, reminded of a fantastic documentary on BBC called for Pete's sake, all about Pete cutting.

Matt: In the highlands and islands of Scotland and, you know, the cultural identity connected to that was so strong. And so, yeah, I was really taken with that. And I think in many respects, it's, um, it's really underplayed about how we decarbonize agriculture is about, we must be mindful and considerate of the cultural identity of these communities.

Matt: And I think that speaks to his point about bringing people along with you rather than imposing change on these, on these people and their places. Yeah,

Becky: I think it's a really interesting point thinking about, you know, the lens of cultural change, behavioral change, kind of those broader shifts. And I think the lens through which you're looking at that is really, really important.

Becky: And you've mentioned just there about like specific farming communities and thinking about the cultural identity there, obviously towards the end, we started talking about, you know, what can people do? And I think there's a level of behavior change that kind of came up in that discussion around a lot of this is being produced for demand.

Becky: And so how do you also think about where people are at and what those, what the demand for these products is. I do think that that's a tough nut to crack as well. Cause sometimes we just say, Oh, like behavior, like we'll do, you know, like behavioral change, get people to change their behavior. But of course that's fully embedded in an entire kind of social system as well.

Becky: And, um, a lot of the choices that we make are fully governed by the system within which we're making those choices. And price plays a part in that. And, um, you know, availability and what's there and, um, knowledge and understanding and so on. And it's a very, very intertwined system.

Matt: It's like you're around food.

Matt: As long as it's on the shelf and it costs under 1. 50, that was kind of his

Becky: point. Yeah, exactly. And so I guess I was kind of thinking again, and this sort of strikes me from the similarities of the early sector, broader sector is that actually what we're talking about here is like, there's no single bullets.

Becky: There's no sort of technological change that can happen, but it is very much that it's this intertwined and interconnected system and these different system related challenges to overcome. That I was, yeah, I was like really reflecting on the kind of those, those similarities. And then of course the lack of leadership, lack of political leadership as well.

Matt: Yeah. But about having that big bang, that silver bullet that that's also cultural, isn't it? Or at least maybe it's sort of cognitive and sort of psychological disposition to try and Trying to solve problems is that it's so easy, or it's easier to just think, right, agriculture and reducing emissions from food is about eating less meat, for example.

Matt: But obviously it's far more complex than that, but that's the way you see most people going to around waste while I recycle. There we go. Done. Right next thing. And I think trying to dig into that with these kind of much more complex systems, thinking related issues, I think for me, the more I get into this space, the more I think we need to start to rewire how people look at problems and look for the solutions to them because it's just doesn't work.

Becky: I mean, I completely agree. And I was, I was, before you said that I was thinking, you know, part of, parcel of this is that, you know, as our education system teaches us to think. Linearly, it teaches us to think in silos and actually, we realized that that's not the way to solve some of these big problems and some of the solutions that we need that have to be incredibly creative and our, I guess our education systems in a lot of ways don't set us up to be that sort of minded.

Matt: But also people's, people don't want to be overwhelmed by the complexity of this. When they go into Tesco, I mean, if you're me, you want to get in and get out right as quickly as possible.

Becky: Especially if you've got the kids with you.

Matt: Exactly. And you just want, you just want to kind of lean into the closest solution available to you.

Matt: And I think something around, and what another important point I found from this is the division that they, the guests have made between choices that we may make with regards to food and choices that we make with regards to producing that food and for the consumer, I think it's, it's helpful to say, to demystify what they do need to be cognizant of.

Matt: In the shops, for instance, and other elements that actually, no, don't concern yourself with that in the context of, of these decisions, because that is somebody else's responsibility, but don't worry, it's being dealt with, you know, you've got to take something, no pun intended off their plate in terms of decision making in order to make a more fully informed decision about something else.

Matt: Rant over. Fraser.

Fraser: No, I, I, I think that's a fair point. And I, I think the, the distinction between consumption and production is a very, very important one for me from, from the interview um, which I thought was fascinating. There were, there were three points that jumped out. The first one, burps, not farts.

Fraser: That's interesting. Wasn't aware of that previously. That's the first one. The second one is the, it speaks again to the interconnectedness point. And I guess we, we talked a lot in the first half of this interview about emissions from farming, land use, agriculture from that industry, but also the impact of the climate crisis on agriculture, both in Scotland, which we've seen predominantly with flooding, which is making it much more difficult to grow things as we usually would, whether foods or barley or whatever it might be, but also globally as floods, droughts, wildfires, other increasingly and at an accelerating rate impact agriculture, impact food systems.

Fraser: It also has a massive knock on effect to local economies to. people's ability to do jobs as well as to source food. So I think that that sort of connectedness of farming or agriculture in some ways has its own emissions, which drive the climate crisis as all sectors do. Um, but it's also, as it becomes more damaged by the climate crisis, that becomes a much bigger issue than farming alone.

Fraser: So I think understanding how these things connect together is critical. The third point and the final point, I think, Um, and maybe we missed the trick. We did try to get, you know, sort of farmers, union representatives, et cetera, on the, on the podcast, and we just couldn't, couldn't align, align diaries. But the, the third point around how we engage on this issue, it's been typically, at least in sort of public debate, very confrontational.

Fraser: Farmers are one thing, everyone else is, is another. Farmers are a barrier to progress, whatever it might be. I think it came through from this discussion that actually it needs to be a much more collaborative conversation, much less polarized conversation that we're, we're having about this with the leadership, with all the requisites sort of support needed in place.

Fraser: But ultimately we need, and not just farmers, it goes for other sectors, but we need everyone around the table because it's, it's everyone's, it's everyone's problem going forward. So I think those for me were, were some of the key takeaways in an interview that covered so much ground in, in so much, um, So much depth, so much interest.

Matt: But the other, which I was kind of hoping they were going to come onto at the end and maybe they didn't because it's nonsense.

Matt: Uh, in terms of what we can do as individuals is a bit more of grow your own now, not so much around food security. I don't really think it shifts the dial on that. Although if somebody, if we've got a historian out there who's looked at the dig for victory and the impact that that had be very interested to hear from you.

Matt: I think it's more about our connectivity to the food system and our understanding about how difficult it is to grow food in a sort of more organic way without pesticides, without fertilizers in the context of some of the climate changes you've talked about Fraser, and, and I'm saying this largely 'cause I'm really sore.

Matt: About three days ago I woke up and all my potato plants have been hammered by a really, really, I know, terrible I'm still in morning. Um, hammered by very heavy rain and wind in the middle of the night. Okay. For a moment, I kind of occupy the fringes of the brain of a farmer, you know, when I see the pests going at my food or the, the weather battering it.

Matt: And I, and I think having that connectivity for me gives me a much healthier respect for those that grow food and the challenges that I don't understand how to run a farm. Okay. But I feel like I understand maybe 0. 001 percent of the process of growing food better than I did without that. And it does change.

Matt: How I, as a voter, as a consumer change, how I approach the process now in terms of supporting some of these changes, because they're not, I imagine this very challenging to, to grow food sustainably and with security, these, these are really challenging priorities.

Fraser: Does this speak to a wider point, Matt, I guess, is that, not to get overly philosophical about it, but we're not even just food, we're not as connected to land, nature, whatever it might be, or most of us at least aren't in ways that we have been before, because we've sort of built society, we've built an economy around, largely around hyper consumerism, largely around driving things that make us more comfortable and cozy, and that's not any individual person's fault, but we're not in the same way encouraged to, or even able to in a lot of ways, maintain that connection that maybe we had before. Which means all of this feels like, until you go to, you go to the supermarket, you pick up your food, you go home, everything else kind of happens somewhere else.

Becky: Don't think about it. I mean, we spend an obscene amount of time indoors rather than outdoors, and just the benefit of getting outdoors is so, so huge beyond that of kind of connecting to nature, connecting to land, connecting to all of these, these other elements, like I completely feel Matt's paying because we're on courgette seeds round three, having had the first two pulled out by, uh, by strong winds and, and rats.

Becky: Delightful things. Yeah.

Matt: I didn't know things were so bad in Cornwall.

Becky: We're growing a chili plant as well. Cause, uh, and last year we had some great yields, made some great fresh chili sauce at the end. That's even got on the chili plant as well. I'm just feeling, you know, what's happened to them now. Um, so I feel your pain with that. I also think that there is this, yeah, there's this.

Becky: Huge disconnect, you know, uh, through adults and children, just not even knowing sometimes where food comes from and connecting it back to the animals and to the farm, we, uh, we go out fishing sometimes to catch, to catch fish to eat and my kids sit there and watch, you know, they, they catch the fish and they watch, um, them being killed and, um, deboned and all the rest of that.

Becky: And like have that acute awareness. And I think it's so important to, to build that from when we're young so that it's not just you know, a fish finger and, Oh, it comes from the freezer, but, or, you know, a chicken nugget that comes from the freezer, but that it's actually an animal that eats food and is raised in a certain way.

Becky: And, and the implications of that.

Matt: Completely agree. So it's about understanding food. It's about understanding agriculture better because many of the solutions they pointed to, I felt were much more market and policy oriented. Bigger kind of bang issues that would, they mentioned, uh, methane prices, uh, nitrous oxide prices.

Matt: There was point about subsidies. So some of this gets into the weeds. Would it, would it be in a manifesto? Will it be in the manifestos once they land on our desks in a couple of weeks for the, for the UK elections in order to lean one way or the other? On these, I think you need to have a basic understanding of food, how it's produced and what impacts upon the availability, security and cost of these.

Matt: And I really, really worry that our children today, and to be honest, our generation as well, completely disconnected on the whole from this. I don't think former generations, particularly the interim post war generations that were grown up to grow their own, I think they were more connected and many of those also didn't necessarily live in big cities and there was sort of, you know, stronger connectivity to these rural communities that needs to change.

Matt: I think, uh, in order for us to start eating better and growing better.

Becky: And wasting less, I think there was a very different perspective around waste. Like when you are growing your own, you take less, you waste less. So, so

Becky: I feel like it's been a bit of a, you know, Yeah.

Matt: I think we'll, we'll draw a line under that, but I feel we've got other episodes on this to come. So watch this space. If you've enjoyed the pod, here are some quick things you can do to really help us out first rate local zero, wherever you listen to your pods, five stars, of course, please to find and connect with us on LinkedIn three, if you listen on Apple podcast, please leave us a quick review to help drive us up the charts and reach more like minded people.

Fraser: And on that note, our single most powerful tool for growing the pod and reaching more people is, is you guys, it's word of mouth and personal recommendation. So please do hit the share button wherever you listen, WhatsApp the pod to a pal, whatever way you want to share it, and let them know that you think this is the best podcast, is it?

Fraser: Let them know that you think this might be the best podcast that you've ever listened to.

Matt: But for now, thank you for listening and goodbye.

Becky: Bye.

Fraser: Produced by the Spoken Media.