'I won't read that to the kids at bedtime'

Hello, welcome to Wheat from the Chaff on the Farmgate podcast channel. I'm Finn Lokastain, the chief editor of89.com

0:08

and I'm Joe Stanley, head of sustainable farming at the Allerton Project.

0:14

Joe, we haven't done one of these for six or seven weeks. So what's happening?

0:21

I mean, the sun's shining. Finn, though, that's a nice change, right? And all of a sudden everyone's sort of flying out into fields and doing lots of farming. So that's very pleasant to see. But I guess in the interim since we last spoke, there's been a bit of a story concerning myself, concerning the Allerton Project in the national media, which has been around the DEFRA baseline agricultural training that we're offering to DEFRA Group. So defra A for Natural England and the Rural Payments Agency. And basically this was an initiative originally that we came up with, sort of identifying that the way the modern civil service works, or the way the civil service has worked forever, is that sort of those departments have civil servants in them who might be very talented and very well educated and intelligent and informed, but ultimately they are not subject specialists. And we identified that it might be beneficial from a farming point of view to get those guys out on farm and to actually sort of learn some of the basics of modern agriculture, you know, across all the different sectors, the economics of farming, some of the challenges and opportunities that face the farming sector today. And now that's been running as a formal contract with DEFRA since last autumn and we've had some great conversations as a result of that. You know, essentially what we're trying to, to provide is a bit of a safe space for people from all across those different government bodies to basically ask the questions that they might be too nervous to ask when they're out, you know, talking to, if you like, real farmers in a, in a live fire situation. Whereas, you know, the Allerton Project, we're a real farm, we've got other farms around the country that we're involving in this program. They're all real farms too. This is an opportunity to see those real farms in action and to talk to the farmers who are, who are operating on those farms. And I can't personally help but think this is a really positive thing. You know, it's not going to solve all the problems that we might have with kind of lack of understanding within government and God knows at the ministerial level as well. But I guess the reason it's worth mentioning is one, I think it's a good news story, but Two, there has been almost the inevitable backlash. When it came to light, it was first run in the Farmers Weekly as a positive story and then of course, the Telegraph and GB News picked it up and somehow turned it into a negative story, which was a shame. Why are we employing non farmers in DEFRA to deal with farming matters? And, of course, I think that was a great show and it kind of whipped up a lot of farmers to think negatively about the program. You know, the shadow DEFRA minister, she started going on about it and trying to whip up farmer sentiment, which is a great shame, because especially, you know, the pilot started under her.

0:25

And what about defra? Have they changed as their response to what you're doing, their sort of passion for what you're doing? Has that changed as a result?

2:50

No, the feedback has been. Has been really fantastic. So, you know, I think we're delivering great value for the taxpayer. And again, you know, A, I think everyone really enjoys coming out onto a farm and B, I think we really are fulfilling what we were hoping to achieve, which was to just leave those civil servants who are leaving us just a little bit better informed about the basics of modern agriculture. And of course, they may end up leaving DEFRA altogether and going to other parts of the Civil Service, but that is no bad thing either if they end up in places like the treasury and remember their bit of agricultural training at some point in the future.

2:57

Thanks for that, Joe. That kind of, I guess, brings us on to the sustainable farming incentive. Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds told the NFU Conference that she wants to see farm businesses that are productive, profitable and resilient, wants to see a countryside that's thriving for wildlife, for communities and for the families who've worked this land for generations. The new SFI is including 71 actions, which is down from 102. It's going to be capped at £100,000 a year. And with the vast majority 97% of farms already below this level, that doesn't seem unreasonable. What was your response to this?

3:28

I was in the room at NFU conference when the Secretary of State announced this and it's been broadly welcomed by the industry. The reality is that ultimately what we're looking at is, although sfi, by the time it does start to reopen in June, will have been closed for 15 months, what will be coming back is just a slightly altered version, ultimately, of what was previously available, trimmed down a bit, made a bit leaner, a few payment cap reductions, except, as you say, £100,000 maximum per farm business. What I would draw out was the reductions in payment rates on certain of the most popular options that farmers had been taking up under SFI. So herbal lay reduction payment rate of around 40%, 20%, 5% for winter bird seed mix and 10% reduction in, I think, legume fallow. There was a new story that I was involved in just before the announcement which was indicating that DEFRA was considering going below the income foregone model for natural capital payments. And the Secretary of State actually said in her speech, just to absolutely clarify, we are not going below income forgone rates on our natural capital payments and then announced that we were going to see cuts on some of the most popular options. Now you can't have it both ways. Either that was an income foregone payment that we were previously receiving, or magically the three most popular rates just happened to have been massively over calculated by defra.

4:03

Now, well, that's the point. They've reduced, haven't they? But the question is whether they've reduced beyond that point. That kind of makes them still profitable.

5:27

It is of course very different for each different farm. But the point was that I think what we're seeing here is we are cutting our cloth according to the budget. What natural capital services, what nature benefit are we seeing from, for example, winter bird seed mix? We are not being rewarded in the first place for those benefits under the income foregone model. We are just being paid as farmers for the income we would otherwise have received for just farming that land. As we were to then turn around and say, I would suggest in somewhat suspicious circumstances of needing to save money in the budget, are we going to cut the payment rate for that incredibly valuable option by a quarter because, oh, we just happened to overpay you before, you know, frankly, I mean, look, again, it could have been much worse. But the reality is that options, especially like winter bird seed mix, which again here at the Allerton Project we've been incredibly involved with the development of over the years and demonstrating the huge value of it. It would be a great shame to see farmers take up less of it in future because frankly, it no longer looks like it's even going to wash its own face going forward.

5:34

I guess we've got to go back to the whole sort of debacle over the SFI last year. And of course the point was the reason that it was withdrawn at the point that it was was that the money ran out. And one of the reasons was that you had these higher earning elements within the SFI which were oversubscribed so far as the government was concerned. And so I guess from the government's perspective, it wants to see as many farmers as possible doing this, but it can't afford to pay everybody as much as they were before. And the whole point that the Labour Party has been sort of trying to do, the sort of whole message is we've got to do this in a financially sustainable way. We need to be able to plan these finances rather than just, you know, have farmers spending the money until it runs out and then complaining that it has run out.

6:37

But then let's be honest about what we're achieving, which is a fraction of what's possible. You know, we are not making decisions based on the best outcomes for nature, we're making the decisions based on how we can most widely spread the small amount of jam that is available. And this whole thing around, you know, we want small farmers to get involved because big farmers have been snaffling all the pot. Well, well, fundamental function is that about the top 15 or so percent, the largest 15% of farm sizes in this country, has about 75% of the output of the industry and controls about 70% of the land. So if you're going to start cutting those guys out because you want to spread the jam ever more widely in terms of the number of farm. Look, every farm should be in these schemes. The problem we have isn't that certain options were over subscribed. The problem we have is that the budget is woefully insufficient to the scale of the challenge. Let's be, let's be honest about that. And yes, if you want to then start cutting payment rates and reducing the ambition of the scheme, fine. That will fit your budgetary objectives, it will not fit your environmental objectives. And that's what we should be thinking about. Right.

7:20

And I guess, you know, this again comes to one of my sort of key criticisms of the SFI elements because obviously countryside stewardship and higher level stewardship, that, that's something else. And the majority of the budget, I think it's sort of 1, 1.8 billion. Isn't that going into countryside stewardship, which is very much farming integrated with nature? The SFI really, if there was ever any doubt, really has become it's sort of farming alongside nature rather than integrated with nature. And as a result of some of the things that have been removed in this incarnation of the sfi, it's definitely the case that they're paying for inputs, they're not paying for outcomes and they're not remotely interested, it seems, in management planning or in outcomes. At all. They're just paying for things that treasury can tick off.

8:21

That's a very important point, Finlay. One of the things that was removed was the soil management plan option. Now, look, for my money, frankly, paying farmers to do an integrated pest management plan, a soil management plan, a nutrient management plan. I'll be honest, they're things that we should be doing anyway, and there is a business value attached to that. So I'm not concerned really about farmers no longer being paid to do those tasks, which most of them should be doing anyway. And we have to be clear, you know, somewhat clear on it.

9:03

Most of them should be, but many of them weren't. And I think that's the thing, isn't it, with transitional funding, that you need to persuade people to do it in the first place?

9:28

True, but I think if, again, if, look, a limited budget, I think there are things with greater outputs I would say that we could be spending that money on. But where I would very, very much agree with you on that is the only point of data collection from the entirety of the SFI scheme was soil organic matter level testing as part of that soil management plan, and that's now gone. So across all of sfi, there is not a single data point which is any which we are collecting anymore as a country. Now, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland have taken a very different approach to this and they are collecting lots of data as part of their essentially farm environment schemes. And ultimately, if we're not collecting any data, how can we know where we are now? How can we know if we're improving? And I think this is a fundamental problem with our entire sort of ELM scheme here in England, that we're almost shooting in the dark. And I know that data collection costs money, but again, what are we trying to achieve?

9:35

And again, it comes back to this idea of additionality versus maintenance and government, and indeed the private sector. And this is where the government, I think, has to step in and it has to sort of support maintenance payments rather than simply additionality payments. The market finds it very difficult to reward maintenance. And so we need a bit more than government than just sort of simply paying for actions. And on that sort of particular area, one of the most important elements of the SFI that has been removed. And there was chatter on this yesterday on LinkedIn from John Harold at Plant Life and Jimmy Woodrow at Pasture for Life, that the managing priority habitat, species rich grassland, has been taken out. And that was valuable. It was 600, 146 quid per hectare. But again, this was an Essential maintenance payment for a really important habitat. And without that, there is every chance that that habitat is just going to be plowed up or put into something else.

10:30

I couldn't agree more, Finlay. So we once say, back in 2023, we had a big group of DEFRA economists out here as part of our baseline agricultural training program. We took them up to our 5 hectare native hay meadow field, for which we were at that point only receiving 153 pounds a hectare, which made it really one of the worst paying environmental options on the farm. And from a productivity point of view, it was one of the least productive agricultural fields on the farm. And we explained to them and it was in full flower. It looked magnificent. This is natural capital. This is what you should be paying to protect. We can pay arable farmers a whole load of money, £860 a hectare to produce a faint facsimile of what you see in this field. And we do it happily. And six months later they brought out that maintaining native grassland option. Now, I'm not saying that we deserve all the credit for that, but I would like to think when I saw their faces light up, I saw them go, you know, I get it, this is natural capital. I'd like to think we did have a small part of why that option came on. So I completely agree. It was a huge shame to see that option go because that had the potential to deliver a massive amount, amount of positive benefit to our landscapes. And the shame of it is of course that the reason that that wasn't a widely uptaken option under SFI 24 was because of the bottleneck of getting Natural England to come out and assess that land. So again, it's not the problem. There was the process, it was the bureaucracy, it was the capacity, it was the budget, it wasn't the value that that payment could deliver for society.

11:24

And again, when we think about species rich grassland and the incredible importance of it and the way that, you know, potentially the removal of this payment will mean that there is going to be a removal of, who knows, it may be very little, it may be a significant amount. Where's the incentive to keep it? Where's the same time indeed, you do it, you keep it, because you value it personally as a farmer, I suppose. But at the same time as then having all this development language which appears to kind of have nature in its crosshairs, lots of development planned, lots of house building planned, which inevitably will be going on to grasslands of one kind or another, it is this sort of feeling that There is a pincer movement and we just can't. Carried an article on89.com at lunchtime today. Grasslands and wetlands being destroyed four times faster than forests, not just in the UK, but around the world. These are hugely undervalued habitats and also hugely important. Just before we move on, I guess we should touch on the cap just for a moment. It's £100,000 per farm business. That's always seemed an amount that seems entirely reasonable to me over the course of the last decade that we've been talking about this sort of thing. What's your own view on that, John?

13:00

Yeah, look again, the majority of farm businesses will fall beneath that cap. It had to be set somewhere. The NFU was asking for a per hectare cap rather than a per farm business cap. But of course, again, the budgetary constraint would mean that the potential for a per hectare cap would balloon more easily than a farm business cap. They could calculate that and manage that much more easily. It's not a good outcome for nature. It's not good enough to say that a big estate, you know, a 5,000 acre estate can only have a 100,000 pound cap on its, on its ambition. Essentially, it will mean that that estate will be delivering far less for nature than it otherwise could. Again, it's a budgetary constraint. I understand it, the majority of farms will be largely unaffected by it, but it's just retarding our ambition. And this is not the moment, as we've seen from the OEP recently releasing its sort of report card on our progress towards our nature target. We are going backwards, not forwards, and its first key recommendation was to put more money into nature friendly farming.

14:05

You talked about retarding ambition. Of course, it shouldn't only be public sector ambition, there needs to be private ambition as well, and money coming in from the utilities, from natural capital schemes elsewhere as well. And we're going to talk in a moment about the Evenlode landscape recovery project, because I think that's a really good example of where those farmers are going to be supported by public funds. But at the same time there's also going to be money coming in and from the private sector too. We've got a few stories that we're going to spend a bit less time on and just sort of crack through to an extent, things that are linked to activities that are taking place in the UK and also to science stories, bits of research that have come out. The first story that we've got on 8.9 that I wanted to cover, sort of following the SFI is open access to soil maps and data. Welcome. So this is removing previous licensing restrictions and paywall. This was greeted with great applause, really by the Sustainable Soils Alliance. Ellen Fay, the co founder and co executive director of the Sustainable Soils alliance said, this is a huge moment. By making this taxpayer funded resource universally accessible, the government has demonstrated a clear commitment to fairness, value for money and the facilitation of innovation. Open access will help establish a universal language for soil health that connects policy, research and practice, enabling more strategic action on climate resilience, food security and flood mitigation. Presumably this is something that's welcome from and project perspective.

15:12

It can't hurt, can it? No, absolutely. Look, the more we know about the soil beneath our feet, the better and yeah, I mean I've seen some of the resources that are going to become available. Fantastic, wonderful. I'm going to be printing some off and sticking them on the wall in the visitor center. You know, they're great illustrative tools. How from a farmer's point of view, how practically useful they are is, you know, that's kind of like another thing, right? The granular detail that farmers kind of need to know in order to manage their soils in the real world. Things like, you know, fertilizer applications, variable seed rate applications is much more granular than this data allows, however. Yeah, absolutely. This will be a fantastic teaching aid. It will be a fantastic way to engage more people with the variability of the soil under their feet. So yeah, really positive news story.

16:34

Yeah, absolutely. So let's move on to that Evenlode recovery project which has just moved to implementation. So you've got farmers in the Cotswold starting work on the UK largest nature recovery initiative, restoring over 3,000 hectares across 50 farms in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. Project combines over 100 million in public funding with private investment and commercial revenue. Blended finance models supporting farmers over the next 20 years or so, linking measurable environmental outcomes to new income streams from nature markets. Environmental outcomes being tracked through robust data led approaches, monitoring, reporting, verification systems. Tim Coates, who will know who was one of the founders of Oxbury bank and director now of the Northeast Cotswold Farmer cluster. So this is the largest landscape recovery project of its kind to reach implementation stage so far, shows that farmers can lead these types of projects that are ambitious, investable and built for the long term. And that investable element of course is really important. Now, Joe, you've been skeptical, I think, of nature markets in the past and not without reason because obviously they need to scale. Here's a really Good example of one which is HAP happening at scale, which has managed to get the money in place. Farmers working together, but also an administrative support team helping them to do that.

17:18

Fantastic. And this is great news. And look, I mean, yeah, the landscape recovery concept is fantastic. You know, we're not talking about taking huge tracts of the country out of agricultural production in many cases, we're talking about agriculture working alongside landscape scale, nature recovery. So the concept is absolutely great. You know, I'm not aware of the exact details of how they're funding it or exactly the projects that they're going to be engaged with, but I know that these, these landscape recovery projects all have, you know, farmers at the heart of them. And again, we need to see as farmers what we can deliver beyond just food, fuel and fiber, but also into those natural capital benefits for society. So it's great. But yeah, again take a step back and consider that we do have, I think it's 55 landscape recovery projects which have been accepted over two rounds by DEFRA and this is the third one to actually kind of get its ducks in a row and actually kind of get some funding under it. There are significant issues around funding the other 50 plus projects which ultimately at the minute, the public sector doesn't have the money that it wants to do to invest in it. And the private sector is largely stepping back and going, well, if the public sector is not going to invest in it, why should we make this long term commit? Now you and I could talk about why they should and why we think that would be a good thing. But the reality is it's great that these three projects have got off the ground, but let's not overlook the fact that in the wider natural capital space, outside of even these sorts of projects, farmers are still very much struggling to pick up the long term funding that they need in order to support nature restoration. One final thing of course is that it's been well reported that the contracts which sit underneath these landscape recovery projects, DEFRA is continuing to insist on a 12 month break clause for their funding, even though they are requiring farmers to commit for the full 20 years, which of course in many cases will also be permanent land use change, not just for 20 years. So, you know, there's a fundamental problem there where the government is still being so inflexible as to refuse to commit itself for the long term when they're asking others to do that. That's going to cause all sorts of problems, which again, again, you know, I appreciate this kind of the bureaucratic mentality, but Honest to God, there's some times where you just actually have to flex your position in order to suit the circumstances.

18:34

Right, absolutely. And as you say, this is so definitely in the public interest that we ought to be getting that level of commitment from government. But at the same time when you've got, you know, it's the power imbalance, isn't it, at the end of the day? And it's, and it's such a shame. But one of the things that I think it's quite interesting about this is the way that, that it kind of takes me back almost to that conversation we were having at the beginning about the Allerton Project and the way that the telegraph and others were kind of laying into the people who were coming from death row, who weren't farmers themselves, they were administrators. But of course this project I think has succeeded partly because they have that management administrative capacity. Because you've got all of the farmers that are part of the project, all of them are going to be delivering different things on their farms, different combinations of actions on their farms in the same way that the SFI is, you know, a combination of different actions. And all of those different actions need to be monitored and verified and reported and all these different things. And so the administrative capacity there is super important. And I guess it's the confidence in that administrative capacity that then unlocks the funding that comes from the train line that goes through the project areas so that flooding is minimized from the various other different sort of private sector elements that are contributing into the project. They have to believe in that administrative capacity.

20:47

And if I can Finlay, that's why I think we spoken before about the environmental farmers group concept and the fact that again that's a farmer led all across the country. Now we're seeing these groups crop up basically farmer led super clusters where exactly that you have farmers leading that and sitting on the boards of those environmental farmers groups, but you also have them professional staff helping with, as you say, that administration, that baselining that negotiation with the partners who are wanting the natural capital services. And it's that level of professionalism which again, look, farmers aren't, we shouldn't expect farmers to be able to go toe to toe with a housing developer and negotiate a good deal or to be able to, you know, baseline their own farms. So absolutely, that, that professionalism is really required and kind of having that secretariat almost that's able to help farmers to deliver those natural capital services. We can't do this fly by night, you know, we can't do this really on an individual farm base we have to look at a more professional way of helping to if you like, you know, unionize the countryside to help deliver these benefits for society.

22:05

I'd be really interested in your views on this next story. This is Europe wide study shows profound effect of pesticides on soil biodiversity and as an arable farmer I'm sure that you'll be you know, sort of well across the detail on this. So a groundbreaking study published in Nature reveals that pesticide residues are profoundly altering soil biodiversity across Europe Europe with implications far beyond farmland. The research conducted across 373 sites in 26 European countries uncovers the reality that pesticides have become the second most powerful of soil biodiversity patterns. Examined 63 different pesticides and their effects on a whole range of soil life. Arachia bacteria, fungi, protists, nematodes and arthropods and pesticide resist youths detected in 70% of the sites studied. Perhaps the most concerning is the study's revelation of extensive non target effects. So pesticides harming organisms, sorry that they weren't designed to affect and in particular one of the biggest sort of casualties there, mycorrhizal fungi. And we've seen, haven't we a big take up and I've seen just driving around the countryside in Dorset that there are many farmers, you know, doing cover crops who weren't doing before, who've got long stubble and things like that over the course of the winter There is change happening but when it comes arable the use of pesticides, particularly glyphosate is still an issue. It's still a problem. It feels like that's the next super important stage that we need to find a way of getting away from pesticides.

23:07

We have come to rely as a global, as a civilization globally on the use of these products on synthetic fertilizers and their ability to make modern crop varieties perform and feed the population, the global population that we have today. It wouldn't have been possible to have 8 billion, 8 and a half billion people globally, 10 billion supposedly by the middle of the century in an agro ecological food system. Now I know you would probably push back Finland say probably would be and this is how, but this is the way it's developed, right? This is how we've managed to do it in a super efficient, super fast way. Now there is absolutely no doubt in my mind and again if you'd have talked to me about this 5 years ago I probably would have been much more skeptical than I am today. There's no doubt in my Mind that the implications of that global agricultural revolution over the last 50 or 60 years have been profound for nature. And of course, just as we're starting to learn impacts on things like fertilizer use today, we will undoubtedly find impacts in the future on things like pesticide use that we are not aware of today. Now, the caveat I would add to that is it's easy to find residues of things. It's very easy to find the 0.1 parts per billion maximum pesticide rate in drinking water. We can find it. Is it having a negative impact is another question. Is it easy to be alarmist around the presence of pesticide residues in our food? Of course it is. Are they having an impact on us? Well, that's the question. Now we have to keep. Here at the Allerton Project, we're currently doing research into sewage sludge, biosolids that come out of our sewage treatment work works incredibly valuable. Fertilizer, organic matter going back onto our land. Increasingly, concerns that it might have PFAs, that it, you know, forever chemicals, that it might have hormones, that it might have antibiotics in it, which are also harming our soil biology. We hope not. We are doing research to see whether that is the case. We haven't looked before. We were only worried about heavy metals. If we find a problem, then we have to address that with absolute speed and decisiveness. So, look, I welcome research like this because of course we need to know if we're causing problems. But as you say, Finlay, look, at least in much of Europe, we are starting to move away from such heavy reliance on these products. But let's be honest, the market is still stacked against farmers moving away from them at speed. We exist in a global agricultural system which is predicated on. On high inputs, high outputs, and we've got to balance our moving away from that with the economics of that and also with our ability to continue to feed 8 to 10 billion people in the coming years. So, yeah, let's have this conversation.

24:34

Yeah, absolutely. And the issues that you raise are all entirely reasonable. As you say, the food system has developed in this way. The trouble is that the food system needs to move rapidly away from that. And therefore the question is, is how do we achieve it? And of course, that's where the role of government comes in. But we're not seeing that leadership. We're not getting that leadership from our own government, let alone other governments around the world. And we also need it from retailers and we need it from brand owners. All of these big buyers of food need to understand their own role and take responsibility and leadership positions within that. And you're talking about impacts on human health. And there is evidence that there are cumulative impacts on human health of these things. But this particular piece of research was specifically looking at soil, soil microfauna and things like the mycorrhizal fungi and that sort of thing, recognizing the impacts there. But I know, you know, from conversations I had with you and Tim Partnan and people like that, you know, where glyphosate isn't being used for desiccation, where it is being used to prepare fields before planting, that there is a belief that the impact is, is relatively small. And you know, as we've discussed in the past, perhaps it's smaller than it is from using a plough. It's hard to be certain. There are lots of different opinions and I'm fascinated in that sewage work that you're doing. And perhaps when you've got more details on that, we could go into that in more detail. I think that sounds like it's really interesting work. There are another couple of sort of research stories I just want to touch on before we sort of get onto the last larger conversation that we were going to have. Joe. And the first is livestock grazing helps to secure long term solar soil storage. Removing sheep and other livestock entirely from upland grasslands actually reduces the most stable forms of soil carbon, according to new research. The study suggests that while removing livestock from upland's grasslands can increase the cycling of carbon stored in plants and dead vegetation, the sort of fast cycling of carbon, it can also lead to losses of more stable forms of soil carbon further down in the soil profile. And this long lived carbon number known as mineral associated organic carbon, is bound to soil minerals and can persist for decades or centuries, making it critical for long term climate mitigation. And of course this comes back, doesn't it, to the idea that we need nuance in these things. We need research that explains what's actually happening rather than assumptions about what's happening. And you know, much as we get told time and time again that livestock are bad for climate change, actually, you know, having sheep and that, you know, sheep are the destruction of the uplands, actually having some sheep there numbers to

27:20

be as nature intended is important.

29:51

Yeah, absolutely.

29:54

And it makes sense, right? You know, again by, by having more decomposing uneaten plant material near the surface, which is always going to be more liable to be what they call labile, to essentially decompose and head up back into the atmosphere, rather than that impact that grazing has has on rooting plants that will then put their roots deeper, they'll put more carbon further down into the soil where it's more stable. So yeah, absolutely, it makes sense. And again, as you say, finlow important to, to have the nuance in the conversation between what good land use looks like across a range of metrics, not just methane emissions.

29:55

And of course it's not just the roots that are going down, it's the, it's the, the soil fauna that's within there as well that's helping to sort of move that carbon further down into the soil profile. And then, you know, you actually have carbons which are locking themselves particularly onto the different nodes of different root systems and that sort of thing. And then as this research was suggesting, there's a, you know, profound impact there where that, that carbon is locked in for a much longer period of time. And so that sort of brings me on to the final piece of research I wanted to touch on today, which is linked, I suppose soil food webs and necromance mass should be built into carbon modeling. Soil fauna are not passive bystanders in the carbon cycle. This is what we were writing in our article on 8.9. They are active architects of it. And leaving them out of our biogeochemical models is like trying to understand a city's economy while ignoring everything its residents actually do all day. And so soil fauna shape carbon cycling through two distinct types of pathway. The first is the trophic effects, what animals eat and how that feeding reorganizes microbial communities. The second pathway is non trophic, the physical and chemical transformations that animals cause simply by existing and moving. And what the authors are proposing at the end of this research. And you know, I encourage people to go on to 8.9 and find the story because there's lots more detail, as you'd expect, you know, within that article and within research paper itself, is that we really need to find what ways of integrating the soil food web structure into biogeochemical models because otherwise we just simply aren't measuring soil carbon accurately. And that makes it very difficult to, you know, to mitigate climate change, adapt to climate change, all those other good things. And as we know, soil is still so under researched, so little understood really in the big scheme of things and undervalued.

30:31

I'm surprised this like hasn't been thought. I mean, I read it, I was like, oh God, have they not thought of that? What else haven't they thought of?

32:20

Well, quite, you sort of start with that's the thing with science, isn't it, that you kind of start with the easiest things and then you get on to the harder bits and pieces, which was always the argument around methane that, you know, when GWP Star first came out, there was this idea, well, why is this only just come out now? Why are people saying this now? Because you can't do all of the research instantly, you know, in place the first, the first year of a program of research and climate science is relatively young and you know, people got to it. And it's the same with soil science. There's been so little of it over the course of, you know, the last decades of proper kind of applied research that we, you know, in sort of a modern sense. And so people are only just starting to get to it.

32:27

And I'm told by our soil scientists here, not that I think that they're bitter or anything like that, but they, they, you know, apparently soil science is not the sexy bit of science to go into. Apparently there are such things as rock and roll scientists and they tend to reside in the areas of things like astrophysics and nuclear biochemistry. And soil science gets, you know, gets a bum wrap. So it could do with a bit more research and a bit more funding, I think.

33:06

I guess a red dwarf, you know, does have greater televisual impact than a wolf worm. But at the same time those worms are fundamentally important to the way we live, aren't they? And so, yeah, it's interesting and I think, you know, those rock and roll scientists, you know, their, their numbers are going to go down I think over the course of the, the next couple of decades and the soil scientists will be the new rock and rollers and anybody who's interested in going into research science, that's, that's the area, that's the,

33:33

the up and coming area after civilization collapses. In the next few months, Finlay with a events in the world, yeah, we'll probably all be a bit more interested in soil than we are in the stars.

33:58

Yeah. So that prediction's moved from 20 years to the next few months, hasn't it? And it has, I guess. And that brings us on to the sort of the final big topic, the final basket of things that we were going to talk about today. Let's start with the biodiversity loss report that came out. Our headline said UK Intelligence Chief's ecosystem collapse will drive national security risk. So this is a report from the chiefs reportedly of MI5 and MI6 and other elements and of our security services where they were looking specifically at biodiversity loss. We've Already been looking, certainly within the security services on the impact of climate change on national security and global security. This was about looking specifically at biodiversity loss. Government saw it, obviously threw their arms up in horror and wanted to suppress it. They then thinned the report out and I think they did everybody a favor because in thinning the that report out, it became incredibly clear what was being said. It's rare, I think, that a government report has ever been clearer. You just got 12 pages of very succinct points and graphs and tables. The report states, if current rates of biodiversity loss continue, every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse. The impacts will range from crop failures, intensified natural disasters, infectious disease outbreaks and conflict within and between states, political instability, erosion of global prosperity. Increasingly scarce natural resources will become the focus of greater competition between state and non state actors, exacerbating existing conflicts, starting new ones and threatening global security and prosperity. And again, this isn't the Green Party saying this. This is the chiefs of MI5 and MI6, our security services, saying how urgent this is.

34:08

Well, I'm not going to read that to the kids at bedtime. No, look, we know, we know this.

35:55

We know you're much nicer to your kids than I am. I have been reading them.

36:00

You're prepping them for civilizational collapse, Buying baked beans. Yeah, no, look, I mean, there's nothing in there that would surprise anyone who frankly is paying attention. And the problem is that dealing with the problems outlined in that report is expensive and it is disruptive. And as is always the case in our political system, and frankly, it's not just the politicians who are at fault, it's society. We just don't want to engage with problems on that scale. You know, we are talking about, we're talking about a real inflection point in world history we are about to embark on, not just geopolitically, but climatically. And that is not something that we as a species have had to deal with in the last 12,000 years. Years. It's impossible, frankly, for us to sit here at the, you know, at sort of the early part of the 21st century in Western Europe and think of the scale of the challenge that this report poses as it starts to come to pass. Yeah, I don't like to think about it, but I think the point at which we are going to have to start dealing with these problems, because these problems will be coming and knocking on our door in a very real way is getting closer and closer. So. So, yeah, we need to prepare. We need to be building resilience into our political systems, our social systems, into our food systems, our energy systems, into everything. And we're doing nothing because it's too hard. And then the crisis will hit and we'll have to react.

36:04

I mean, you talked about the way that it's expensive and disruptive. I think the real challenge is that nobody's really got a clue what to do. You know, there are so many different points of view and perspectives. There are so many different people who feel that we should do this as opposed to other people who think that we should do something completely different. If you just think in terms of food systems, you've got the likes of you and I that are talking about regenerative agriculture and then the likes of George Monbiot and the technologists, eco modernists who want to replace the food from the field with food from laboratories. And you know, all of these things are conflicting and colliding. And if we had 100 of 200 years to evolve through these stories and work things out, then no problem at all. The challenge is that we've got to do it right now. And one of the things that's always interested me is the role of the security services within this. And over the course of the last 10 or 15 years, you'll be aware of the work that I've been doing just loosely and peripherally with people who've been working on this at a global level. The center for Strategic Risk in the us, who used to be the center for Climate, Climate and Security, I think, who've been working closely with the Pentagon, trying to, you know, help the Pentagon to sort of work out its climate change mitigation approach. And more latterly, they've been trying to bring biodiversity into those sorts of things as well. Before COP26 we wrote the or the Food and Global Security Network, which was a loose network of different experts from around the world that I sort of brought together. Before COP26 we wrote the Soil and Security Report, looking at the critical importance of soil to national security and then beyond that to global security. And I was fascinated because I had a long conversation with Lt. Gen. Richard Newgie last week. Now, Richard Newgie is retired now. He was the Chief of Defence people I believe. So he was, I understand, responsible for the troops, you know, all of the British sort of withdrawal from Afghanistan, for example, so a really senior guy within the military. And he said over the last five years he himself has been working really closely on the biodiversity question. You know, he is the go to guy to talk about soil within the military, to Talk about the importance of this and the way in which, you know, if we're talking about strategic defense of the nation, then our ability to feed ourselves without, you know, those things. If we're talking about climate change and biodiversity loss, those things like the pesticide conversation we were having before, it sort of puts it in context, doesn't it? But the importance of having soil that can function, that can produce food without reliance on loads of external inputs from elsewhere in the world, whether those are fertilizers or pesticides or antibiotics or whatever else, data and machine parts, all those sorts of things from elsewhere around the world. And it was really interesting to hear again, that the military is ahead in the same way that, you know, people within the insurance sector are ahead, because the military and the insurance sectors understand the notion of risk. They don't have to buy into every. Every possibility, but they understand that if you have a risk, you deal with it.

37:31

I'm still piecing together your career finlow from all the little nuggets you drop, and I'm still sort of increasingly convinced you're probably involved with. You're probably a spy or some sort of, I don't know, some sort of sleeper agent. You're sitting there, you're wearing a shamag. You could be Special Forces. It's hard to say. You're always dropping these little nuggets along the way.

40:25

Yeah, well, and I also should say that the ARC Conference is coming up. I think it's June 19th, and the arc Conference happens up in Gloucestershire. Tom Pycraft puts that together and it's a great conference. It's a lovely day. Sort of 200 fairly senior people from within the farming and food systems. We're going to be doing a panel on food and global security there. I forget off the top of my head exactly what the panel title is, but it's about how we deliver food security and how we reduce that dependency on inputs. And Richard Newgie is actually one of the confirmed speakers on that panel. So I'm looking forward to that. And we're actually going to do a leaders podcast with him in the near future as well, because of the work that he's been doing around soil and food systems within that sort of military landscape, which I think would be fascinating.

40:45

Briefly on that. Look, a third of the world's fertilizer, I read yesterday, moves through the Strait of Hawaii moose, you know, and that's now shut. So a third of the world's fertiliser is not going where it should be right now. So absolutely that that dependence on critical inputs is something that from a pure military point of view, you know, of course those guys get it and we get it and you know, but unfortunately still the people making the decisions do not want to get it.

41:31

And the more people that get it from different worlds, I think the better. You know, one of the things that I put within our soil and security report, one of the recommendations was that the MOD should take some responsibility, should have some defense, find responsibility for soil health, which made a lot of eyebrows go up. But certainly it was something, I think that seemed to be well within the range of what Richard Newgie was talking about. He was recognizing, and I'm not going to put words into his mouth, but I think that he was clearly recognizing the critical importance of soil health for national defense. And that's a very different conversation to farmers saying we think the soil health is important because it produces food. And of course within this as well, we've had another report that's come out from the United Nations. Our story was New era of water Bankruptcy accentuates ecosystem and Security risks. UN scientists say the world has moved beyond water crisis into an era of global water bankruptcy. Many societies haven't just overspent, they put this all in sort of financial banking terms. Overspent their annual renewable water income from rivers, soils and snowpack. They've depleted long term savings and aquifers, glaciers, wetlands, wetlands and other natural reservoirs. And while not every basin is water bankrupt enough, critical systems have crossed irreversible thresholds to constitute a planetary scale condition. These systems connect through trade, migration, climate feedbacks and geopolitical dependencies, fundamentally altering the global risk landscape. And it concludes this isn't a warning about future risks. And I guess that's the key thing, isn't it? If we can move from simply thinking about farming and food as something that DEFRA deals with at the absolute bottom of the governmental pecking order and start thinking about it as something that is critical to our national security, our national defence and an understanding about how that feeds into global geopolitics, into migration, a whole range of other things. I mean, it's gotta be good news that we're talking about this stuff.

41:55

Absolutely. And again, it's obvious to anyone who's paying attention, I mean, I saw a few months ago, the UN FAO has said that by 2030, that's five years away, 40% of the world's population are going to be living in areas of they're not going to have sufficient access to fresh water. 4 out of 10 people globally because of course, yeah, climate change is driving scarcity as the world's population is increasing and we're all demanding richer diets and other consumer goods which consume water and there's less of it and we're depleting. We know this. We've known this for decades and yet we continue to fail to act. We're still growing cash crops in deserts and sucking out rivers and watercourses. In order to achieve that, we're importing 30 million tons of fresh blue water into the UK every year, just in avocados from some of the driest places on Earth. What are we doing when we do talk about food sustainability, we tend to just talk about methane coming out of cows. So big conversations. Let's keep beating the drum.

43:52

Let's move on to a good news story to end because I think this is a fantastic good news story. And just before I do, I want to give a shout out for. I mentioned the leaders podcast and Nikki Yoxall was on our leaders podcast. Nikki Yoxall, a first generation Regen pharma. Most people listening will know her. They won't necessarily know the things about her that we discussed in the podcast. And I think it's well worth a listen. It has to be one of the longest podcasts I've ever recorded at. I think it was over an hour and a half when we sort of came out of it. It's come down to about an hour and 20 minutes and. And I was reluctant to take too much out because it's just fascinating as ever talking to Nikki. But here's the good news story. It's Brazil has lifted 40 million people out of hunger in the space of two years, which is just entirely phenomenal. And we did a Farmgate podcast earlier, I think a month or so back with Elisabetta Racine, the president of the Brazilian National Food and Nutritional Security Council, who's responsible for delivering the program in Brazil, and rather Raj Patel, who's a professor of food systems from the University of Texas. Now this is the Lula government taking a policy decision to get people eating again, to get people eating meals to lift them out of poverty. And they've given cash transfers to support dignity and access, introduced a school meals revolution, which isn't just people who don't have enough money. I mean, if you think about it in UK terms, people who are sort of defined as poor in one way or another that are getting those school meals, but it's everybody in every age. And that's now been extended to state hospitals, to universities, Even to the military. But the focus is on agroecological and family farming. So again, in terms of those school meals they're talking about, 45% of federal funding needs to be spent on purchasing those meals from agroecological farmers. And so there's just so much there. And within that podcast, talking to Elisabetta, you know, she's talking about the importance of, of coordination, the importance of social movements, the fact that, you know, the government has taken the decision to define the right to a good meal every day, you know, three good meals a day as a human right in that country. And so the importance of government. And I just wonder if you might reflect a little bit, Joe, on the role of the state in making sure A that people eat and eat well and B that the farmers who are doing the best kinds of farming, the agricultural regenerative farming, are the people who are benefiting from those state led programs to buy food for people.

44:49

Obviously the obvious contrast to draw here is with the UK government. Labour was elected about 18 months ago now, two years ago now, on the promise that it would source half of public sector food from higher quality, higher welfare and or British farms. They were not the first government to pledge that this. It's what deframinist has pledge when there's an awkward pause in conversation historically and we've moved approximately nowhere with that. That has gone nowhere. So as you say, look, within two years Brazil has, and look, I'm sure there's a lot of nuance around this and we don't know Brazilian politics, but the headline is 40 million people lifted out of food poverty in two years. In two years. We are not even starting to have a conversation about how to get 50% of public safety sector food coming from higher quality sources in this country. There's just a complete lack of interest in this, in this subject. You know, we've all been to hospital, we've all had hospital food and if food is medicine, then my God, we're not looking very hard for the NHS to make us healthier. So this is important. This is hugely important. It's important. As with all the other issues we always discuss finlow and yet that never seems to be the political priority afforded to it that, that there be, should, should be. Now again look, there are other countries around the world that put more import on the quality of food provided to their citizens. You know, for example, in Austria, I think some 40% of the food that's eaten there is organic. Now we could have a conversation around how genuinely better for you organic is than non organic food. Nevertheless, again, it's a cultural thing. And in Brazil, as you say, there was a political decision taken to move on this issue. This was a political priority in the uk, it never ever is. And we sort of continue to decrease, you know, our metrics around obesity, health, food related illness continue to decline. So look, yeah, as you say, Finn, this is a really good news story and you would like to think it's the sort of thing that would spur a little bit of contrition within government in a country such as the uk, where of course, per gd, you know, GDP per capita is so, so so much higher than it is in Brazil still that we can achieve just a fraction of what they've achieved in the last two years.

47:15

Yeah, and actually you mentioned organic there, which again just takes me back to the sfi where under sort of the nutrient management set of SFI actions, the only ones that have been retained are the ones that are supporting organic agriculture. And so, you know, where you're looking for change, you know, better nutrient management, better nutrient cycling from mainstream or regenerative, you know, sort of mainstream, but not necessarily organic certified. Those payments have been removed as well. As you say, you know, in terms of this government and its ability to actually deliver on a policy of public procurement, we're nowhere in the same way. We still don't have clear objectives, a clear strategy from government about how it's going to integrate farming and nature. Governments that want to move, that want to make the difference, they do make the difference. And Brazil is the evidence of that. And in terms of that security element, I just wonder if you, you would have a think about the way that the state gets involved in these things. Sort of thinking 10 or 20 years down the line in Britain, are we going to see a situation where the state has to take much greater control of the whole food system? And one of the things in particular that we're talking about in terms of Brazil are conditional cash transfers. So you've got cash transfers going out to every family. The conditions are designed not as punishable but as guarantees of access to essential services. So families have to demonstrate that children attend school, for example, which is verified every six months, and the pregnant women and young children are receiving regular health checkups. And if they're not, then there's an engagement process rather than simply having that money taken away. And of course we have child benefit, you know, in this country. That's the, you know, the sort of the one unconditional transfer I suppose that we have in Britain. But what do you think?

49:24

Depends how many children you have. I mean, even that, as you say, that the one unconditional cash transfer we have in this country, but there's even been a huge amount of political opprobrium around that, of course, for three children and above, et cetera. I mean, the reality is that, yeah, look, the uk, we know we're in a funny place politically and we know that almost anything that gets put together in terms of social policy, certainly by a Labour government, just gets labeled as nanny state and all those sorts of terms from the right and where we are currently balancing off left versus right and the fear, of course, in labor at the minute around being undercut by reform to the right and the Greens to the left. And look, it's, I guess my observation would be we are just so far from the practical reality of being able to implement such a policy. I'm sure there are cons to it, I'm sure there are negatives to such policies, but the pros certainly seem to be, look, you want to reward good outcomes, this is how you might go about it. And clearly it's had an impact in that circumstance. But look, here in the uk, we can't even build, look, we can't even build a railway, not from the middle of London to not the middle of Birmingham for more money than we spent getting to the moon in the 1960s. That's where we are as a country. And we've just got to do better, haven't we?

51:07

Yeah. And of course, you know what we keep being told in these situations that people have to be very careful because of trade deals and arrangements and WTO rules and, and that sort of thing. But I think the reality is that a lot of countries in the world, if they want to do something, they find a way of doing it. But you've got to want to do it in the first place. Look, Joe, we've had our hour and that's all we've got time for. Thanks so much for joining me. Really interesting as ever. Great to get your insights on these things and your depth of knowledge, particularly on those farming issues. Really interesting. If you've enjoyed listening, please come back and listen to more. Tell your friends like us, review us and share our links. Farmgate is the world's highest ranking fish food security podcast and Farmgate Leaders and Martin's Farm and a whole host of other programs, some of which I've mentioned are available if you just scroll back in your podcast feed. Farmgate is part of 8.9.com, the land use news channel, which is sponsored by First Mill Pelican AG, the nature friendly Farming Network prize Moore Livestock Health, Agrolo and individual donors. I've been Finlo Costain. Bye for now.

52:26

And I've been Joe Stanley. It's good to be number one Finlow. Thank you.

53:24

Sa.

53:28