This presentation was recorded at session six of “Preston People’s Climate Jury” . The theme of the session was food and farming as chosen by the Climate Jury.
The People’s Climate Jury will provide 30 Preston residents with a chance to have their say on how we tackle climate change across the city and make recommendations to local leaders about how the city should act in response.
For more information on Preston People’s Climate Jury, please visit
https://www.preston.gov.uk/article/7872/People-s-Climate-Jury
Adam Briggs is the Environment Advisor for the National Farmers’ Union in North West England.
The Preston People’s Climate Jury was funded by the United Kingdom Shared Prosperity Fund.
The UK Shared Prosperity Fund is a central pillar of the UK government’s Levelling Up agenda and provides £2.6 billion of funding for local investment by March 2025. The Fund aims to improve pride in place and increase life chances across the UK investing in communities and place, supporting local business, and people and skills. For more information, visit https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-shared-prosperity-fund-prospectus
thanks very much for inviting me to speak today my name is Adam Briggs I’m what to call the policy manager for the nfu in the north of England so I kind of look after all our work in relation to agricultural policy so I was asked to sorry sorry to interrupt Adam I will add this on to your time just want to remind people about your red cards I’ve just heard you say nfu Adam not everyone might know what that means so can you just explain what that is all right yeah so we are basically our work for the national Farmers Union so uh we’re not a union in the traditional sense where essentially we’ll go out on strike and stuff like that we’re a trade Association so our role really is to try and represent the industry and present the industry in the best possible light so do a lot of work with politicians a lot of work with the supply chain um we’ll do a lot with promoting the industry um you know talk about what the industry that’s good and we’ll you know if the new rules coming in we’ll respond and say this is why we think it’s bad and this is what we need to do to make it better so in reality my role really nfu’s role is to try and make the Trad the the Regulatory and trading environment in which Farmers work as good as it possibly can be so we do a lot of work around things like prices and and rules and regulations and that sort of stuff so my rules see all that and I hello yeah yeah so my role really is to over say all that and also my my background really is very much in Environmental Policy as well so that’s kind of where I talk quite a bit about climate change so I was asked today just to say a few words in relation to agriculture in laner give you a bit of a background to the structure of the industry and to talk about one or two issues with respect to CL a change something to consider when you’re making your decisions so just the first um point to note this is a little map here of Agriculture and land bu and large is is is classified so uh not all land is the same you classify it from uh basically grade one through to grade five so grade one is excellent all the way through to grade five so as you can see here this here is Preston I believe um but we’ve got lots of grid one land down here grid two land up here all the way through the grade three grade four and grade five and the first key thing to recognize about that is what you can do on the land is dictated by how good the land is so it’s not a matter of what we can do we can think oh we’ll grow lots of vegetables and that sort of things down here few cereals up here if we don’t grow vegetables down here or if we don’t have um grass here or don’t have livestock here we can then just shift in to another form of Agriculture by and large what you can do is very much dictated by what sort of land you have so for the sake of argument land that’s currently covered in grass for for livestock the reason it’s covered in grass for livestock is because that’s the best use of that land you couldn’t in a situation think we’re going to stop keeping livestock we’re going to start actually G growing cereals or cabbages or cauliflowers on it because essentially that land isn’t good enough to sustain that sort of production so basically the first thing to consider is when you’re looking at what you want to do with land what your plan on food is that land that production systems are very much dictated by the land you actually have so you can’t grow caulif flowers on the top of it Hill and equally as well as you’ll find that in that light blue area down there down towards Southport and that sort of area is a lot of Horticultural production down there that’s because a land is best suited to that and equally that’s because it’s the most profitable that’s the first key thing to see is that land is class land is divided into categories and those categories very much dictate what you can do with that land and how what sort of food you can produce and what sort of management you can actually do as well that also means the Farms themselves in those areas have the infrastructure set up for that sort of production system so again you couldn’t just I was in you know over towards Cleo I was a Ser I was a dairy farm I’m going to move into serials you couldn’t just switch over because you haven’t got the infrastructure there to allow it do that and equally the skills too and that and that very much dictates as you can see the structure of the industry here in um in laner so by and large in the Northwestern Mery side it’s very much dominated by livestock Dairy and um by livestock and dairy foring because the land is very suitable for grown grass and that’s kind of the predominant use if you got rid of those sort of systems you couldn’t just flick over into um uh different sorts of production systems you’d have to use a land for something else so in relation to climate change may be going over a little bit uh of background um you maybe heard this before but uh UK agriculture is responsible for between 10 11% of you of UK greenhouse gas emissions three main um greenhouse gases we concerned about methane which buy and large comes from um livestock production systems nitrous oxide which comes from things like fertilizers and carbon dioxide which comes from driving tractors and things like that so agriculture has worked very very hard um over you know since the 1990s to reduce its carbon FR been down but to be fair since 2011 things have been fairly modest but there’s a hell of a lot the industry can do to tackle things particularly methane emissions which will talk about later on and also nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions so despite the fact nothing’s really moved since 2011 there is a hell of a lot that can be done in the meantime reduce those emissions down even further and the other thing to consider about agriculture is our greenhouse gas emissions aren’t necessarily the same as other Industries so where whereas you know essentially the majority of other industries by not just put greenhouse gases carbon dioxide uh methane and nitrous oxide into the air the actions of agricultural businesses by growing crops by growing trees look off the land will sock carbon back into the ground so a culture and land use is not only producing greenhouse gases it’s actually sequestering um sucking carbon back in So by and large it it’s part of a virtuous cycle and there’s more can be done to reduce the amount going up and there’s also more that can be done to increase the amount that in the industry actually sequestered and that’s probably the holy Grill to get Farms to be what they call Net Zero so what they’re producing is balanced by what they bring in so that’s why probably Agriculture and food prodctions in unique in relation to carbon um it’s carbon footprint in the fact that it only produces carbon it also sucks it back in and that needs to be taken into account so going forward there are a number of challenges around um food production carbon footprint the first one is that we’re in a situation whereby we’re produ where you know global population is um increasing and by 2050 um you know there will be 9.5 billion people on the planet I think past 2050 that will remain stable but on the back of that the United Nation food and agricultural organization estimates we need to produce 25% more food in 2050 than we produced today so that’s the first key thing so anything we do in this country essentially what it does is it means that um which produces our own food security and how much food we produce essentially means we’ve got to bring it in from somewhere else in the world and that may be from places where as you can see 800 million people uh are currently are actually living in in in food insecurity so the key thing there is that we’re in a situation where the demand for food is going to go up and we need to be in a position to react to that and we need to be be able to utilize as efficiently and as sustainably as we possibly can the land we have available to produce food the Second Challenge really around engaging farmers in this um in in the climate change debate is around the the way the debate plays out it tends to play out as a as a battle between plant-based foods and animal Foods what that does is that completely turns all Farmers not just livestock Farmers all Farmers off in the debate and they get very very defensive so when you talk about things such as dietary change what you tend to find is Farmers start throwing statistics back at you and essentially they just move away and they don’t invol they don’t get involved in the debate and you’ve kind of lost the opportunity to say well look this is what you’re doing now which is well how do we make it better and by and large what you do to reduce your carbon footprint has a benefit of your bottom line and that’s a much more positive way to uh to engage in the debate and the third challenge really locally is to think about uh right back to start land use around 65% of the Farmland in the UK is the only suitable for growing grass that’s in the UK for animals to eat now may well be you know some of the um arable Farms would produce cereals which the animals and animals eat quite a lot of byproducts as well we might have to get used to eating different sorts of things but that’s a key factor that 65% of the land we have in the UK is only suitable for growing grass it’s not a matter of plowing it up and then putting cereals in or plowing it up and putting um horiculture crops in first of all you can’t grow them and secondly it’s not environmentally beneficial to plow up permanent pure because it releases a lot of nitrogen and things like that I’ve got one more slide two more slides and this is born out if you look here sorry if you look at this is self-sufficiency as you can see cereals are not so bad mative meat products were not so bad but if you look at fruit and vegetables and that sort of thing we’re not particularly self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables and that’s just a reflection of the sort of land we have in the UK so from my final slide it’s just in terms of how do we move forward with this what are some of the opportunities as an organization H you’ve heard quite a lot about um regenerative fing and that’s about producing in um in in conjunction with uh nature which is which is a big positive but you’ll hear quite a lot of farmers talk about sustainable intensification that’s actually focusing on getting more from what you’re doing in a sustainable way so you don’t damage your environment so basically focus on things that deliver for the environment and also focus on things that deliver production so increasing soil matter uh how much organic matter you’ve got in the soil so youve got more productive soils uh increasing productive efficiency so getting more from what you’ve got already if we had um if we had the early 1990s if we had to feed the same amount of people now with the yields we had in the early 1990s we need a billion more hectares of agricultural land than we’ve got now so essentially by increasing productive efficiency you can feed more with an increas in resource I think biotechnology has a huge role to play for increasing um yields and things like that and for for getting more from what we’ve got in a way that doesn’t damage the environment as well so you don’t have to use as much pesti side it’s not as H they’re more resilient to drought and things like that we kind of look to focus on local food supply chains as well to bring in food from local areas where possible with the cave at that we con everything here and I think there’s an opportunity as well to look to sequest as much carbon as we possibly can with the um you know with the farming activity that goes alongside food production too I’ll take a breath now and I’m going to hand over to Katherine if that’s okay brilliant thank you very much