Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]

Meeting date: Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Official Report 908KB pdf

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A Climate Transition for Scottish Agriculture

The next item on the agenda is an evidence session on the climate transition for Scottish agriculture, ahead of our scrutiny of the climate change plan in the autumn. This follows on from our evidence session with stakeholders from the farming sector last week, and I welcome a panel of academics and climate experts.

Before we begin, I remind participants that they do not need to operate their mics. I will invite all witnesses to introduce themselves and to briefly tell us about their backgrounds.

Starting on my right, we have Dr Vera Eory, reader, Scotland’s Rural College; Dave McKay, co-director, Soil Association Scotland; Dr Mike Robinson, chief executive, Royal Scottish Geographical Society; and, joining us remotely, Professor Dave Reay, executive director, Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the University of Edinburgh.

I invite Dr Eory to begin.

Thank you for inviting me; I am pleased to be here. I have been working on climate change and agriculture for the past 18 years, mostly on options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture production, specifically on farm, but also beyond that. I also look at cost effectiveness and what farmers think about the issue, the policy options that we have and the policies that we should be developing to move forward with reducing emissions not only from agriculture, because that is only part of the story, but from the whole food supply chain.

I have also worked on nitrogen and other related pollution, and I have another hat: I am a member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change. I am not here in that role, but, because of that, I have insights into European policy making, especially in the areas of agriculture and land use change.

As part of the work we have done in the past 18 years, we have informed the Climate Change Committee, the Scottish Government, the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs and other bodies on how to reduce emissions. We have produced more than 15 reports, which roughly tell the same story. The latest report was published by the Climate Change Committee on 21 February as part of its seventh carbon budget report.

Good morning, and thanks very much for inviting me. I am co-director for Scotland at the Soil Association, which is a membership charity that dates back to 1946. We work across the whole of the food system, including sustainable public procurement through the food for life programme in Scotland. We do a lot of work directly with farmers and crofters, facilitating peer-to-peer knowledge exchange and innovation support.

In recent years, we have done a lot on policy development, particularly in relation to agroforestry, integrating more trees and woodlands into farming and crofting systems.

A couple of years ago, we set up a new commercial spin-off, Soil Association Exchange, which is a new baselining and monitoring service that provides advice to farmers for more profitable and sustainable farming.

I sit on various groups, including the Scottish Environment LINK food and farming group. My wife and I are organically certified small-scale fruit and veg growers, based in north Aberdeenshire.

Thank you for inviting me. I am the chief executive of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. I have been involved in climate for the past 25 years or so—probably most obviously in helping to set up Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, which is an amalgamation of all the non-governmental organisations and civil society across Scotland.

In 2010, I chaired the short-life working group in the Parliament to help to set the annual climate targets, and, in 2020, I was on the First Minister’s business leaders forum, which aimed to bring all the business leaders in Scotland together around the agenda.

With Dave Reay, I helped to set up a climate solutions qualification for public and private bodies, which has been doing very well, with around 100,000 people having gone through the course.

I was asked to co-chair the farming for 1.5° inquiry some years back. We produced a very thorough report on how farming could start to move towards a net zero future. We also produced a magazine, in case anybody did not read the boring report—although it was a great report. I now sit on the ARIOB.

Dave Reay, you do not have to answer on whether the report that you co-wrote was “boring”, but it is very nice to see you, despite your participating remotely. Please introduce yourself.

I recommend the report. It is not boring, but brilliant. For the record, I finished my tenure as director of the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the end of 2023. I am a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh. I have worked on climate for more than 30 years—in particular, on land use and agriculture and the mitigation of emissions.

I am also co-share of the Just Transition Commission in Scotland. Clearly, some of the issues that we are looking at with your committee today are key for us in ensuring that the transition to net zero is a just one for farmers, crofters and everybody else who is involved in the land and in rural communities.

Thanks. We will now move to questions, and I will kick off.

The rate of emission reductions that has been achieved in the agriculture sector to date is lower than that in other sectors, having reduced by only 12 per cent from 1990 levels. Last week, we heard from farming representatives who suggested clearly where the issue was. However, from a scientific perspective, will you set out why you think agricultural reductions have somewhat stalled and are not keeping pace with other sectors?

That story has two parts. Agriculture is just one part of the food chain, so we should probably not talk about production without talking about consumption and trade.

However, most importantly, in all the studies that we have done in the past 18 years, we have found that, when it comes to an uptake in practice shifts and technological shifts—for example, the use of feed additives to reduce methane, fertiliser additives to reduce nitrous oxide emissions or clover in the grass so that it does not need as much synthetic nitrogen—even if 60 or 70 per cent of farmers adopt those methods, you will get a 15 per cent or perhaps 20 per cent reduction in agricultural emissions if you are lucky. However, even that assumes very strong regulatory and payment policies, and strong monitoring.

There are two parts to the story. One is that we cannot achieve a lot more with only technological and practice change on farms. We need a major shift towards the production and consumption of a food basket that has a much lower emission intensity. The other part of the story is that, in the past 20 years, despite multiple advice reports from the industry and from science, there has not been much movement in agricultural policy structure. We estimate that 80 per cent of CAP payments subsidise the highest emission-intensive production in agriculture, which is livestock—that is the EU average, and Scotland emulates that. We cannot reduce emissions if we are dishing out money to produce and consume something that contributes to high levels of emissions.

10:45  

Are you suggesting that there are some farmers who are innovating at the moment? You talked about clover or whatever. Are any such improvements despite policy decision making at Government level?

I am not saying that it is “despite” that, because, for the past 10 or 15 years, there were always little nuggets of financial incentives to be taken up to cover slurry stores, for example, so Government support probably helped farmers a bit to do certain things. Quite a lot of such changes provide efficiencies, which are important, especially given high nutrient prices. In that sense, the innovations are happening not despite Government policy but alongside that, due to market changes in input prices and so on.

I am not an academic, but I will base what I am saying on the evidence that we glean from the work that we do on the ground with farmers and crofters. As I mentioned, that work is around knowledge exchange in particular. We are finding that there are some practical, policy and confidence barriers. On the policy piece that Vera Eory mentioned, I absolutely agree that there is a sense out there that there has been something of a vacuum. We have been promised transformational change, and farmers are not seeing that yet. The witnesses last week covered a lot of this, but at the moment we are sticking with quite a rigid system that the Government’s own analysis has shown does not deliver on environmental outcomes, and that stifles innovation and productivity. The NFUS representative last week described it as incentivising inertia. That is one issue.

On the confidence issue, the policy vacuum does not help, but there is also a sense that farmers know that they need to be doing something. They are aware of the emissions targets. There is an awareness that we are not going far enough, fast enough. Sometimes, though, there is a lack of confidence, from a technical standpoint, that the policy support will be there for some of the things that farmers might want to do. The issue can be to do with making that initial change. People often describe the current system—the conventional approach—as an insurance system. Inputs go in, outputs come out, and they know what they are going to get. There is a role there for policy, as well as other areas. For example, lenders could de-risk that transition process, which on farms can take anything up to six years, and there may be impacts on production during that period. Regarding yields, for example, it is important that policy supports farmers through that transition.

We are probably missing some easy wins as well. For example, we could be making much more progress on reducing synthetic nitrogen inputs. We are wasting too much nitrogen, particularly on grass and hedges. On the train down last night, I was reading the Climate Change Committee’s seventh carbon budget, which I am sure that we will get to. A very straightforward measure would be for the Government to incentivise hedgerow creation.

Woodland Trust Scotland figures show that, in the last century, we have lost 6,000 miles of hedges—half of all Scotland’s hedges. There are lots of reasons for that: some of it was driven by policy and the way that the agriculture sector developed. At the Royal Highland Show in June, the Government could announce a target and budget for hedgerow creation, and we could crack on and do it. For us, that feels like it would be an easy win, and we are not currently picking up easy wins.

I agree with a lot of what has been said. A lot of good, progressive farmers are out there, but a lot of what they do is not necessarily supported by policy and certainly not by payments, which is partly why we are having the conversation about transforming agricultural subsidies across the board. Clearly, the current system does not quite meet all our different public needs. Exactly what public goods we wish to prioritise and how they can be transformed and brought forward at scale is a very clear question. It is not enough for lots of progressive farmers to do really good things in isolation or around the edges, so we need to capture such work.

Those farmers are not fully represented at the moment. It is perhaps difficult to find out exactly how we give them more of a voice. If I am honest, the whole conversation got a bit bogged down and became a one-dimensional one about meat, and it did not really go any further than that. The farming for 1.5° inquiry team was partly set up to broaden the conversation out to all the different ways that agriculture plays a role in order to help to move that work forward.

I agree with everything that has been said. On Vera Eory’s point about the transition from the CAP, if you had to point a finger at one reason why our sector has not reduced its emissions by anything like some other sectors have, and certainly not as much as it needs to reduce them in order to be line in with climate targets in Scotland, you would point to the policy regime.

That is where we have a big risk. We look towards 2045, when Scotland plans to reach net zero, and 2040, which is the year that the new climate change plan goes up to, but our sector is always going to be a net emitter, because producing food emits greenhouse gases. We could do a lot to mitigate that, but emissions are always going to be part of the process.

The point that David McKay made about netting off some costs through on-farm carbon sequestration is crucial. It all comes back to aligning the policy regime with where we want Scotland to get to: meeting its climate change and nature commitments while supporting farmers. The regime is certainly not delivering a reduction in emissions, but, as you heard in the previous session and last week’s session, the regime is not delivering for farmers either.

Given the pathway that we are on—we heard earlier from the minister that we want to get it right—is there a fear that, if we do not take action now, we will never get it right, we will always be chasing our tail and that we need policy to start delivering now? I know from my time on the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee in the previous parliamentary session that you gave evidence then to the effect that the longer we wait, the more we will have to do, and that the interventions will have to be harder and go further, so the earlier that we start, the better. Do you have any confidence that the current trajectory will deliver and that emissions will start to reduce at a greater pace?

I have low confidence. A lot of secondary legislation would need to be introduced to make that happen. As the committee was discussing earlier, we have not seen any detail around that.

There is the whole argument that we cannot have a cliff edge of massive changes in how support is delivered and who it goes to. I completely get that. However, if you extrapolate through to 2040 with the next climate change plan, we are headed at the moment to our sector sticking out like a sore thumb as the highest emitting sector. I know that we compete with transport, but our emissions are sticking out more and more. The sector across Scotland is hugely dependent on public support, and that makes us vulnerable. It brings us to a different, and perhaps more dangerous, cliff edge in the future for a lot of farmers, crofters and land users in Scotland.

The upcoming advice from the UK Climate Change Committee will give us our trajectory on emissions in terms of carbon budgets. I am sure that agriculture will be a key focus for the CCC in respect of the lack of progress so far in comparison with where we need to be. That will mean rapid action—it will not be a case of saying, “Oh, we’ve got a nice vision post-2030, and it’s business as usual until then,” because the atmosphere and the climate are not going to wait for us. In fact, it would be doing the whole sector a disservice if we were to essentially try to protect business as usual while also trying to address the post-2030 aspect. If I am honest, it feels like that is where we have been for the past 10 years; the committee might be able to tell from my tone that I am a bit frustrated.

I share Dave Reay’s frustration. We have not seen huge progress for some time; even now, the progress that we are talking about is still very uncertain and still not even immediate—it is for the future, for 2027 and 2028 onwards. Everything about it is just being pushed into the long grass, as it has been for at least five years, although I would quite happily agree that it has been 10 years, as Dave said.

How do we overcome that reluctance to move, or to shift or change? How do we deal with the urgency of the issue, which is clearly accelerating all the time? Scotland cannot achieve its emissions targets if agriculture and land use do not play a role—they absolutely have a critical role to play.

In addition, the sector itself needs protection. There is the issue of adaptation, which will become more and more obvious. Last year, I was called out to two quite major flood incidents where agriculture had lost a lot of topsoil—there was a business in Fife that nearly went under because it was absolutely full of seed potatoes and about 2 feet of mud. There are some real issues in that regard right now.

One of the things within the subsidy system that has been talked about but has still not been clarified is the principle of ratcheting up the requirements that are attached to each of the different tiers of subsidy payment. That is really important. If we can agree something quite quickly, there is the facility to ratchet up. I do not particularly want to rely on that ratchet, but, at the end of the day, it is a way of starting to influence things a bit more quickly. We do not have to wait to get it all right before we move—if we do, we will be waiting until 2035.

I totally agree with the previous points. We need to think very much about the long term—the policy in the past 10 years has not delivered that thinking, which is quite sad. I agree with Dave Reay—I have very low confidence that we can now see that policy development will deliver much.

The plan, not only from the Government but from all parties in Scotland, is to have a very clear long-term view to 2050 and beyond, and I would like to give a bit of detail on that. By 2045, we have to reach net zero. Beyond that—although it is not written in law—we have to be net negative, because we are going to overshoot the 1.5°C target, which will be devastating. If we do not get net removals from the atmosphere, it will just get worse.

Based on that, if we look at Scotland’s emissions and what is projected in the latest climate change plan, which was produced a few years ago, the plan is banking on roughly 10 per cent of today’s emissions as net removals. We have not seen much progress on net removals from actual carbon capture and storage—not from fossil-fuel burning, but from direct air capture and biomass capture and storage. If we kept agriculture to 6 million tonnes, or even if we reduced it by 15 per cent—we could do that by forcing all farmers to do everything that they can—we would still be left with roughly 5 megatonnes. If there is no consumption change and no shift in production, we would be left with around 5 megatonnes just in agriculture. Of course, land use, land use change and forestry, the cement industry and the transport industry will all be emitting. How will we get 10 megatonnes or however much net emission removals to make us net zero?

11:00  

Even the EU’s most advanced scenarios, which count net removals, think that probably 5 per cent of today’s emissions can be removed by 2050, so we cannot get faster technological development. If that holds true in Scotland, it means that the best guess might be 2 megatonnes removed in 2050, and we would be left with 5 megatonnes in agriculture, not counting all the other industries. We just will not get to net zero, not to mention net negative, without a major shift in consumption and production.

I have a point about policy development. I listened to last week’s meeting with some interest and I found myself agreeing quite a lot with the analysis of where we are and some of the difficulties. To put a slightly more positive spin on it, when the Government published its vision for agriculture in 2022, we broadly agreed with that—we thought that it was the right vision. The thinking behind the national test programme was also right and it still is. That baselining and monitoring at the farm level is really important. The adoption of a whole-farm approach is absolutely the right thing to do.

The objectives of the Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Act 2024, linking high-quality food production with improved animal health and welfare outcomes, climate mitigation, adaptation, nature restoration and enabling rural communities to thrive, are all the right objectives, because we have to look at this in the round. It is not only about reducing emissions.

The list of measures for tier 2 that were published in February 2023 included a good range of practical on-farm actions that would make a difference to the climate and nature targets. As your witnesses last week said, where that has fallen down is in the apparent failure or incapability of the IT system to deliver on what was intended. After all these years of policy development, it seems quite incredible that that is the case, but if it is, we need to overcome that and do so quite quickly because, as I mentioned earlier, the rigid system of tweaking the legacy CAP schemes, as Vera Eory has outlined, is not going to get us to where we need to go.

Emma Harper has a supplementary question.

Good morning. I want to pick up on what Dr Mike Robinson said. I should have written the words down, but I think that you said that people are reluctant. In your personal experience or perception, who is reluctant to progress?

It is quite hard to answer that, in a way. I would say that, within ARIOB, there is a huge amount of agreement around the table, but there is certainly some sort of institutional dragging of heels, if I am honest. The farming community, and NFUS in particular, are a little wary of some of this change and quite anxious about it, which is quite reasonable. It is purported to be transformational, so that is not a surprise. There is an awful lot of need to clarify some of the devil in the detail.

In reality, the issue is that I rarely meet anyone who does not agree that this needs to happen in some form. There needs to be much more focus on net zero and biodiversity in agriculture. That is fairly well understood and accepted across the board, but we are just not seeing anything shift. We are not seeing actual commitment to action other than from a number of individual progressive farmers who have chosen to pursue that line themselves and, to a degree, those who follow some of the greening ideas. It is a slow process.

Some of that is about the nature of the current payment systems, the extraction from the European Union and all of those things, but I feel that there has been a bit of backpedalling in recent years. In 2019 and 2020, NFU Scotland really stepped up to the plate and understood its responsibility, with a national commitment to meet those targets. It started to show real progress, but I feel that that has just slid back the way. I do not know whether that is because it has just taken too long to get through the weeds in which we seem to be slightly lost and get some commitment to future policy—it is difficult to say.

I am not the only one who has tried to do this—in one or two areas, there were a lot of key findings. In producing our farming for 1.5° inquiry report, we brought a very robust group to the table. It is the only report in which I have been involved where people have privately come up and shook my hand for it; it clearly resonated with a lot of people.

However, it has not instantly, or obviously, led to the adoption of any further measures, or even led towards steering what we are now talking about to some degree. One of the measures in the report is agroforestry. There is a bit of pushback on that from farming, for all sorts of different reasons. One reason is that it is not a traditional farming method—well, it is, but not in recent years. Some of it is about a lack of understanding of the process, but some of the reasons are pretty legitimate. That aspect has not moved forward, so we sat down and wrote a paper on how we would encourage the uptake of agroforestry on Scottish farms, and we submitted it. To be honest, I have no idea where that went.

Good morning. The Scottish Government is setting a new level of emissions reduction ambition in regulations later this year. The previous level of ambition was a 24 per cent reduction in agriculture emissions between 2018 and 2032. Is that adequate, or does the level of ambition for the sector need to increase with the next climate change plan?

That may be one for Vera Eory to kick off on.

If the target is for 2032—if I remember correctly—a 24 per cent reduction would be very ambitious and on the right track. However, we have to think long term, and that is not the end goal—it is just an intermediate goal, and we have to go beyond that.

Of course, we need to produce food and we will have nature, and we cannot reduce emissions fully, but I think that a 24 per cent target would be in line with the 2045 net zero goals. However, setting a target is not enough; we have to think about the progressive policy package that will drive us there and ratchet up, and provide support for research and development, innovation and peer learning while, at the same time, setting clear goals. That could be done to some extent, initially, in regulatory ways, but we would then need to introduce carbon pricing signals to the agriculture and food sectors. Without those pricing signals, we will not get much.

If we look across different sectors such as transport, building and industry over the past 30 or 40 years in the UK and in Europe, we see that the highest reductions were achieved where we could introduce the emissions trading scheme, which means pricing emissions. We cannot do it without pricing emissions—it is not really possible. That is what the history of the past 30 or 40 years shows us. A goal of 24 per cent would be great if we achieved it, but we need a policy vision, and we need not only the current Government but all the parties to sign up to that, carry it through and then move further.

There is a supplementary question from Ariane Burgess.

Vera, you talked about carbon pricing signals. Can you elaborate on that a bit more?

Yes. By “carbon pricing” I mean a mandatory policy set-up whereby either the emissions are priced or someone gets a subsidy—a negative tax—for reduction. There are various policy solutions for that. The UK and the European Union emissions trading schemes for industry are one option, whereby every actor has a quota. If they produce fewer emissions, they can sell the difference; if they produce more, they have to buy more allowances.

There are other ways. Denmark, for example, will, in the next two years, introduce a carbon pricing policy for agriculture. That is going to ratchet up—first, it will be only on livestock. For nitrogen fertilisation, a subsidy system will be introduced; if a farmer goes below the optimum that is set, they can get the subsidies. For livestock, Denmark will have a per-head tax for now. Those measures can always be given some nuance by particular subsidy systems. If the farmer shows, for example, that they are covering their slurry storage and saving a lot of methane because they are capturing and burning it, or even burning it and feeding the heat and electricity into the system, there could be further subsidies.

In a sense, pricing means that the polluter pays. Someone is paying for the pollution, because, unless we put the pollution on the market, no one cares. That is what we have been saying.

It seems that we may need to do that, as Denmark has. If we were to bring in something like that, would we need a database? How would we deal with that?

Yes, definitely. Stronger monitoring would be needed—as Dave Reay mentioned, that is important—as well as some sort of centralised data about farmers and farm activities. However, we do not need a full-blown system to start with; we can start step by step. The Danes are slightly ahead because they have a much better system for the management of field activities and livestock, not only on numbers but on other things. Nevertheless, we could move towards that—a relatively rough system could already be set up now, with further improvements to come.

Could we build on the back of anything that currently exists in tracking farming activities, or would it need to be something new?

From my very limited knowledge—I have been involved in some discussions with the Scottish Government and other colleagues—the current problem is that all the different databases cannot really talk to each other, not only for informatics reasons but because of data protection issues, such as who is the data owner and who shares soil-testing data—that is the most infamous example, but I am sure that others can elaborate.

The right pieces are there; we just need to put them together to have a functioning system, and we can make it better later.

Before I bring in David McKay, I will get Emma Harper to ask her question on baselining, because it dovetails well with what we are discussing. Once Emma has asked her question, you can signal if you want to come back in.

I will pick up on what Ariane Burgess said about data. Last week, representatives from the farming sector told us that there was a lack of baseline data for the agricultural sector that makes it challenging to measure progress.

I know that that is a challenge—most emissions are from nitrous oxide in the soils and methane from livestock and manure, for instance—but we know that there are differences between emissions from beef-fed cattle that are out on the hill and from dairy cattle in sheds. We cannae just put all beasts in one shed, so to speak.

What are your thoughts on the wider aspects of capturing data and even working with other countries such as Denmark to build on what they are doing?

There are two points there, with regard to a national inventory and then what happens at a farm level. I think that the committee covered some of that last week. I bumped into the Minister for Agriculture and Connectivity in the corridor and he said that he had told the committee that he was out on a farm with us last Thursday, in Lanarkshire, where we were demonstrating Soil Association Exchange.

There are other providers out there, but I will talk about ours, because I know about it. Soil Association Exchange is a comprehensive baselining and monitoring service for farmers across six impact areas, looking at soils, carbon, water, animal welfare and the social impact of the farm. There are 42 different metrics.

We were able to show the minister that the farmer we were visiting was able to see, on his mobile phone, all the data that had been gleaned from all the soil sampling and everything that had been done within the farm. That was in the palm of his hand, alongside all the recommendations that he was given for what he might do to improve the sustainability and profitability of his operation. When the farmer was talking to the minister, I was struck by how that information had empowered him to feel that he was in control of decision making. He said, “This is my farm, and I get to decide what happens on it.” The recommendations included things such as rotational grazing, reinstating hedges, shelter belts and manure management. Some of those things he picked and some of them he disregarded. The point is that he felt that he was in control of the process.

11:15  

There is a big issue and disconnect—it was noted by the Climate Change Committee’s agriculture advisory group—between the high-level models and the headlines that appear, and the reality as farmers see it on the ground. If we are to empower farmers and encourage them to make changes, we have to provide that data. We are talking to the Scottish Government about the need to standardise and scale that up. At the moment, we have covered 2,000 farms across the UK, including close to 300 in Scotland. That is a very small sample of the roughly 16,000 to 17,000 basic payment scheme recipients in Scotland. For us, providing that data is the way to empower farmers and get them on board with what we are trying to do.

According to the Scottish Government website, the number of carbon audits has dramatically increased. Is it a slow burn to get that data? That relates to my question to Dr Robinson about reluctance. There are early adopters, and there are folk who will need to be supported.

There is a big spectrum. We have been running a knowledge exchange programme on whole-farm planning, which is funded by the Scottish Government through the knowledge transfer and innovation fund. We have been walking people through what the requirements will be for basic payments from April onwards, and we have found that there is a vast spectrum. Some farmers think, “What on earth are you talking about? I’ve been doing this for years.” However, there are others who have not been doing that and who have not really thought about it.

What has been missing from some of the comms and messaging is why farmers are being asked to do this and how the data that is being gathered on carbon, soils and biodiversity can be translated into practical change that will help to deliver on profitability and sustainability. The collection of the data is not an end in itself; it is what you do with it that matters.

Those are excellent questions about where we are at and how we unlock the transition and achieve greater emissions reductions and greater resilience. Tier 4 of the payments will be a key part of that. I do not think that it gets enough attention, certainly from the point of view of budgetary support.

When it comes to capacity building, as David McKay just said, we need to have a differentiated approach. Some farmers and crofters will understand this, but many do not have the capacity to spend a lot of time learning how to use apps—for instance—without any support. Good monitoring and evaluation, which we need, will be easier for some farmers and crofters than it is for others. For a smallholder or a crofter, that capacity is a key part of what tier 4 needs to help to deliver so that they can do this stuff and do their job, which is to successfully manage their land. That is often a greater burden for a smallholder or a crofter than it is for a big producer.

When the minister gave evidence earlier—I do not know whether he would say that he had a hard time—he said that he and the Scottish Government try to hear from voices that are not normally heard from, which I applaud. That is an on-going challenge, but hearing from those voices is a key requirement for a just transition, and it is something that we provide scrutiny and advice on. In the agriculture sector, there are lots of voices that are never heard. The committee will hear from the people who are on this panel and the union and industry leaders, but many smallholders and crofters might be struggling with day-to-day living, so they will not have the capacity to watch this meeting or be involved in the process, or to learn how to use some of the tools or how to report. A key requirement for the Government is to help them to do that.

The Farm Advisory Service is an important mechanism for that. It could do a really good job, although it needs to have sufficient capacity with regard to advisers. For a lot of us, that service is our main way of interacting with the Government from day to day. If I have a question about what subsidies are coming down the line or whether I am doing the right thing, it is the Farm Advisory Service that I go to. For us, working on a small scale, it can play a big part in how we report and comply, and in how—David McKay mentioned this—we understand why we are doing what we are doing.

Only by taking a differentiated approach will we unlock the huge potential that exists across Scotland. That includes not only the big landowners and those who have someone working on these things almost full time, but the small producers and the crofters who will deliver a lot of the nature and climate benefits that we need. At the moment, they do not have the capacity to spend a week looking at the latest advice and the latest reporting requirements. The capacity building at tier 4 is really important.

Building on what Dave Reay said, I agree that this is a complicated matter, so measures need to be taken in the round. That is partly about scaling up some of the farm support services and scaling up skills and education. It is not just about physical measures on the ground; we need to have a full package of measures.

In every single climate space, the problem is that there is a desire for perfect data. That is absolutely understandable, but that should not be at the expense of doing anything. We need to find a balance between those measures that can be implemented at scale quickly and those that require baselining. If we are serious, we need to invest in that baselining as quickly as we can. Otherwise, data is a barrier. Sometimes it is used as a reason not to do the thing that we know we needed to do 10 years ago.

The seventh carbon budget report identified measures that needed to be taken to lower emissions in agriculture, such as adopting low-carbon machinery and reducing livestock numbers. What measures do you think are the most important and require the most attention from Government when it comes to lowering emissions? Those could possibly be different things, because there might be some easy things that could be done, but also some things that cannot really be done without Government intervention.

On the last part of your question, about whether things can be done without Government intervention, if I am blunt and simplify it, I would say that there is nothing that can be done, because those things have already been done.

Let us take the example of sexed semen in the industry, which makes it possible to produce a lot more beef meat from the dairy sector because of artificial insemination and separating male and female semen. That became profitable for dairy farmers and those beef farmers who buy in and rear. It works for them, to some extent. That required no Government intervention; it came about because of technological advances, markets and so on.

Sometimes such things happen. However, things happen in the data direction as well, so we cannot let ourselves rely on markets. We have been doing that for the past 200 years, and that is why we are here. We need to think about strong Government intervention.

I will highlight two of the actions that we could focus on. The easiest option for most farmers, which might provide some financial savings—or, at least, not much loss—for many of them, although it comes with some difficulties, would be to reduce synthetic nitrogen use on grasslands by the inclusion of clover and legumes, which provides nitrogen through biological nitrogen fixation. That can mitigate quite a lot of emissions.

On the other hand, the one thing that would bring about the biggest reduction in emissions would be a strong shift in our food basket to more plant-based food and a lot less livestock-based food, especially ruminant-based food, by which I mean beef, sheep and milk products. That would have the biggest impact. If I had to pinpoint one thing to change, that is the one that I would recommend.

Before we get the views of the other witnesses, I will come back on that point. We see that our cattle and sheep numbers are falling, but if our imports will increase to fill that gap, we will—while our balance sheet might look a bit better—be importing something that is not fed on grass, which is a carbon store. How do we get the balance right in that regard? We are not an island on our own in all of this.

That is why I started my contribution at the beginning of the meeting by emphasising that we cannot look at production on its own—we have to look at the whole food supply chain, and at consumption. The Government and subsequent Governments, and all parties, need to act strongly on shifting consumption patterns and, at the same time, make sure that the trade balances, if necessary with some sort of carbon border adjustment mechanism or something similar down the line.

I am not saying that we should reduce livestock numbers in Scotland but continue to eat just as much beef and drink just as much milk, because that would simply increase emissions elsewhere around the globe. I agree with you that that would not contribute to mitigating the climate threat globally. We must focus on consumption at the same time, in parallel with having strong policies.

I am glad that Rhoda Grant touched on that. I know that we have previously had conversations about the CCC’s apparent obsession with reducing livestock numbers in the United Kingdom. It is quite obvious, when we look at global emissions, that the emissions from livestock in the UK are insignificant—they are not significant at all. They might be significant in the context of UK emissions, but, globally, they are not.

Do we get the balance right? Do we look at the impact of removing cattle and sheep ruminants from our hills, our grassland and whatever? Do we look at what would replace that, and how it would all balance out?

Right now, we have a rapidly declining national beef herd; I would suggest that we are almost at a critical mass. We are seeing record prices for livestock because there is a shortage. It is not because we are producing better meat or because the demand is higher—the demand has flatlined—but we are seeing a shortage, and meat prices are at record highs.

How should Governments approach that? We will not stop people eating beef, lamb or pork overnight, but some of the interventions need to take place now. Should we simply ensure that we recognise that livestock in the UK is produced with a carbon footprint that is significantly lower than elsewhere in the world? How do we get the balance right?

I do not really see it as a balance, and I do not see the emissions from a single cow—or a single car—as insignificant, because it all adds up. I could say, “Oh, I can take a flight to Florida because it’s nothing compared with global emissions, so I don’t care,” but if we keep saying that about everything, we will not change anything.

The purpose of this meeting is to recognise that every little counts. In that sense, my milk consumption counts as well as China’s steel production—although, of course, that is bigger. We have to take action on every front, because otherwise we will keep the status quo. If we keep the status quo, we will end up with agriculture still emitting 6 megatonnes or more in 2050, we will not get to net zero and we will experience climate impacts that will cost us a lot more.

I feel that we get stuck in the debate, because we never talk about the future costs, which include tomorrow’s costs from fire, flooding and everything else as a consequence of not taking action. We must take action, down to the last cow and the last glass of milk, and on every single car. We cannot just say that it does not matter. That is my opinion, from what I have been studying over the past 20 years.

I will explain where I was coming from. I was talking about getting the balance right with regard to the impact of removing livestock from our hills or wherever. Is there a balance? Is there sequestration? Is there preservation of the natural environment? If we remove livestock, do we need to appreciate that there is another side to the equation, if you like?

11:30  

With this one, we are extremely lucky—it is a win-win situation. If we reduce livestock, that means that we free up land for nature restoration and peatland restoration, and for afforestation. Afforestation is not only the maximum way to go about temporary carbon removal—it is always temporary—but it can be done in a way that balances the need for biodiversity. Usually, if afforestation is done for biodiversity, it results in a little bit less carbon sequestration. There are synergies, although not fully.

If we take quite a chunk of the livestock away from our land, that means freeing up a lot of arable land, because those livestock feed on barley and other cereals, and soya in the Amazon. We are in a win-win situation for nature and carbon sequestration. There is no need to strike a balance, because those are not trade-offs but synergies.

I will not keep labouring the point, but I am concerned that we are reaching a critical mass when it comes to livestock in Scotland. If we fall below a certain level, we will not have any at all, because there will be no abattoirs, no markets and no agricultural agents, and there will be nobody on our hills. I am worried about falling below the critical mass and reaching the tipping point. I do not think that we are far away from it.

I see that Dave Reay wishes to come in.

Do not get me started on tipping points, convener—as with the North Sea, for example.

On emissions, Vera Eory used the phrase “every little counts”. To support what she said, I want to quash the idea, which keeps coming up—whether in relation to Scotland or the UK—that we produce only a small amount of global emissions, and we could therefore say, “Oh, China’s only 25 per cent, so why should we do it, as 75 per cent of the rest of the world?” That is a false argument in terms of tackling climate change. Everything is important. The convener used the crucial word “balance” in his question. In my view, there needs to be a balance in relation to how we reduce emissions in a sustainable and just way.

The key point, if we are looking at the change in land use, whether it is a reduction in livestock herd for arable or a reduction in both of those for other use, is that the balance needs to be seen in relation to the people who are living with it. That is particularly important with regard to the support that they get. If we want to see a change in expectation, we need changes in support. If we want to have a reduced herd and we are looking for afforestation—planting trees—or for peatland restoration, the support to enable people to do that needs to be balanced, and it needs to be there. Otherwise, we will just see the loss of community and of people’s livelihoods.

Yes, we are going to have to see a change, in particular in many areas of Scotland in comparison with the UK as a whole, because the UK is relying on us for a lot of the sequestration. A lot of that needs to be done on our farms, but it needs to be balanced in how it is supported—otherwise, it will simply have negative consequences, not only for emissions reduction and nature but for the communities that are part of the road, or pathway, to net zero.

I want to push a little further on that. I totally get where animals are being fed, but a lot of our animals are grass fed—they are on the hill. That is not arable ground; it is different. They are there, and they are providing a nature benefit as well. We have seen that, where livestock numbers have crashed, that has had an impact on the natural environment. How do we get the balance? At some level, having animals grass fed on the hills is providing a nature benefit. What happens if we lose that? There is always a balance between carbon and nature and what we do to protect both.

I will have a go at answering that.

There are several issues. Agriculture does not exist in isolation, of course. It is determined by the market more than anything else. After the market come subsidies and what is encouraged through grant giving.

When it comes to the balance, we are sitting at this table mostly because, as is clear from the remit of ARIOB, the balance is currently wrong; otherwise, we would not have a climate crisis or a nature and biodiversity crisis. It is clear that there are other things that need to be dealt with. There are also the social and community aspects of agriculture, which are a huge part of the rural economy. There are many things to balance, which is why it is so blooming complicated—let us be honest.

There are moments when cattle on wild ground can enhance habitat; in the right places, that is absolutely true. However, there is also the market. There are lots of issues in relation to the point that we should just stop producing livestock and import them. We already do. We also export a lot of the livestock that we produce, by the way. There is no logic there, because it is dictated by the market. The logic is the market. The problem is that we have a market that does not really make sense—it just does what it does, and farmers respond to that.

Subsidy is the chance to rebalance the equation and bring in other factors that we view as being of significance and importance in relation to what the whole of agriculture can deliver for the rural economy, and for nature, wildlife and climate. That is the balance. Everybody wants to see surety and security for rural communities, but that has to be achieved within the scope of all those different pressures.

Our view is that ruminant livestock in well-managed grazing systems are essential for a sustainable food system in Scotland, given our climate and land type. However, I have not seen any modelling that does not involve some form of reduction in livestock across the UK if we are to meet the targets that the Government has set and which every political party signed up to at the time.

The question about balance is an important one. It is absolutely the case that, in some parts of Scotland, in particular, we would probably have a net biodiversity loss if we removed grazing livestock. Our view is that, primarily, the significant cuts need to come from the overly intensive livestock sector, which is dependent on grain, which results in land being taken up that could be used for growing food for human consumption or, in some cases, grain being imported and having a climate footprint overseas.

Any reductions must be driven by dietary change. There are some signs that our diets are changing, but they are probably not changing as quickly as some of the pathways would like them to. There is sometimes a misconception about that. Last year, there was an interesting study—I think that Food Standards Scotland commissioned the University of Edinburgh to do it—on what would happen if everybody in Scotland actually ate the recommended diet of the “Eatwell Guide” plate, which is a healthy, balanced diet. The study found that red meat consumption would come down by 16 per cent; the target for 2030 is 20 per cent, so it is not that far away.

If you step into social media for five minutes, it often becomes a binary argument, with people saying, “The Climate Change Committee wants us all to be vegan,” but that is absolutely not what it is saying at all. It is important that we have some context around this. Yes, diets can shift, but that actually means simply eating in line with what we are being told to eat already. The problem is that we do not do that.

To go back to the grazing livestock issue, another element is that we are of the view that we need to integrate as many trees and as much farm woodland into that landscape as possible to help us to make progress towards the targets that we have for tree planting and woodland creation. Over the past few years, we have spent a lot of time working with Woodland Trust Scotland to develop detailed policy options for integrating trees on farms.

At last year’s Royal Highland Show, we launched a report in which we costed in great detail low-density, small-scale silvopastoral and silvoarable options, biodiverse hedgerows and small-scale woodland. We presented it to the Scottish Government. The headline figure was that, with an investment of £10 million, it could double the land under agroforestry systems in Scotland. That is not a lot of money for quite a significant gain, but we need to go much further than that.

We hope that that is under consideration in relation to what happens with the schemes that come forward under tier 3, in particular, on the future iteration of the agri-environment schemes. However, at the moment, we do not know what is happening with that.

Ariane, you indicated that you had a supplementary question.

It was on headage, which you covered, convener.

I have a question for Dr Eory. Correct me if I am wrong, but you said that people should drink less milk. However, when we look at milk processing and the supply chain, more cheese, high-value products and protein yoghurts are being made. In my work on the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, I am keen to make sure that folk have nutritional foods as well.

David McKay mentioned Food Standards Scotland’s “Eatwell Guide”. My understanding is that milk, which has calcium, B12 and other such things, is more nutritious than soda pop, which is carbonated water that rots your teeth. Are you suggesting that folk should drink less milk?

That was my shorthand for saying that we should reduce milk-based product consumption as well as meat consumption, because that is the recommendation in the “Eatwell Guide”. At the moment, we are consuming not only too much ruminant red meat but too many milk-based and dairy products. Dairy products can be quite high in saturates, which are the major cause of strokes and cardiovascular disease, which have a very high cost for our health systems.

We are getting into a completely different argument by talking about the health impact of reduced dairy and beef consumption. I do not think that we want to go there.

Sorry—milk was my shorthand for dairy products.

I totally agree with the balance. I argue that carbon sequestration and reducing livestock’s GHG emissions are a win-win, because balancing is not needed. A balance is needed when we talk about biodiversity and livelihoods and making sure that abattoirs are working and that the remaining five cattle are not scattered around Scotland with no processing chain in place. However, when we are talking about greenhouse gas benefits, going to zero livestock would be best.

We have to remember that, without livestock, there would be forest instead, and that provides a lot more carbon sequestration than a grazed grass-based system.

I totally agree that balancing is needed for so many other reasons.

That is exactly why this is such a difficult conversation: it ranges all over the place. Admittedly, there is always anxiety about there being some sort of attack on meat and dairy. The science is fairly clear on their impact—that should not be a surprise to anyone. However, if we are talking about the issue within the realms of a subsidy system for agriculture, that aspect is slightly to one side and irrelevant, because things will be largely dictated to by the marketplace. As we all know, the marketplace is hugely important in agriculture—that is what farmers are growing for most of the time. If the market dictates something, that is what will have the biggest impact.

The fact of the matter is that having better grown, lower-carbon and less greenhouse-gas-intensive meat will be positive, because that is the way that the market is going and how customers want all of their meat and other produce to be presented. It is not for farmers to dictate the market, because they cannot; they respond to the market. Customers, retailers and others usually dictate the market.

In the farming for 1.5° inquiry, we were quite clear about the distinction, because it was not our job to change customer demand; it was our job to understand what the science was telling us and how to protect agriculture in that space. It is worth saying that out loud.

An earlier question was about how we would direct funding and what sorts of things we would lean towards. It would be towards things that we are currently not doing and need to do more of. To pick up David McKay’s agroforestry point, that is a classic case in which we are improving the land and improving the carbon sequestration on the land while still having livestock roaming around the trees. However, there is pushback even on that.

11:45  

There are things that we could be doing, and we should be starting to put effort into those, and there are things that we probably should not be bothering to put money into that we currently do. I do not think that reducing nitrogen is necessarily one of the things that we need to subsidise. The biggest single impact of the reduction in nitrogen use was that the price went through the roof because of the war in Ukraine, which has probably served that function. Again, the market has intervened in a way that means that the Government does not need to.

Everybody knows that there is not an endless pot of money. It is about the things that we want to see prioritised and the things that we cannot and probably should not influence through the subsidy system.

We will move on to our next theme, which is the Scottish national adaptation plan. Evelyn Tweed has a question.

Good morning—it is still morning. The 2024 national adaptation plan identifies growth in pests and diseases, flooding and drought as some of the critical risks to Scottish agriculture. We recently had storm Éowyn. This weekend, we are putting out alerts for extreme risk of wildfire in my Stirling constituency. We are coming to the stage where, every few weeks, we are thinking about another event in relation to climate change. How are those specific issues impacting Scotland’s farming sector?

I will come to you, Mike Robinson, because you gave an example of somebody who was having issues because of flooding and whose business nearly went under.

Yes. Last summer, I was called out to two incidents because they were of real concern. One in five households in the UK is theoretically at high risk of flooding at some point. It is a real, very live issue and it affects every person.

There are two sides to that for agriculture. First, I am sure that every farmer could tell you about the unpredictability of the seasonal weather and some of the issues that that presents. The problem with heavy rainbursts and storms is that, apart from anything else, they take away a lot of the topsoil, which is the productive soil. There are some very real and live issues for a lot of the farming community, but I do not know whether anyone has quantified them.

The other thing that we also have to think about is what we want from farmland. In both of the cases that I was brought into last year, the way in which the land that was next to the incidents was farmed was a factor. It was not the only factor—there were 10 things that caused the flood. However, one of them happened to be the fact that, in both instances, they were planting tatties downhill, which created channels for the water right to the road edge. They did not have a shelter belt and no rig was cut across a field to protect the road. Those things had not happened, I think, because the farms had been rented out to potato planters and they did not bother to follow the guidance. Most farmers generally do the right thing, but they sometimes get it wrong. In both of those cases, they got it wrong and it caused a significant inundation of mud into households, properties and businesses in the two areas that I was brought into.

This might be irrelevant, but I will say it anyway. The issue that I had at the time was that a lot of people were quick to blame each other for why the flood happened but nobody seemed to be doing much to prevent it from happening again. There are usually several overlapping factors that cause a problem of that nature. If you solve two of them, you can usually alleviate the problem. There therefore needs to be a bit more focus on what we are going to do about it. Farming has an important role to play in that, because the land that farmers manage is often on the edge of urban areas. If farmers are encouraged to use slightly different practices, it will protect their topsoil and probably their crops, and it can protect the communities that they serve.

I agree with Mike Robinson that there is very rarely one cause and that there is not one solution. Unsurprisingly, we have focused our work on soils and soil management as an adaptation strategy. As Mike said, certain things that happen, such as planting tatties on a slope, are probably not a great idea. You see a lot of bare soil as you drive around. I live in Aberdeenshire and I remember driving through Angus after storm Babet. Enormous amounts of topsoil had washed on to the roads after the storm and the fields were still bare. It was not just fertile topsoil for growing but nutrients that washed into watercourses and overloaded our streams and burns.

There is a whole host of things that farms can do to help with building resilience. Some of that goes back to the whole-farm planning that the Scottish Government has been trying to do. When it comes to soils, you can reduce compactions by limiting heavy vehicle movements on soil over time. Where appropriate, you can grow cover crops, particularly over winter, thereby avoiding bare soil. If that is not possible, you can leave stubble from the previous crop.

We have spoken before about integrating trees, and Mike Robinson mentioned hedges and shelter belts. You can think about plant composition—mixing shallow and deeper-rooting plants to build and improve the soil structure and the infiltration capabilities of soil to store water. You can also apply bulky organic manures and compost.

I am not about to tell you that those things will solve the problem—with the extreme events that we are getting, they will not be a solution. However, they can make an individual farm more resilient to what we know will keep coming.

I see that no one else wants to come in on that. Have you got a supplementary, Evelyn?

Yes—just a short one. What more can the Government do? I put a similar question to the witnesses at last week’s meeting.

I will answer that. First, on the adaptation front, David McKay and Mike Robinson covered lots of good examples of resilience. A lot of those can be combined with mitigation and cutting emissions. One key thing—this point is sounding like a broken record—concerns capacity building and education. We are seeing new or increasing risks that we are not that familiar with, such as wildfires—which is the case at the moment—and summer heat. If you work outdoors, there is an increasing risk from heat.

We need a bit of advice, particularly on working practices—for example, on the clear explosion of vector-borne diseases, such as from ticks. Those kinds of things need to be part of the support system and part of how we make everyone who works on the land safer in the context of a changing climate. It is not just about living with what we have seen previously; some of the risks are also changing.

Then there is that bigger question of what the Government should do. From my perspective, the Government is doing some good stuff. I know that you talked in your previous evidence session and in last week’s meeting—that was really interesting—about the frustration, which I share, of the speed of progress on climate action in the agriculture sector, and that applies to mitigation and adaptation. However, I applaud the principle behind the consultation process and listening to people, particularly in the industry. As I said, I applaud the minister for talking this morning about trying to hear from people we do not normally hear from.

There will be a key test before the end of this parliamentary session in relation to the advice from the Climate Change Committee. We have had CB7 for the UK, and it will advise the Scottish Government on what Scotland needs to do with our carbon budgets and our climate change plan.

Within that plan, my main plea to the Scottish Government on agriculture is to be realistic. We had a discussion earlier on the 24 per cent reduction in agricultural emissions by 2032, which was in the plan and was based on the advice and the different sectors doing their part. However, the Government needs to be realistic about where we are now, where we need to get to and the speed at which we need to go this year and certainly in the next parliamentary session.

Vera Eory made a point about this not just being a matter for the current Administration. Whoever forms the next Government after the next parliamentary elections really needs to get on top of climate action in agriculture in a way that delivers for climate and nature and that works for all of our communities who work on the land around Scotland.

As we have just discussed, that is complex, but we can do it. We have a great research background and a great community of people with skills and expertise across Scotland, working on the land and pushing forward new innovations to cut emissions. Essentially, we need real courage to do it. Some things will not be correct—we will get things wrong—but, given where we are with the climate and nature emergency and, I would say, a rural emergency because of depopulation, for example, we cannot wait for the parliamentary session after next before we come back to the matter and the committee comes back to it, asking “Well, where did we get to?” The answer might be that we are still high emitting, we are not competitive internationally and we have hardly any farmers left because everyone has left the countryside.

My main plea would be that you should get on it and do what you are doing by way of the consultation and your involvement, but you should not leave it to the next session. Do it this year to show a tangible improvement in tackling climate change and other issues in agriculture.

Resilience and adaptation is a long-term process—resilience needs to be considered in the long term. If someone owns and manages an asset, whatever it might be—a pipeline or farmland, for instance—they are, of course, managing it for the long term, as it is their capital. If someone else manages it, there is a disjoint in the incentive system. One thing that can potentially help to fix that is having some sort of resilience and adaptation plan, including as part of a whole-farm plan. It might even be something like a soil passport, whereby someone has to show what quality their soil is and how resilient it might be to forthcoming changes, such as water shortages and storms, 10 or 20 years down the line.

That is a bit like the idea of energy efficiency checks for flats, which were brought in for similar reasons regarding the disjoint between ownership and management. We have seen a lot of that with the ownership and management structure in Scotland. Such a measure could help to bring in long-term planning, keeping the incentives and goals of the manager, the owner and potentially the buyer on the same line.

I will respond with a couple of stories. First, there are certain win-wins in this space, and we need to see them for what they are. For me, one of those is agroforestry. The reason why one of the main proponents of agroforestry in Scotland came across it is that, after a significant storm, he could not find his cattle. One of the fences at the top of the farm had fallen down, and the cattle had all run into the woodland to hide, because it was better for them. They could rub on trees, they were happier in the woodland and they escaped the worst of the storm. Most of the time, we stick cattle in the middle of a field and we hope that they will be all right—although we sometimes take them inside, too. It was because of a humane issue that he instigated agroforestry in his fields: he saw the cattle’s response.

Farms that are hit by storms often have very thin woodlands as shelter belts—single-tree shelter belts or hedgerows—which are not surviving particularly well with some of the inundation that we are getting. If farmers bolster those, they are delivering against some of their biodiversity targets as well, so they bring in other things, and it protects the farm.

Those are the sort of things that feel like complete win-wins. My question would be, since the last wave of storms—there have been quite a few—how many shelter belts have you seen being replanted? I live in Perthshire and I have seen none being replanted. Everybody just says, “Oops—they all fell over.” Those trees can be 200 years old, but people just watch them fall over and do nothing to replace them, let alone bolster them or improve them.

What is my appeal to the Government on what it can do? There are lots of things that the Government can do. We keep, perhaps accidentally, reiterating the need for advice and guidance and the importance of investing in a farm advisory service. That is new knowledge for some people. The average farmer is aged over 60, and they have probably not had many people giving them much education or training in new skills in a long time, but we are asking them to transform the way that they manage the land.

I have been involved in climate work for 25 years, and my biggest regret is that I did not think that we had time for education when I started. I now realise that it is our single biggest problem. There is a skills deficit in every industry sector in this country, and helping people to understand what is being asked of them is the most important thing that we can do.

12:00  

Elena, I think that we are moving on to your question next.

I am not sure, convener. I think that Tim Eagle is next.

You can skip me if you want to, convener. It is fine.

No, no. I would never skip you, Tim.

I want to pick up on what has been said about woodland, because it is an interesting point. I helped my neighbour after storm Arwen, when a few shelter belts came down on the farm. We could have been in there the next day to clear the trees and replant immediately, because they were good trees, but bureaucracy prevented us from doing that. We need Forestry and Land Scotland to have faster bureaucratic processes so that, in the event a major storm or something like that, we can get in quickly. We had to get a licence to remove the trees, and it is an arduous process. That was the issue. It was not that we did not want to do it; we could not do it, because FLS would come in and tell us off.

A lot of my questions have been answered, but what new research and innovation is coming out in relation to climate resilience? What is the most exciting stuff that we could deliver at pace? What more could the Scottish Government do to enable greater climate resilience in agriculture?

Those are huge questions.

Perhaps you can narrow them down and give us some nice practical examples.

Yes. A lot of traditional farming practice probably does a lot of that resilience stuff for us accidentally, particularly in relation to adaptation. A lot of it is about having the right farming in the right places, as you probably know.

Your point about bureaucracy is a very real one—I fully appreciate that—and complexity is the other issue that is attached to that. I guess that I would remind everybody that we are, by your definition, in a climate emergency.

Another area that maybe needs to be considered is how we can allow systems to move more quickly. That is certainly an issue within the concept of ARIOB and the conversations about shifts in subsidy payments. What we currently have is not transformational in the slightest, and it is not even going to happen for two or three years, so there is an awfully long way to go.

On resilience, a lot of it is about building appropriate infrastructure and about flood management, which is an area that I have ended up in. There needs to be less hard standing, more areas should be allowed and encouraged to flood, and there should not be building on flood plains—we should not be doing daft things such as that.

There are so many different aspects. One of the flooding events that I was brought to nearly took my friend’s business out, and the only way that he could have solved his problem locally was to put more drainage in, which would have broken a Scottish Environment Protection Agency ruling against emissions ending up in the river. There are a whole load of reasons why that went wrong. We talk about the whole-farm approach specifically for agriculture, and that is absolutely right. However, it needs to take account of the adaptation stuff and not just the mitigation stuff. There is a broader societal issue there.

The agri-environment climate scheme or AECS—Ariane Burgess does not like it when I use too many acronyms—had £50 million in the pot, but I think that it is now down to £25 million, so it has taken a hit. Work on hedges, ponds, increasing wetlands and a lot of other stuff in that scheme was beneficial to the wider farm, including small-scale woodland planting. Did that scheme deliver some of what you are talking about?

As far as I know, it did, but not at enough scale. The question is how we can scale it up.

As far as I am aware, some of the options in the agri-environment climate scheme, particularly on hedges, are generally oversubscribed. I made the point at the beginning of the session that that work feels like an easy win.

As part of the work that we have done with the Woodland Trust, we have gone round all the different farming organisations and have got support for what we propose. We went round every committee of the NFUS and we now have their backing for what we suggest. That means that no one will push back on reinstating hedges around field boundaries, so we should just get on and do that. The Government can communicate clearly that it wants that to happen, that it will put a pot of money aside to cover it and that it wants everybody to get on board with it because it delivers what we are talking about on many different levels, whether that is on adaptation, mitigation or resilience.

Some of the issue is to do with how we communicate that. Mike Robinson alluded to some of the resistance to agroforestry. We work closely with Scottish Forestry on that, and I sit on the trees on farms sub-group. It does not use the term “agroforestry”; it uses the words “trees on farms” because it discovered that “agroforestry” met with great resistance from farmers, who thought that it meant that Scottish Forestry was going to cover their fields with trees. Those sound like small things, but they are essential to getting a positive message across.

We have talked about some of the benefits of trees, but they are not just about resilience. In many cases, tree planting can improve productivity. We can think about a dairy herd as an example. If we can provide it with shade and shelter not just during storms but during the hotter months in the summer, which is increasingly important, milk yields will improve and the animals will be healthier. There are also productivity benefits from integrating trees in free-range poultry systems. That needs to be better understood and communicated.

We need to go back to why we are asking people to do something. It is because it will deliver many benefits.

On the latest information about climate risk and resilience that we can make use of in Scotland, I am biased, but I give a shout-out to our colleges, universities and expertise and the improvements that have been made on projecting risks. Remote sensing using drones and satellites is coming on in leaps and bounds. We have programmes such as the dynamic coast project that was undertaken a few years ago. It considered coastal erosion, which is important for many farms and crofts. There are also organisations such as ClimateXChange that distil and synthesise that research brilliantly.

The key thing with all those examples is the translation to the farmer or crofter—the people who need that information. We are in a good place in better understanding the changing risks, but that needs to feed into what the users can do about it and the support to allow them to do that.

The value of peer-to-peer learning has been mentioned a couple of times. For a number of years, we have run projects with many different organisations and facilitated discussions between farmers. Farmers want to learn from other farmers, and that is by far the best way that we have found to disseminate information about good and best practice.

As Mike Robinson said, however, only a tiny proportion of the tier 4 budget goes towards that kind of thing. That needs to be massively scaled up. We need to recognise the value of facilitating such interaction between farmers and the formation of farmer clusters in specific regions or catchment areas where they can collaborate and work together. There is an enormous return on that investment, but at the moment we are not investing nearly enough.

Would those schemes be limited by the IT system? You probably heard in the previous evidence session and last week that some innovative schemes will not be able to progress because the IT system is unable to deliver them. Do you see that as a risk?

What was envisaged under tier 2 and many of the approaches that I mentioned within it should definitely happen. There is obviously a limitation, which is a big problem. However, lots of those things need to be incentivised. The farmers who already do them should be rewarded for that, and those who do not could be incentivised to do them.

I do not see why some of the things that we have just discussed, particularly on trees—I mentioned the options paper that we launched last year—cannot be integrated into the current agri-environment climate scheme. We have talked about providing grants for tree planting. We already provide grants for hedgerow creation and riparian planting, so we can just get on and do some of that stuff regardless of the IT problem, although that needs to be resolved.

The situation is obviously ridiculous. I would give tiers 2, 3 and 4 to someone who has a working computer. There is a real problem there. Delivery is hampered by the current IT system, as I understand it, but surely that is resolvable.

Okay. Thank you.

Good afternoon. I want to spend a wee bit of time speaking about regenerative farming. We have danced around that this morning, although a lot of your answers have alluded to it. One of the very first speeches that I made when I came to this place was on the subject. It is new to a lot of people, but I learned about it way back in the early 1990s from taking environmental science courses in Canada. We were starting to think about dust bowls, compacted soils and the very real threats at that time.

How do we make the concept of regenerative farming more accessible to our farmers in Scotland and enable them to understand it? Knowledge exchange is important. David McKay talked about that, and I have been out on a farm in my area with the Soil Association to see it in practice. As I come from Ayrshire, you will not be surprised to know that my grandfather was a dairy farmer and I have friends who are dairy farmers. A lot of really interesting things are happening down there, such as the First Milk co-operative, which has a regenerative farming programme and is rewarding farmers with financial benefit for producing soils that are healthy by, for example, ensuring that there is clover and that the swards are healthy. There are also individual farms such as Mossgiel Organic Farm, which is working towards net zero and is able to gain public procurement contracts because it is recognised that the farm offers a valuable, nutritious product.

How do we make the move to regenerative farming accessible and well understood for those who are at the soil face, so to speak? I do not think that we do that at present. I am also concerned about the tier 4 issue. Is there enough resource around that? How do we address that?

David, will you start, as you have touched on that aspect already?

You are absolutely right to highlight a lot of great practice that is currently going on. Many farmers are driving positive change around what might be termed “regenerative farming”. The difficulty that I have with that term is that there is a very loose definition—it is essentially a set of principles rather than a set of things that can be measured through standards, for example. It is quite difficult to assess whether farmers are doing that or not, and I think that there would be pushback if we suggested assessment, because the whole point is that it is about principles and adapting to the specific context in which a farm sits, rather than following a prescriptive list of practices.

For the Soil Association, it is more about what constitutes best practice and, putting labels aside, saying to farmers, “What is best for your farm and what works best?” Some people might decide that they want to be organic and go down the certification route because there is a market there. Others might think that there is something in regenerative agriculture that they want to pursue—for example, bringing grazing livestock back to an arable rotation, which we need to see more of. Not everything is going to work for everyone, and it will be different for each farm, so it is more about the broader exchange and sharing of best practice.

Dr Vera Eory mentioned soil passports. That would be a good way of thinking about how we baseline and understand what soil health in an agricultural business looks like. I absolutely get that there is a set of principles for regenerative agriculture and that it will be, and look, different in each place. Nonetheless, how do we actually empower farmers? David McKay talked about farmers being able to look at their phone and see all the data on soil health on their farm and what is working well. Might a soil passport fit in with that kind of thinking?

It might well do. As I said earlier, the value of the data that is collected through the Soil Association Exchange is exactly as you have just described. It is to empower the farmer to be aware—and, first, to verify that what they are already doing is working. In the case of the farm that I took the minister to last week, there are very positive results on soil health and soil organic carbon, which is probably unsurprising as it is a livestock farm. That, in itself, recognises that the farmer is doing the right thing in many areas. That part of it is important.

12:15  

It is then a case of the farmer saying, “Where can I go to improve that? What might the recommendations be?” We provide advice and recommendations, and it is then at the farmer’s discretion to decide what he or she wants to do. It is important to keep that decision-making power with the particular farmer rather than imposing something on them. It is also important to provide the tools to let them go and do what is right for their holding.

Is it the case that, if the move towards sustainable and regenerative agriculture is done correctly, it will not necessarily impact on businesses’ long-term profitability if they are supported along the way to get themselves to that position? Even if we consider reducing herd sizes and reducing consumption, if that is done on a whole-farm basis and a societal basis that drives the kind of cultural change that we know that we have needed for the past 30 or 40 years, it should not affect profitability or our food security in Scotland.

The committee has been concerned about how we ensure that we get the right tree in the right place and that we think about trees on farms as something that is beneficial, as opposed to the argument that comes back to saying, “We can’t eat a tree.” That is a part of the whole thing that we need to consider.

That point about profitability is important, and I have mentioned it a couple of times in this meeting. Environmental organisations have not been clear enough about that—I say that as someone who is part of Scottish Environment LINK. We have not communicated the point well enough that, although it is about sustainable farming, it is also about profitable and sustainable farming, because that is the only way that we will make progress and farmers will be able to make a living.

The good news is that a lot of the regenerative practices that you talk about, particularly when it comes to reducing inputs, deliver a saving alongside delivering a more resilient farm business. Again, it goes back to the ways in which we talk about this—the communication is really important.

There is a difference between short-term and long-term profitability. That divide is probably one of the many reasons why we are stuck. In the short term, we might need investment. Agroforestry is a major investment. It is seen as risky, as are so many other things, but our report—which informed the seventh carbon budget—found that, on average, if we keep up with these changes on the farms, the net present value of the change eventually balances out. For many practices, it is actually negative because of the efficiency savings. All our previous reports found the same thing.

What we could not factor into our calculations was the long-term benefits from higher resilience for soil health or mechanical resistance to flooding, storms and heat resistance. We have not factored those in. We need to think about that, because long-term profitability is highly dependent on resilience.

I add that regenerative farming is beneficial for the principles and practices that are associated with it. I say “associated” because that is a loose word. Regenerative farming can benefit soil health and local biodiversity on farms, although there is no evidence that it improves our emission profile for greenhouse gases, so that is something to keep in mind. It is good for so many other things, but there is no clear evidence that it reduces our emissions.

That is something that we really need to bottom out, because a lot of people who are doing regenerative farming will say that they believe that they are sequestering a lot more carbon than their farms are emitting. We are on a journey to try to catch up with that kind of carbon auditing. It will be helpful once we get to the position where we understand that clearly and collectively.

Something that we have not yet discussed on carbon sequestration and storing carbon in the soil and trees, even though it is extremely important—it has been missing from the societal and scientific debate until now-ish—is that the carbon is temporary. We cannot escape the fact that, if someone buys the land and develops it or if they drain the land, cut down trees or no longer manage it using no-tillage or min-tillage—which could be in 50 or 100 years’ time or next year—that carbon will be back in the air.

Basically, sequestration can help us to reduce climate change’s peak effects, but it is not a clear long-term solution, because it cannot be guaranteed. However, there are policy instruments which could link, for example, carbon stock to negative or positive payments. I am not saying who would be paying whom—the farmer, landowner or taxpayer—to keep the carbon stocks, but payments could be linked to the stocks rather than the carbon flows. There are various options to ensure that whatever is sequestered stays that way. In that sense, regenerative practices and some other practices can be somewhat beneficial for the climate as well, but we need governance structures that ensure the longevity of the stocks.

To pick up on one small part of that detail, you have talked about food security, which is, in theory, a concern, although I am not sure that it really is in this context. Seventy per cent of arable land in Scotland is used for growing barley for whisky, and 15 per cent is for livestock feed. We are not food secure, and food security is a different thing to consider on top of all the things that we are talking about. The nature of farming that we probably need to move more towards—regenerative farming—is perhaps more likely to lead to there being more local supply and less of a market diktat.

I will describe the issue with an example. I am currently working on a history of Perth, and in the 1860s or something, there was a massive famine. All the local farmers were selling their grain to London, because that was where they got the highest price and, ironically, the council had to intervene and buy grain from London in order to ship it back to Perth to feed people.

We are not food secure—that is not how we operate or how agriculture operates. Agriculture is there to serve a market. I sometimes worry that we overplay the food security card as a reason not to change anything.

Those contributions have been really helpful in setting a marker for us to think about the issues. We do not think about food security in such terms, so that is pretty helpful.

I do not want to open the Pandora’s box of global pricing of agricultural products, so we will miss that out.

To back what Dr Robinson said, we really need to think about food security from the consumer perspective, which is what matters. In that sense, poverty is a lot worse for food security than a change in import-export volumes. What really matters is how people can access food, and it does not matter whether it comes from Scotland, England or France.

Following your point about profitability and rewarding farmers for sequestering carbon dioxide, Dr Eory, I am thinking about biodiversity issues as well.

For instance, in a recent round-table meeting on forestry, I talked about supporting ground-nesting birds and managing land for the sake of biodiversity. In the Clyde valley, 23 farmers are now involved with the Clyde valley waders project. They are working with SAC Consulting and there is a lot of peer-to-peer learning on things such as cover cropping for curlew and planting oats for black grouse. Even though the oats do not contribute to the farm’s profitability, they are part of the support for improving biodiversity. It is all about the complexity of putting the right tree in the right place, because trees can sometimes harbour predators that predate on ground-nesting birds. How do we reward farmers for actions such as implementing changes in their farm practice to support biodiversity?

I am not an expert on biodiversity, although, of course, it links a lot with the greenhouse gas issue, so I know a bit about it. In general, on support, we need to think long term and at a societal level. First, we have subsidies that we distribute for certain things and not others. We can definitely think about how to re-engineer the subsidy system. That has been going on slowly, but it can be ratcheted up.

The other thing that we have to think about is who pays for what and whether, in the long term, the current subsidies will be sufficient to pay for everything that we want the land to provide. We might come to the conclusion that the system is okay, in which case we just keep on using that taxpayer money to fund afforestation and work on peatlands and nesting birds. However, I suspect that, especially on afforestation and peatland restoration, the current subsidy alone will not be enough. In that case, what do we do?

That is where a false hope crept in and keeps going up as a bubble. We—society, the Government, political parties or whoever—think that private finance is coming to the rescue and that white knights will pay for all our biodiversity initiatives and carbon sequestration, but they will not. Although a few investors buy in the voluntary carbon markets, most go for much lower risks and industrial solutions. Investors are not really touching voluntary carbon markets. I can go into details, but the bottom line is that agricultural land use is tiny. It will not do much, because the carbon sequestration is temporary.

Eventually, we will have to find the money to pay for what we want to do. We have to decide where that money will come from. For that, some sort of carbon pricing can help, because, if we tax those who emit too much, that can be redistributed for those who reduce their emissions and/or sequester carbon. We need to divert our thinking from just dishing out subsidies to getting some money from the high emitters, whether that be consumers or producers, and giving money to those who help in reducing emissions.

We will move on to our last topic. We have broadly covered it as part of the witnesses’ contributions, but Ariane Burgess might have a tidying-up question.

The last topic is knowledge transfer and capacity building. Mike Robinson said that education is the biggest skills deficit in every sector. David McKay talked about peer-to-peer learning and the tiny amount of money for that in tier 4, which needs to be increased. Dave Reay also talked about that.

The 2020 update to the climate change plan talks about all the different things that the Government is focusing on, such as communication methods, using technology and media to best effect, how to get the information over and how to build capacity in farmers. We have talked about peer-to-peer knowledge transfer and David McKay talked about farmer-led clusters. What mechanisms should be used to facilitate knowledge transfer between research institutions, policy makers and the farming community to meet the climate and adaptation goals? I am asking not necessarily about farmer-to-farmer knowledge transfer but about how we get what Vera Eory has talked about all morning to farmers through policy makers.

12:30  

For more than 10 years, the Soil Association has been involved in a project called innovative farmers. The idea behind it is to bring together a group of farmers who are trying to solve a specific problem. It might be pests, disease or climate related, for instance. Whatever it is, the farmers are matched with academics and researchers who can provide a level of scientific rigour to what they are doing and can then conduct on-farm field labs to assess and work towards a solution to the particular problem. We have found that model to be very productive and successful for a number of years now, and I think that it could be replicated. A lot of that has happened in England, although we have also had many successful field labs in Scotland. As I say, that can be replicated and, with support, it could be scaled up significantly across the country.

Another thing came to mind as you were speaking. I have been made aware, through Jo Hunt, of the report that he has been working on—and which the committee has been involved in—on skills and the pipeline that is required, working with the different education institutions in Scotland. We have endorsed that, and we fully support what he has proposed. That would also be a good way of directing resources in this space.

I will add two other points. First, clear long-term goals can help a lot with having a unified understanding and message in the advisory system, as well as helping farmers. If the goalposts are changing, there is no learning—it is just a mess. Through its nitrogen regulations, the Netherlands has ratcheted up its requirements on fertilisation, both organic and synthetic, over the long term—over 20 years. Slightly stronger requirements were added every five years, but everyone knew where that was going. Therefore, contractors were already there. The whole innovation system started to boom and grow because there were contractors doing the injection and contractors doing the slurry acidification.

That required the advisers to learn about it, because the farmers started demanding people with the knowledge. You need to have goals and clear objectives across the whole system, so that everyone goes in the same direction. The farmers start demanding, and the advisers want to learn—and they will know what they need to learn.

Another aspect of what is going on—which is kind of the opposite—is unclarity or messiness, which can be caused inadvertently. In 2019, the NFU came up with an industry-wide goal to be net zero by 2040. The consequence of that pledge is that farmers now think that they have to be net zero. Advisers advise the farmers that they have to be net zero on the farm or, if not, that agriculture needs to be net zero, or agriculture and land use needs to be net zero. However, that is simply not true, because, in the 2050 goals, the net zero goal is not a sectoral one but an economy-wide one. Unfortunately, the NFU did the industry a huge disservice by sending that message, which it probably thought was along the right lines although it went in a completely different direction.

Until we have a clear objective of what we want our food system to look like in 2050 and beyond, we cannot give crystal-clear direction to the food industry and farmers. Until we can do that, the learning will consist of an innovation pocket here and there, with some organisations taking that on, but it will not all flow in the same direction.

A few of us have mentioned advisers. The Farm Advisory Service would be key here, and it needs capacity building to be the conduit for what many farmers and crofters are doing.

The other thing that I have always thought has great potential for capacity building, skills delivery and knowledge exchange, as well as all the other stuff that we have talked about, is regional land-use partnerships. I do not want to go down the frustration line again, but they are not where we all thought that they would be when they were first touted and when we had the pilots in the Borders and the north-east. However, they have potential in a structure to give that more devolved skills provision, based on the differences in how we farm around Scotland and what already exists in the form of knowledge exchange networks and so on. The RLUPs still have great potential, but maybe, in 10 years, we will again ask what happened to RLUPs and think that they could have delivered so much. That is another one to flag.

I mentioned that I sat on the 2020 group, which was the First Minister’s business leaders forum. For a couple of years, I thought that businesses were reluctant to do very much. However, when I spoke to more of them, I realised that they had the same problem: the Government did not want to tell them what to do and businesses were waiting to be asked.

That is why we wrote a climate solutions course—we realised that somebody needed to fill the void. The purpose of the course was to tell people what we were doing and why we were doing it. The solutions were largely derived from the old RPP—the report on proposals and policies—and RPP2, which have now become the climate change delivery plan.

The point is that we all understand that, if we are to have transformation, we need a positive narrative and we need to be clear about why we are doing what we are doing and what we are asking of people. I make the appeal that, for any statement, act or changes in subsidies, energy and effort needs to be put into going out, sharing that and explaining it. Often, we do not do that.

I am glad that Dave Reay mentioned the RLUPs, because I have a note that I took earlier in the conversation that says “Working at scale?” I have a good and constructive RLUP in the north-west and one thing that comes up when I talk to it is the need for what I call soft infrastructure, by which I mean something that is Government-funded that involves people who have the skills to convene the large-scale landscape groups. What do you think about that idea for speeding up the process? I hear your frustration on the RLUPs, but do we need to have that infrastructure of people who are not managing the land but who have the skills to project manage and bring everyone together?

Speaking as a climate geek, I would say that one of the big issues that we have as a community is that translation. I was talking about the climate risk stuff that is coming out, which is great. We have much better models and projections of climate risk in Scotland, at much higher resolution, but that is kind of worthless if it does not translate to what we do about it. That missing middle is an issue, particularly when we think about national aims and policies and data translating down to the farm scale. That is where I think that RLUPs have great potential.

The example that you give of the skill capacity for translation and joining the different scales is vital not just in the agriculture sector but across Scotland and in all sectors.

Thank you for your time this morning. Again, we have run over a little bit, but that indicates how interested we are in the topic. Thank you for joining us. We will, no doubt, be back in touch at some point, when we have the climate change plan in front of us.

That concludes the public part of the meeting. We will now move into private session.

12:39 Meeting continued in private until 13:00.