By Jez Fredenburgh Knowledge Exchange Fellow for AFN Network+ If you missed our annual network gathering last month, you can now watch the key presentations on YouTube, by clicking the names of our three distinguished and very thought-provoking speakers below. Judith Batchelar OBE is deputy chair of the Environment Agency and former brand director for Sainsbury’s. Navaratnam Partheeban OBE is a farm vet and founder of the British Veterinary Ethnicity & Diversity Society. Sue Pritchard is a farmer and chief executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission. Key points from Judith's presentation on supermarkets and food system change and challenges: “The world doesn’t produce what the world needs to be eating! We need to produce three times more fruit & veg globally than we are currently, if everyone is to eat a healthy, planet-friendly diet"
Judith's slide on what the world produces, and what the world needs to eat I looked up Judith's point about the UK's fruit and veg deficit, and it really is rather large: Out of 'food, feed and drink', fresh fruit and veg is the highest value category for imports, totalling £6.6 billion (2022). Exports of fresh fruit and veg, in comparison, totalled only £149m. That's a trade deficit of £6.45 billion! See full government stats here.
Designing a new model of insurance for farmers experimenting with climate friendly practices23/4/2024
By Zainab Oyetunde-Usman, Rothamsted Research This project, led by Zainab, was one of 16 scoping studies to receive funding from the AFN Network+ in 2023 In the UK, agriculture has a large impact on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for 68% of nitrous oxide and 47% of methane emissions – with a significant impact on the ecosystem. Farms are diverse and complex and mitigating farm emissions and achieving the UK’s 2050 net zero target will require experimentation to establish which combination of net-zero practices work best on each farm. Also, farms are open systems, meaning that agricultural production occurs in a wide range of lands and climate risks such as flood, biodiversity carbon loss etc can be linked and do not occur in isolation. Tackling climate risks and reducing farm emissions will therefore require collaboration at a landscape scale.
How do we reduce risk for farmers who want to experiment with various practices and see which can effectively tackle climate risk? This was the key research question raised by our team at the AFN Network+ Crucible workshop in June 2023, made up of researchers at Glasgow University (Rachel Opitz), Rothamsted Research (Zainab Oyetunde-Usman) and the SRUC (Joana Ferreira). Our idea of farmers’ risk-pooling through collective insurance to jointly tackle climate risk is akin to people taking building insurance for blocks of flats to cover major risks such as fire, flood, theft etc. Taking insurance individually is expensive and collective farm insurance products can provide a cheaper risk-pooling option accessible to all farmers. Also, innovation at a large scale has more impact than on a single farm. If you missed our annual network gathering last month, you can now watch the key presentations on YouTube, by clicking the names of our three distinguished and very thought-provoking speakers below:
Sue Pritchard is a farmer and chief executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission. Judith Batchelar OBE is deputy chair of the Environment Agency and former brand director for Sainsbury’s. Navaratnam Partheeban OBE is a farm vet and founder of the British Veterinary Ethnicity & Diversity Society. Key points from Sue’s presentation:
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May 2024
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