17
Examination of witnesses
Jerry Alford, Peter Cowlrick and John Williams.
Q37 The Chair: Good morning everyone, and welcome to the Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee. Today is the fourth session of our inquiry into the efficient use and management of nitrogen in the environment, and we will be focusing today on agriculture. We will be taking evidence from two expert panels of witnesses. The first panel will focus on innovative farmers and agronomists; the second will take evidence from farmer representative bodies, the NFU and the Nature Friendly Farming Network.
I remind everyone that the session is webcast live on Parliament TV and a transcript will be taken and made public. Witnesses will have the opportunity to review the transcript and make amendments as necessary if they wish to do so. I also remind everyone—members and witnesses—that any relevant interests should be declared the first time they speak.
I start by warmly welcoming our first panel and thanking them for taking the time to be with us today. It really is very much appreciated. Before asking the first question, may I ask each of you to spend a minute introducing yourselves? Jerry Alford, would you like to start?
Jerry Alford: I am the senior farming adviser at the Soil Association. In the Soil Association, we have the charity side as well as certification. I work at the charity as a farming adviser, so I work directly with the farmers we work with. I am a retired farmer; I used to have a mixed farm down in Devon. Within the Soil Association, we have Innovative Farmers, which supports farmer-led research—bottom-up rather than top-down—some of which also involves Horizon projects. For example, I am working on a Horizon Europe project called LEGUMINOSE, which is looking at intercropping. That is my area and why I am here.
John Williams: Good morning, everyone. I am a soil scientist with ADAS. I have spent much of my career carrying out field-based research—mainly Defra-funded—looking at the evidence base to support many of the Defra policies on reducing nutrient losses to the environment: nitrate leaching losses to water, ammonia emissions to air, and nitrous oxide emissions to the atmosphere. Most of my work is focused on improving the utilisation of organic materials as well as fertilisers as a way of improving the financial use of manures and fertilisers and minimising their impact on the environment.
Peter Cowlrick: Good morning, everyone. I am a technical director with CCC Ltd—an independent agronomy company based in the south of England—advising on about 80,000 acres of arable crops between Dorset and Kent. We have a range of farms from purely arable through to mixed. Over the years, I have been heavily involved with local water companies, looking at projects to minimise nutrient losses from agricultural systems.
The Chair: What are the main nitrogen management approaches that you yourselves or farms that you support use? In your answers, could you also say how cost effective you think these measures are?
Jerry Alford: From our point of view—the organic point of view—obviously, we are not allowed to use artificial nitrogen inputs of any form, so we are basing our whole farming system on working with nature by using pulses. In our arable rotation, we are using clovers and other crops such as lucerne and sainfoin as a source of nitrogen in the grass, arable and livestock systems to try to build up the nitrogen levels so we can monetise it and bring it back when we grow the cash crops within our system. The objective is always to try to minimise the loss because if we lose anything that we produce, it is not to our value, so there is a cyclical nature to the way we use nitrogen in our systems.
On the question about productivity, it depends on the system. Certainly, within the veg cropping systems, we have yields very much closer to conventional, whereas in the arable cropping, our yields are maybe 40% to 50% of what they would get in a conventional system. So we are not pushing for yield; we are trying to make sure our system works. We concentrate on a whole-farm system, where one part of the farm supplies nutrients to the next, and we send it back the other way later on. The whole idea is to use nature and save the nitrogen we create to make sure that it is available to us for the next stages of our rotation.
The Chair: Just to stay with this very briefly, what are the benefits you see?
Jerry Alford: From a practical point of view, working with nature, we are trying to use those resources we have; we do not want to waste them. We find we are getting less wastage of nitrogen through the system. We have tried keeping it on the farm. Working with nature, we are also less dependent on all the other inputs associated with farming practices, such as pesticides and herbicides, and are trying to have a much more balanced farming system.
John Williams: We will promote a nutrient management planning approach to nutrient use on the farm, using soil analysis as a basis to understand what the soil nutrient supply is likely to be. We would then use information on manure applications in terms of understanding the nutrient supply characteristics from them, which can be quite complicated because it requires an understanding of the nutrient content of the materials and analysing those, and they can be very variable for all sorts of reasons.
We then use information from decision support tools—such as the AHDB’s Nutrient Management Guide—to ensure we are supplying nutrients and only topping up with bag fertiliser where we have to, to meet optimum crop demand. The benefit of that is it will generally be the most economical way of farming for most situations; obviously, if fertiliser is expensive, you do not want to be putting too much on. Similarly, you need to make sure that fertilisers are appropriate to make sure that the crops are optimal, taking account of what is in the soil and what is supplied from manures. Topping up with bag fertiliser is probably the most effective approach to doing that.
Obviously, there is the optimum rate for fertiliser, and nitrogen fertiliser in particular is governed by the value of the crop compared with the cost of the fertiliser. When fertilisers are expensive, it may well be worth reducing the amount of fertiliser you are applying to make sure you are being as economical as possible with the fertiliser. Similarly, if grain or commodity prices increase, there may be benefit in applying more fertiliser, so it is important to look at the economics when you are planning your fertilisers as well. But, basically, if it is in the soil and you are getting it from the manures, you do not need to apply it from the bag.
There are several mitigation methods you can use to reduce the nitrogen losses from manure management. Applying organic materials is a very leaky thing to do because you are likely to lose nitrogen, either by ammonia volatilisation or nitrate leaching, depending on when you apply the materials. Those losses will depend on soil type, weather, climate and all the rest of it, so quite a lot needs to be considered, but generally, it is making best use of the manures, knowing what the nutrient content is, quantifying the application rate, and cutting back on the bag. It sounds dead simple, but it can be quite complicated to do in practice.
Peter Cowlrick: As advisory practitioners, we utilise a whole gamut of tools that are available to the industry now to support our advice on farm. As John has mentioned, that would include the RB209 and PLANET-type decision support systems. It would also include undertaking soil nitrogen testing at the start of the spring to evaluate how much nitrogen is left after the winter to give a baseline to recommendations that we make on farm or to our customers in terms of the nitrogen approach they need to take.
A lot of our farms are growing high-quality, bread-making wheats that require a very specific management system compared with baseline feed wheats and usually require supplementary nitrogen to achieve the quality aspirations that the growers are seeking. As part of that process, a lot of farms are now integrating precision nitrogen application systems, using remote sensing technologies to assess the canopy structure and architecture because it gives a good indication of how much nitrogen has been accumulated within the canopy over the winter period. Without going into any specific detail, different soil types will hold different levels of soil-based nitrogen, depending on organic matter levels.
Using that kind of technology then allows you to vary the rate of nitrogen applied across a field throughout the season, which basically means you are not oversupplying areas where you have excessive canopy growth, but you are targeting the areas that are perhaps a bit behind the curve in terms of canopy development. An advantage of that system is that you end up with a slightly more even grain quality when you harvest the field because you have had a better distribution of nitrogen within the canopy, and therefore your protein levels tend to be tighter, which usually stands you a greater chance of reaching market specifications.
The other thing we have been heavily involved in is recycling nutrients as much as possible within the rotation, integrating both catch and cover crops between crops. Where there would normally have been bare ground in the winter, there would be a cover crop to accumulate between 50 and 100 kilograms of nitrogen from the soil and prevent that being washed out during winter rainfall events. That is quite an extensive array of systems. The soil minimal nitrogen testing that we undertake is very cost effective, and we often see savings of between £50 and £100 a hectare on nitrogen input based on the results we achieve from that.
The Chair: Lord Leicester, you had a supplementary?
Earl of Leicester: Two very quick questions. In my register of interests, I am a large mixed farmer in north Norfolk, undertaking agriculture through regenerative agricultural principles. First, what percentage of British farming cover is organic? Secondly, how long has RB209 been in place and is it fit for purpose?
Jerry Alford: To answer the first one, currently about 3% of the land is under organic management.
The Chair: Sorry, could I ask the panel to explain what RB209 is before we start to talk about it in more detail?
John Williams: RB209 was a booklet originally developed by MAFF; I think the first edition was in around 1970. In effect, it is the industry standard fertiliser recommendation system. It was managed by MAFF and Defra until around 2014, when it was handed over to the AHDB—Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. It is now called the Nutrient Management Guide and forms the basis of FACTS, which is the Fertiliser Advisers Certification & Training Scheme. For people to be able to give fertiliser advice, they have to be FACTS-qualified, so they have to understand what RB209 is. Do you want to chat about whether it is fit for purpose now?
The Chair: Perhaps we can take the Earl of Leicester’s question now.
Earl of Leicester: The first question has been answered: 3%.
Jerry Alford: We are finding that a lot of farmers are now adopting organic practices, so my message here is not that everyone has to go organic. It would be great if everyone did, but it is the practice we have used in organic for the last 75 years. Cover crops and grass leys in rotation have been mentioned. The use of manures and livestock within the system and even using grass crops within the arable rotation are ways of building that fertility and soil health, which have been picked up through that regenerative way of farming. Although it is 3%, there is a large percentage of people now saying, “Well, I’m doing it anyway; why don’t I go organic?” so we are getting a big uplift in arable farmers converting, partly because they are seeing a marketplace as well.
The Chair: Can you just say very quickly what you mean by organic farming?
Jerry Alford: An organic farm would be certified with an organic certifying body to farm to the standards that are UK legislative standards.
Earl of Leicester: Which is, in effect, using no fertiliser or ag chem?
Jerry Alford: Yes.
Earl Russell: Can I clarify: organic practices would not result in organic-certified crops?
Jerry Alford: No. The organic practices themselves are those actions that carry on, but you still have to go through the no fertiliser, no chemical, and be certified to be organic.
Lord Lennie: Is it on the increase?
Jerry Alford: Yes.
Lord Trees: I have a question for Mr Alford, really, and it is a question I suppose we should ask at the end of our report, but I am going to ask it at the beginning. You have described a circular economy, which sounds wonderful, and I am sure we would all want that, but you said you were not going after yields. If every farm in the UK practised that totally circular economy, how much more food would we have to import, for example, and how would it compare to the current yields we get?
Jerry Alford: It is that million-dollar question as to whether we can feed the country organically. In some things we produce, the answer is yes. Some 30% of food produced is wasted anyway, and I am not saying organic food is not wasted. There is that perception that it is expensive, which we feel is wrong. We have a 30% uplift in the value of crops at the farm gate, but it is 70% or 80% when it gets to a shop, so there is profiteering coming into that somewhere along the line. Veg production is something we are really poor on in the UK in terms of quantities. We can do a lot more within organic rotations because that will become part of that rotational system. I am trying to hedge my bets and not answer your question directly.
Lord Duncan of Springbank: I have a very quick question. Are you talking about England alone, not the whole of the UK?
Jerry Alford: No, we are talking about the whole of the UK here.
Q38 Lord Jay of Ewelme: Welcome and thank you for being with us. We inevitably have a rather national approach to these issues, but I guess all farming countries are facing more or less the same sorts of issues and problems as we are. I wondered whether you thought other countries are doing things from which we should learn. I gather that the Netherlands and Denmark in particular have regulated on slurry acidification and fertiliser application and have set requirements for using urea-based fertilisers. Are there lessons there for us? Are there things we should be doing that we are not or should not be doing that they are?
John Williams: In terms of slurry acidification, ADAS, Rothamsted Research and Bangor University recently completed a comprehensive study on the practicalities and technical aspects of slurry acidification. It is very effective at reducing ammonia emissions by 80% generally, compared with unacidified slurry. It also has the benefit of being able to reduce emissions from the house, store and land spreading—each part of the manure management continuum. For example, if you were to cover a slurry store and did not have an ammonia mitigation strategy at spreading, unless you reduced the ammonia emissions, any ammonia saved at storage would then be lost at spreading.
The problem is it is hugely expensive to implement. Most systems use sulfuric acid as the acidifier, and obviously the cost of the acid and the sustainability of the supply would be a significant concern there. There are other ways of acidifying slurries, such as plasma technologies, where you fix nitrogen out of the atmosphere and acidify using, in effect, nitric acid. Again, that has been very effective at reducing the ammonia emissions, but it is very energy intensive and expensive to implement. In theory it is good and would work very well; it is just a question of cost and practicalities of being able to install it.
Acidification generally is more suited to control farming systems, such as pig farming, and we know there are acidification systems in use in the UK, but in terms of the saved nitrogen from reduced ammonia emissions, it would certainly would not pay for the cost of the equipment and the operation of it. Using abated urea fertiliser is a really good thing because it reduces the risk of ammonia emission. Quite a lot of extensive work has been done in the past looking at ammonia emissions from urea, and on average 20% of the total nitrogen that you are applying with urea will volatilise. So if you are using urease inhibitors to reduce the potential for ammonia emission, that is a really good thing to do.
Lord Jay of Ewelme: If other countries are doing these things that are expensive, how do they manage the expenses?
John Williams: I am not sure; you would have to talk to them. There are economies of scale a lot of the time as well, but whether they get more government funding or not, I am not sure, I will be honest with you.
Jerry Alford: In the Dutch situation, it is because of that really intense indoor livestock system. They are rather overstocked in livestock because of the way the system has developed. There is a tax on overproduction, and basically, the way it was pitched was that if a farmer can invest to not have to pay the tax, it is almost like the tax becomes a fine rather than a tax. It is a way to try to keep the farming system going as it was, rather than acknowledging that the system might be slightly broken. That is where the problem comes. Urea is obviously not something we use in organic because it is an artificial fertiliser. We have not been directly asked about the acidification of slurry as to whether it would be approved, but the use of sulfuric acid is a worry for us as an organisation.
Peter Cowlrick: In that respect, my understanding with the acidification and slurry is that there are a few downsides environmentally. One is that using that kind of material increases the availability or solubility of phosphate in the soil, so actually, if you have catchments that already have high levels of phosphate, the last thing you really want to be doing is using acidified slurries because you are going to increase the amount of phosphate that is potentially flushed out of the system. You could also be overapplying sulphur, which could acidify the soil as well, so there are a number of issues there, as well as some other environmental concerns.
On the urea side of things, the UK has adopted a requirement now for urea that is applied after 1 April to be applied only with an inhibitor to reduce ammonia losses. There is already legislation that was introduced in 2024 where all applied urea products have to have a stabiliser or a urea or ammonia reducing agent applied.
Lord Jay of Ewelme: Just one final question: is anybody abroad doing anything that we could or should be doing here?
The Chair: For example, with slurry covers?
John Williams: We have learned an awful lot from the Dutch and the Danes over the past; they were ahead of the game in what they were doing. Certainly, the use of slurry covers is being encouraged in this country and the use of the band spreaders for reducing ammonia emissions and all the rest of it in slurries is being brought in. It is mainly how we implement the measures; there are no real technology things there. It is a question of practically implementing the measures on farm in an economically sustainable way.
The Chair: I am going to come to the Earl of Leicester for his question and maybe you could ask your supplementary within that.
Earl of Leicester: I think it is very important that we let Mr Williams and Mr Cowlrick answer the assertions Mr Alford has made about how organic could feed Britain because that is really important. As an observation on regenerative agriculture, you might not suggest it is a halfway house to organic; maybe a quarter- or third-way house.
John Williams: There are various statistics out there that suggest there are probably 2 billion people alive in the world today because of manufactured nitrogen fertilisers. Ultimately, if you apply nitrogen, by and large you are looking at recommended rates, then you are looking to double the yields where you do not apply nitrogen. There is an awful lot to be said for the regenerative agricultural approach because ultimately it means looking after the soil and making the soil better, and improving the soil and putting organic matter back into the soil is really important for keeping the soil healthy.
Ultimately, you want the water to be able to drain away from the soil, the soil to be well structured, and the roots to be able to get down to exploit the nutrients. By changing rotations, putting grass into the rotation, using manures effectively and using cover crops and the like, you are building up organic matter, which is obviously a very good thing for soils. It is not one or the other, in my opinion; it is a combination of making sure that the soils are in good nick and well looked after, and then managing the nutrients appropriately based on the soil analysis and manure nutrient supply. There is an awful lot that conventional agricultural systems can learn from the regen people.
Peter Cowlrick: UK agriculture is moving towards an integration of organic principles and conventional systems. There are no two ways about it: that sustainable system has to be right going forward. One of the biggest issues with a purely organic-type system—if that is the way you wanted to move agriculture—is you need to extend the rotations because you have to increase herbal leys and that kind of thing to elevate fertility so you can then grow cereals; for example, in a non-nitrogen or non-bag nitrogen situation.
Yields are clearly going to be lower, and our experience with organic farms is genuinely yields of about half of what a conventional farm would normally be achieving, but it can be less than that in some years. The landmass required to produce organic food to feed the nation would be considerable, and unfortunately, there is probably not enough ground to go around in the UK to achieve that.
The Chair: Jerry Alford, I will give you a chance to come back on that, and then, Lord Leicester, we will move on to the question on regulations.
Jerry Alford: I was not attempting to say that we should go fully organic because I understand the practicalities of feeding a population that is growing. My messaging really is that if we look at the organic practices, the soil comes first, so building up the resilience in soil.
The Chair: There are lots of nods that the transcript will not pick up.
Jerry Alford: The good regenerative farmers are reducing their fertiliser rates because they are adopting the practice that we from the Soil Association look at and say, “They are organic in principle; there are overwinter cover crops; there are diverse rotations; there are more pulses in the rotation”. We are replacing soya that we are not importing because we are growing more pulses, so if we can get more UK farmers growing pulses, we can reduce soya importation. Those are the sorts of messages we would like this committee to be considering: that direction of travel to look to more pulse production within the UK systems. That is the messaging I was trying to get across.
The Chair: Lord Russell, I know you would like to ask a supplementary but I want to move on to regulations. Colleagues, if you have any really important questions, I hope we will have some time to come back to those at the end, but we must move on to regulations now.
Q39 Earl of Leicester: What data relating to nitrogen are farms required to measure and report on under current regulations? Would requirements for more transparent reporting reward and incentivise positive action?
John Williams: Under the Farming Rules for Water in England and the water pollution regulations in Wales, there has to be nutrient management planning or nitrogen management planning, which takes account of nitrogen supplied by manures as well as by fertilisers based on RB209 recommendation systems. One issue with that is that RB209, which we were discussing earlier, was developed only as a guidance system, so it was recommendation and guidance, not regulation.
The issue with RB209 as I see it now is that, under the Farming Rules for Water, the guidance has been taken as regulation. Because of the difficulties of dealing with soils, climate and the interaction between soils in climate and cropping, it is very difficult to be prescriptive about the amount of nitrogen you should be applying down to the last 10 kilograms per hectare. That is one of the issues with RB209 and the regulation.
Under the action plan for nitrate vulnerable zones, livestock farmers have to demonstrate that they have less than 170 kilograms per hectare of excretal nitrogen across their farm area as well, but those apply only to 60% or so of land in England but to the whole of the country in Wales.
The Chair: Could I ask you to say a few words about where you think the gaps are in regulations?
Jerry Alford: One of the points you made is reporting, and I am not aware that there is actually a requirement to report. You are waiting to be inspected to prove you are right, so if there are no inspectors, there is no actual evidence that you have complied with the regulations. From an organic farm point of view, we have to demonstrate on an inspection that our livestock stocking rates produce less than 170 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare. We do not use artificial fertiliser. You could have a farm that has 2,000 acres and has a small chicken unit, so it complies with the regulations but is actually massively overproducing in one small area and creating the problem. There is no reporting, in my understanding.
Peter Cowlrick: There are some catchments. I will cite the Poole Harbour area down in Dorset—managed and enforced by Wessex Water—where farmers are actually restricted to applying 180 kilograms of nitrogen to any wheat crop. They are not allowed to grow any pulses, for example, because of potential losses of nitrogen between crops. That is a very rigorously applied approach requiring whole-farm nutrient auditing and it may be example for the industry to follow further down the line. It is very much a catchment-based approach, which in my experience is probably one of the more successful ways of gaining adoption and may be something to be looked at in the future. It is an area where perhaps you could fill the gap between a holistic advisory platform such as RB209 to a more broad-based system where you are evaluating what is going in and coming out of the system in terms of nutrients.
The Chair: Can I just ask a quick question about EPRs—environmental permitting rights? Are they comprehensive and broad enough? Do they cover all the things they should cover?
John Williams: They are very effective at controlling the point source pollution and pollution risk from that aspect. A lot of the pollution incidents that occur from slurry management and the like would be under the environmental protection regulations. They are robust.
The Chair: All three would agree on that?
Peter Cowlrick: I would agree with that.
Jerry Alford: I do not have a great deal of knowledge of that.
Earl Russell: I have a very quick question on the idea of a catchment-based approach. In terms of the Government’s review of the water industry, are you plugged in and related to that in feeding that in?
Peter Cowlrick: We have farms that are involved with it, and one of our agronomists down in Dorset is working with Wessex Water undertaking some trial evaluations, but we are not involved with policy-making.
The Chair: We will be covering that in more detail later.
Q40 Lord Krebs: We have already touched on the topic of my question, but I want to ask about the Farming Rules for Water. All farmers and land managers are required to test their soils and have a nutrient management plan, which John already mentioned. How are farmers using these plans, what are the economic impacts, and would there be any benefit in going further and requiring farm-level nutrient budgets?
As part of answering, I note the figures are that only 57% of farmers actually have a nutrient management plan, a number that has not changed over the last decade or more, and although farmers are required to undertake nutrient testing for soil, only three-quarters regularly tested for nutrients, and about the same for pH. My added question is: why is the uptake low and what are the sanctions on farmers for not responding to the requirements?
John Williams: Fundamental to sustainable farming is understanding what inputs you need to address or provide to support the crop production. Obviously, each farm is different in terms of likely level of production. There will be a lot of farms that do not use any fertiliser at all, in which case there is probably not a lot of point in doing nutrient management planning. Certainly, if you use manures and fertilisers, it makes absolute sense to do nutrient management planning from a cost-effective perspective because fertiliser is probably the most expensive input on most farms. If you do not know how much you should be applying, you are potentially wasting money in applying excess fertiliser and causing damage to the environment, but also potentially underfertilising as well and not meeting your crop potential.
Do they need to do more? I do not think they do because it is relatively straightforward. In terms of transparency, being encouraged to act on that nutrient management plan and getting people potentially to change practice is one of the biggest challenges I have had in my career. It is really hard and takes a lot of doing; just being told you have to do it does not necessarily mean that it will happen.
Lord Krebs: It is weird if it actually saves them money and they are not doing it.
Jerry Alford: “We have always done it this way. What can you do to tell us to do it differently?”
John Williams: “My dad’s put 20-10-10 in a bag of fertiliser: 20% nitrogen, 10% phosphate, 10% potash. He has done it for 30 years”. “But you do not need any phosphate”. “But I still do it because that is what my dad did”.
Peter Cowlrick: We are maybe on the other end of the spectrum: all our farms have nutrient management plans and always have done, really, for the last 25, 30 years. In essence, really, within the industry, if you are using bagged fertiliser, you need to be getting qualified advice, so you should be getting advice from a FACTS-qualified adviser. If you are Red Tractor registered, you will be inspected on nutrient management plans, you need to have qualified for your N max and you need nitrate vulnerable zones regulatory requirements as well, so there is quite a comprehensive system in place to actually check on what is going on on farm. The other adjunct to that is the rollout under SFI of sustainable farming incentive payments for nutrient management planning, precision farming, et cetera. There has been quite a positive uptake across the board with that respect.
Lord Krebs: Jerry, is the uptake higher among organic farmers? What proportion of organic farmers have a nutrient management plan?
Jerry Alford: We have to do the nutrient management plan as part of our inspection anyway.
Lord Krebs: So it is 100% of organic farmers.
Jerry Alford: Yes. It would be one of the first things the inspector would request to see to make sure that we are not overstocking. It also therefore becomes a really important part of the way we as an organic farm would manage our inputs and what we do to make sure we are targeting the nutrients to the places that are most appropriate. Within a rotation, there is an element of moving it around; for example, slurries or manures would go to this field this year because it is going into the arable cropping rotation.
I talked to a couple of adviser friends outside the organic sector to answer this broader question for you, and one problem with the SFI nutrient management plan is that people are getting it but they do not actually know what to do with it because it is a new piece of paper that they have never actually had to deal with. They are getting paid for doing it and they have it. Sadly, on some farms, soil tests they have done actually just go in the cupboard waiting for someone to come and ask for them; they are not actually analysed or investigated.
We move to that question of independent advice, how targeted and accurate it is, and how farmers learn from what they are being told. This is an area where there is perhaps a weakness in farming at the minute. We have an independent agronomist here, which is great; we need more independent and less vested interest sometimes.
Peter Cowlrick: That is a very valid point, actually. Delivering nutrient management plans is all well and good, but you have to have supplementary input to advise how to actually—
The Chair: Who is best placed to provide that input?
Peter Cowlrick: Independent advisory organisations, such as ADAS and the Association of Independent Crop Consultants, of which I am a member. Between us, we would cover probably 60% of the arable—
The Chair: What is the incentive for farmers to approach that advice?
Peter Cowlrick: Well, there would be a cost to it; this is the issue. Clearly, we are not going to give the advice for free, but within catchment management systems or projects, there is very often free advice to those engaging with it, using conduits such as ourselves or ADAS to deliver that advice. So there is a funding facilitation, if you like.
John Williams: The catchment sensitive farming initiative, for example, would be something that would provide some information like that.
Earl Russell: On the advice point outside catchment areas, is there scope for the Government to be funding more advice?
Peter Cowlrick: I think so. SFI is generating a lot of interest in applying for some of these options, and nutrient management plans are one of those. But as a standalone, if it is not followed up and backed up, then it is going to be a bit wasteful.
John Williams: There was an initiative from the future farming resilience fund work as well, going on to farms and talking about soils and nutrient management, which was quite useful. Ad hoc schemes such as that are good, but it is a question of having and maintaining relationships with farmers. In all the work we have been involved in with social scientists, a lot of it comes down to having people who are trusted sources of advice, and if that trusted source of advice is telling you to put 20-10-10 on, you will put 20-10-10 on. But if John Williams from ADAS comes and tells you, then it is a case of, “Who the hell are you coming to tell me how to do this?”
Earl Russell: So it is reliable and ongoing.
John Williams: Absolutely, but it has to be consistent, evidence-based, independent advice, and it has to be delivered in a way—in a language—that farmers can understand. In Wales, a lot of the time, that means being in Welsh, and even now, we still have to talk in imperial units.
Earl of Leicester: As an adjunct to Lord Krebs’s question about regulation, correct me if I am wrong, but if you as an arable farmer are not Red Tractor accredited, you basically cannot sell your cereals.
Jerry Alford: There are still marketplaces; it depends on who you want to sell it to.
Peter Cowlrick: There is a market, but you generally sell at a discount, put it that way, and you are limited in where you can sell your grain. You certainly would find it very hard to sell quality wheat, such as bread-making wheat or malted barley.
Q41 Lord Lennie: Peter has already indicated this, but in your view, how effective are catchment sensitive farming schemes and river basin management plans, and is there a good case to widen such schemes?
Peter Cowlrick: I have had quite a lot of involvement with catchment sensitive farming projects, in both Sussex and Hampshire. In my view, they are an excellent means of generating engagement with local farms, both from a training perspective and with the requirements for a specific catchment in terms of nutrient management and tailoring those nutrient management practices to minimise losses within that particular system. From a more holistic point of view, it is also encouraging soil management because that is very much an important part of managing diffuse pollution. So I am a big fan of it, and if that can be expanded in some way beyond key catchments, the principles are already there and proven, so they would be rolled out very readily.
John Williams: I would agree with that. It is a really excellent thing to do and provides the opportunity for people to build communities and, again, have this discussion about a trusted source of advice. One problem has been staff retention. The catchment sensitive farming officers have been put in place, they will be there for a year or two, and then, because they see better career opportunities elsewhere, more money and all the rest of it, they leave. Once you have lost that connection, it has to be built up again in terms of developing the relationships.
I knew some fantastic people in Norfolk who worked with ADAS years and years ago but had been in the community for decades. They were excellent people who were respected by the farming community and were able to get those messages across in a practical and sensible way. Again, it comes down to speaking the farmer language, and that is not easy unless you have been part of the agricultural community.
Jerry Alford: To add to that, there are other adviser organisations—the Rivers Trust and the like—that are clashing in some ways because they are all trying to do the same thing but with slightly different angles, rather than working collaboratively to get the same message. Sometimes there is also that fear from a farming point of view that you do not actually want to get a government adviser to come on farm just in case they find something you did not want them to. As an example, with someone I did persuade to go and do it, there was nothing wrong with the slurry store; it was the silage clamp that was the problem. That was actually a positive change for him, but it was that fear of being inspected and penalised that was part of the problem.
Lord Lennie: “There is a man from the Government here to help you”.
The Chair: Is the fact that there is a broad catchment area a deterrent, if you like, to individual farmers taking action or feel as though they are being rewarded when they have taken action?
Peter Cowlrick: In general, they usually feel rewarded because there may be supplementary payments within the catchment sensitive farming schemes to indulge in practices they are not already doing; for example, maybe precision farming or incorporation of cover crops or catch crops if they are not already doing it. There is plenty of scope for that, I believe.
Q42 Baroness Whitaker: Good morning. I should declare that I live in a national park surrounded by farming neighbours. It looks as if there are definitely benefits to moving away from a dependence on synthetic fertilisers towards a greater reliance on recycled nutrient sources, such as digestate, biosolids and slurry. Perhaps just for the record, you would care to itemise these and say what some challenges of that approach are.
John Williams: The challenges are, just in the nature of the materials, they are very variable and heterogeneous a lot of the time. Certainly, the liquid manures, slurries and digestates are very difficult and expensive to transport and store because they are 5% dry matter and 95% water, so it is difficult to transport them long distances. Locally, obviously there can be nutrient surpluses on livestock farms; one issue we have is that most nutrients tend to be in the west of the country, where most of the cows are. If we can get into a situation where we can move the manures around within catchments so we do not end up with hotspots on farms, that is a really good thing to do.
The main challenge is being able to understand what the nutrient supply from the materials is, having robust analysis of the materials, and being able to understand simple things such as knowing what the application rates are. It can vary significantly between manure types and even from season to season because of the potential for rainfall, et cetera, to dilute the materials.
Peter Cowlrick: Logistics are a huge issue with moving bulky materials from one area to another. In our experience, although we utilise a lot of these products, generally, the restriction is a radius of 10 to 20 miles to move product from one location to another and then store it or apply it. Clearly, farms are becoming increasingly conscious about their carbon footprint, and a lot of farms are already doing carbon benchmarking or assessing how much carbon their business is generating. Clearly, if you are moving bulky materials such as that, you are importing carbon, in effect, so it is quite an issue.
Baroness Whitaker: Can we itemise the benefits, though?
Peter Cowlrick: Well, the benefits are huge in terms of soil, organic matter and improving soil health; we are big proponents of that. One solution potentially with the biosolids would be to actually heat treat it and pelletise it, so you actually produce a much denser product that could then be spread through existing fertiliser spreading equipment. That used to happen; a water company in our neck of the woods did actually do that, a product called Bestway Granules about 10 to 20 years ago, but it was just too expensive to carry on producing it.
Jerry Alford: Biosolids are not approved in organic, which in itself does not change a thing. The use of digestates and moving fertilisers around is what we do organically. Obviously, we work within the whole-farm approach. There is a scope for a whole-catchment approach, as has been pointed out. The Wye Valley gets brought up a lot at the moment because of the chicken industry. To move the chicken muck from the Wye Valley back to where the wheat came from in Norfolk is somewhat economically impractical but perhaps we need to look at some way of being able to move nutrients back because otherwise we have it constantly coming in. There is an irony that we are bringing in a lot of nitrogen as the protein in soya, and so from a national point of view, what does our national nutrient balance look like? That is perhaps something we need to be thinking about a little more as well.
There are issues locally with digestate and with land being taken up to grow the materials that are used to make them, such as maize and whole-crop ryes, and pressures on small farms to try to compete against big AD plants. The nutrients coming out of AD are actually more volatile than the alternatives, so it is a pollution source in its own right as well. It is not perfect.
Baroness Whitaker: To what extent could it be manufactured locally in the farm itself?
Jerry Alford: Again, it is scale, is it not? If you have a small-scale AD plant on a dairy farm, it has a slurry store already, so it can manage the use of that. You get less ammonia. We get ammonia production from the AD plant itself, and then you get a more volatile form of nitrogen, so actually more leachable. It may not actually go up into the air, but it is going down into the watercourses. Sometimes it is about finding the best, most pragmatic solution.
John Williams: In terms of food waste, a very sensible thing to do is to anaerobically digest it because ultimately you are bringing nutrients back into the farming system which otherwise would have ended up in landfill. In terms of the benefits of manures, the main thing is reducing the cost of fertiliser inputs but also potentially the carbon footprint because nitrogen fertiliser is a Haber-Bosch process which uses huge amounts of fossil fuels to produce it. If you can utilise the nitrogen in the manures that are already around, you will save the carbon footprint of fertiliser production.
Baroness Whitaker: Is there any resistance to the relatively novel innovation that you are advocating? Do people think, “Oh, this is new stuff. I’d rather do it the way we always did it”?
John Williams: Obviously, livestock manures have been recycled into agricultural systems ever since the agricultural systems have been around, from that perspective. Because of the uncertainties surrounding the nutrient supply characteristics of the manures, people are reluctant to make full use of the nutrients. There is always that potential for people to top up just to be on the safe side, particularly with nitrogen.
The Chair: Thank you. We are at time. Lord Krebs has been indicating for some time that he would like to ask a question. After that, I will call this session to an end and we will move on to the next one.
Lord Krebs: A very quick question: I just wondered whether there are risks associated with using recycled biological material; first, from chemical contamination, so heavy metals might be concentrated in slurry or other biological waste; and, secondly, in terms of a spread of disease. For example, we know that Mycobacterium bovis can survive in slurry, so if you are spreading slurry you are spreading disease.
John Williams: There are controls under the PAS scheme—the PAS 100 and PAS 110—for compost and digestate, which means that materials that comply with those schemes have been pasteurised to reduce the microbial loading. There are also limits on the physical and chemical contaminants that can be included in those materials. But you are absolutely right: source control is really important. Biosolids are excellent sources of—
The Chair: Short answers, please.
John Williams: As long as the source control regulations are in place, then it is not.
Lord Krebs: We have seen from earlier questions that farmers do not comply with the regulations anyway.
John Williams: The producers have to comply with the PAS, and the biosolids assurance scheme—the industry standard—is a really good way of ensuring that the material that goes to land is safe. Ultimately, you need the farmers in terms of being able to have access to the materials going to land more than the farmers need the producers, so it is in the producers' interests to make sure it is good gear going to land, basically.
The Chair: Thank you very much to our three panellists again for the very useful information they have imparted to us. I am very conscious that we have colleagues here who would have liked to have asked questions, but we ran out of time. I ask the panellists to undertake to write to us with answers to any questions that they feel still need to be asked. In reverse, if you would like to impart further information that you think will be of value to the committee in its inquiry on nitrogen, please do so. With that, I close this part of today’s session.
