Our Carbon Footprint

One of the challenges for farmers over the next few years will be how they adapt their businesses to Climate Change. Farming contributes 8% of the UK's Greenhouse Gas emissions including about 39% of methane emissions (largely produced from animals), about 67% of nitrous oxide emissions (fertiliser) and 1% of carbon dioxide emissions.

A changing climate presents a number of opportunities and challenges for farmers and wildlife. In order to understand Hope Farm's impact on the climate the RSPB has commissioned the University of East Anglia and Lawrence Gould, a specialist farm business company to assess our Carbon footprint.

So what have we learnt from this report? Three key findings to emerge are

1) The biggest contribution to our farm carbon footprint arise from the fertiliser we apply to grow the crop. Emissions are produced during the manufacture and application of the fertiliser.

2) The greenhouse gas estimates per tonne of crop are higher for oilseed rape, than winter wheat. Spring beans have the lowest estimate.

3) Environmental options, such as grass margins, wild bird cover and nectar mixtures, placed to help the wildlife are able to store carbon. Further work is required to ascertain how effective each option is.

Over the next few months, the RSPB will use the report to examine how we can adapt our farming operations to reduce the footprint of the farm whilst maintaining high yields. This will be the key challenge for all farmers.

Crops

A quite time pre-harvest. The last fungicide application was applied to the wheat last week. Now we are waiting patiently for harvest, which should start in about a month. First crop to be harvested will be the oilseed rape, followed by the wheat and finally the spring beans in early September.