 Welcome back everyone. Our main item of business this morning is the second in a series of evidence sessions looking at the impact of climate and nature emergencies on our remit. Today we'll be focusing on innovation and new approaches to environmental challenges within the rural economy. Welcome to our meeting, our first panel. I thank you for your patience who will be discussing the terrestrial environment. With us this morning we have Michael Clark, the Scotland Chair of Nature-Friendly Farming Networks, David Finlay, owner of the Ethical Dairy, Dee Ward, the chairman of Wildlife States Scotland, and replacing Rebecca Odsley, we now have Andrew Bauer, the head of food and food and footprints. The session is going to take a slightly different form this morning, so I would like to invite Michael Clark to make a brief opening statement setting out some of the background about his innovative project, followed by David, Dee, and then Andrew. Thank you. Good morning, Michael. Good morning, convener. Can I just check if you can hear me? Absolutely. Thank you very much for the invitation. I'm delighted to be here. Good morning all to the committee. We were born less than four years ago and we are a network, a steadily increasing network, a spider's web perhaps of farmers and crofters, the length and breadth of Scotland, big, small, male, female, conventional, organic, covering all sectors of farming. We know that working with nature works for us in our businesses as food producers, as part of the Scottish food system, and we know that working with nature delivers for biodiversity and for climate change. Our mission, as well as running our businesses on a day-to-day basis, is to try to change the mindset of more Scottish farmers and crofters, to get them to rethink the way they farm and to give them the confidence, we hope, to come with us on our journey, our transition to a more sustainable future for Scottish farming, a more sustainable way of farming and a way that delivers for biodiversity and for climate change. We're very grateful for the chance to talk to you this morning to tell you our story, and I take this opportunity to invite you individually or as a committee to any of our 275 farm and crofting members across Scotland who would be delighted to show you how it works for them as a business, and that's a number that has doubled since the Covid restrictions began. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you very much. Before we move on to David, I've got to declare an interest of being a neighbour of David and had the pleasure of farming on very, very similar type of ground in Borg, so I've often felt his pain. David, would you like to make an opening statement? Good morning, everybody. My background is that I'm a fifth-generation tenant, cheese-making dairy farmer in south west Scotland, with 125 dairy cows and all the young stock from that to finishing our breeding and 250 breeding use. We farm 850 acres of LFA, pretty rough stuff. 500 acres of that will be moderate quality permanent pasture, 150 acres will be rough grazing and grub and 100 acres of mixed broadleaf trees, most of which we've planted in the last 25 years. I spent 10 years in the forerunner of SRUC acting as an intermediary between scientists and the farmers for 10 years and then came home and started intensifying the farm. I've got a dissolution with that. We started our transition to organic, ecological and regenerative farming, as it's called nowadays. It's been quite an interesting journey. It's brought us into contact with fellow travellers who are farmers, vets and research people, all sharing our experiences and crossing many industry red lines and finding that many of them were myths. We've thrown away the old text book. We're now writing our own text books, which instead of spending our time and money on what now seems to be damaging technologies, fertilisers, pesticides, antibiotics, etc. We're now investing in our soils, our crops and in our livestock and in the environment and in the people who are working here. We've been trying to follow best practice over the years and we're now moving, we feel confident, towards a resilient, rewarding, environmentally friendly net zero. We actually have 25 years of soil carbon data, which shows that we are sequestering more carbon in our soils than we emit from the farm. We're also resource efficient and profitable. The most profitable years in dairy farming were after we got 10 years into organics and it was primarily because we had driven out cost out of the system. We've now moved into cow with calf, as you probably know, which has been challenging but we're now in a position where we're in our sixth year and within five years we will be back to the level of profitability that we had before. That's pretty well where we are and where we've got to. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good morning everyone. My name's Dee Ward. I'm chairman of Wildlife Estates Scotland. I also own an upland estate in the Angus Glen called Rottle and that is Wildlife Estates accredited. Wildlife Estates is known as WES for short, just so if I mentioned that later on, you'll know what I'm talking about. It's passed for European-wide label. Wildlife Estates are independently assessed land holdings accredited for wildlife and biodiversity. Scotland has the second highest area of accredited land in Europe after Spain, which currently sits at 1.3 million acres. We have another half a million acres in the pipeline going through the accreditation process. We have a target to reach 2.5 million hectares by the end of 2023. Funded primarily by Scottish Land and Estates with initial funding, generous funding from Nature Scott and on-going support from Nature Scott. Most land holdings are commercially motivated, ie they need to make a profit, we all do, but they want to improve and they want to maintain habitats. Lots have been doing good work for many, many years and they see Wildlife Estates as a way for land managers to confirm by independent assessment that they're doing a good job. There are no incentives currently by the bragging rights of saying that you've got wildlife accredited estate, but there are hopes that we're working on this trusted operator status which and other benefits like maybe easier access into EECs in the future or other grounds. The accreditation process though is very onerous. It takes a lot of work, a lot of data required and often because there aren't the incentives there, though people want to do it, it goes to the bottom of their pile of stuff to do. I think the wider benefits of Wes as I see it, collecting this data is really important for knowing what we have, for driving management improvements, to make better informed decisions about wildlife and biodiversity, deliver biodiversity net gain and to deliver sustainable farming. Other commercial drivers for the future opportunities to mainstream are things like the carbon markets, peatland restoration, woodland creation etc, natural capital baseline and measuring improvements. I know that they're talking in England about these baselight net biodiversity gain units etc. Opportunities with things like flood mitigation and water quality through riparian planting and peatland restoration and there's obviously the new cap coming down the line which you know with this talk of public money for public good. There's potential to encourage good practice and people aligning themselves with doing the right thing in terms of net biodiversity gain etc. Wes is well positioned to scale dramatically and deliver huge environmental benefits in my opinion and also biodiversity net gain but some sort of tangible benefits or privileges as mentioned would really speed up this process substantially. Thank you very much. Thank you Dee. I'm going to introduce you properly. It's Andrew Bower, the head of food and footprint at the Scottish Agricultural Colleges Consulting. So, with your proper title, Andrew, could you give us your introduction please? Thank you very much. It's a bit of a mouthful. Yes, my colleague Rebecca sends her apologies. Something came up in the last minute. So I'll run through Rebecca's opening statement. It's primarily concerned with farming for better climate, which has been, since it was first established in 2011, probably one of the more high-profile knowledge exchange efforts funded by the Scottish Government to engage farmers well ahead of a lot of other initiatives on the subject of net zero. It's run in various iterations through to 2018 with a very strong focus on climate change absolutely. After 2018, the focus switched more to regenerative agriculture and I'll come on to that in a minute. The idea was to have focus farms, hubs around the country where farmers could come together who had an interest or who simply were intrigued by what was being discussed there and they drew these 13 focus farms that were established, drew people from far and wide, they were all over the country, all different types of farms. It wasn't just about discussion, but that was an important part of it. It was also about trials and demonstrations and in the end over 5,000 farmers and crofters engaged face to face at these events. There was also a suite of resources on the website, social media and outreach through local and national press. In the year since 2018, the focus has shifted to regenerative agriculture and that has been very popular. I think that it came along just at the right time to complement a lot of the others who have already spoken in their efforts. There are five regenerative agriculture focus farms around the country. They are looking at everything from cover cropping to soil health, to adding livestock and arable systems and minimising damage from potatoes, pillage, reduced and minimum pillage and crop diversification and foliar feeds. A really practical focus there was both farming for better climate and subsequently the regenerative agriculture network has really been about practical innovation on farm and exploring the bounds of what is possible in a Scottish context. Again, Rebekah has asked me to extend an invite to the committee if anyone would like to visit any of those regenerative agriculture focus farms, then she is very happy to facilitate that. Thank you very much. We will certainly consider the invitations that will be nice to get out and about again, and that is certainly something that the committee intends to do. We have now got opportunities for questions up until about 11 o'clock. I will kick off and I will ask a very broad question, but I would like to consider how your projects or schemes are going to contribute to solutions to address the climate and nature of emergency that we are facing right now. How scalable are your projects or initiatives and what would be needed to mainstream your identified solutions and what barriers stand in the way? I am going to ask that first to Michael Clark. Thank you, convener. Our network has grown beyond our expectations by working at the mindset and giving farmers to get the confidence to start on this journey. I think that several of our speakers have talked about a journey. I know that David and Andrew did nothing. We are having a confidence to begin today because inaction is the biggest threat to not meeting our targets, to not being able to become nature positive and reach carbon net zero. Doing something, making a difference today and what we can do through the network is, as I said, it is like a spider's web. It is immensely scalable with support and that would be in terms of giving us this opportunity and supporting policies from the Scottish Government that support wildlife-friendly farming, that support climate friendly farming and that support nature-based solutions as much as technological solutions. We feel that our members feel that we pretty much got most of the technological solutions that we need. If we are just helped with things like establishing the baseline, so carbon audit, so I think that is already on the agenda, we need to know where we are for starters, then focusing on soil health, soil tests, that sort of thing. That tells us the direction to take and then helping with knowledge transfer. Andrew mentioned the knowledge exchange, we call it KTIF. Don't we knowledge transfer innovation fund these days? A bigger pot for that would be enormously helpful for us because I think that we feel that a lot of the responsibility has to be on farmers, we think, and crofters. We think that our role as farmers and crofters and our farm is not that far from you. I am in East Dumfrieshire but we have a responsibility to steward the assets under our management. We need to produce food responsibly and to do it in a sustainable way. Responsibly on farmers with help from you please in the public sector, collaborative private public partnership, but we know that there is a wall of money out there in the private sector. It is a tsunami almost of money that wants to come to help us. If we put our heads together, you as the policy makers and us as the people who can deliver that kind of thing on the ground through the likes of the network, we can encourage and get some of that money to come through. Thank you. Can I move on to Dee Ward? Thank you, convener. Can you all hear me, sorry? Yes. Michael Clark's comments are very, very good and actually very similar comments. I think from a wildlife estates point of view, one of the challenges we face is I use a comparison with the IACS form. If you don't get your IACS form filled in in time, you don't get your subsidy. Wildlife estates currently, we're relying on people's goodwill, they want to do it, but it often goes to the bottom of the pile, so people don't do the work necessarily and there's no deadline to do it by when they do it, they do it sort of thing. Funding is important. I think the private sector funding opening that up is important. We talked about this trusted operator status. I think having some benefits to do it. If you're seen as a trusted operator, from a NatureScot point of view, there's a sort of light touch management. You have your five or 10-year management plan of what you're going to do, degrees you're going to plant, how you're going to manage your land, et cetera, and they let you get on with it because you're seen as a trusted operator. I think things like that would be very beneficial and there are a lot of people keen to do that to become wildlife estates accredited, but because there isn't direct incentives, it tends to go to the bottom of the pile. I think if we could change that, it would go to the top of the pile and a lot more people would come on board. Thank you. David, the ethical data area is often referred to in the Scottish Parliament. It's well quoted in the work that you do, but how scalable is your project? It's good to hear that the business is now profitable and you're looking forward to a positive future, but what is needed to mainstream your type of venture and what barriers stand in the way of your type of venture coming up quickly and addressing what is an emergency? We don't have 25 years to transform or become organic. What do we need to make your project a mainstream solution? I wouldn't expect everybody or anybody, particularly to follow exactly what we are doing, but we are in an emergency situation and we've seen Covid and how we've dealt with that and thrown billions at it. It's been very damaging to the economy and to the country. We're going to have to face up to the fact that, if this is an emergency, we're going to have to invest a lot of money in getting it sorted. The people who can sort it are the land managers, so there's no doubt about it. We can be part of the solution. I'm a bit more hard-nosed. I agree with Dian and Michael that there has to be government involvement and the government has to take the lead here very much. I know that money is a problem. I'm pretty hard-nosed. I would say that what we need to do is to create an incentive. We need to create a market. The market, the incentive from the market at this point in time, is really not there. It's moving far too slowly. If it was up to me, if I was king for a day or whatever, I would be taking gradually transitioning the rural payments budget, supported by some other budget as well in terms of health and what have you. I would be transitioning at least 50 per cent of that over a 10-year period into supporting public sector procurement. We should be feeding our children and our old people and sick people. We should be giving them the best food and they should be giving food that's been produced ecologically, socially and soundly. That would create a market. It would also give a lead to the private sector, as Michael said already. There is a huge amount of money out there in the private sector, but the private sector won't move fast enough until the demand is there from the public. Once the public sector sets the standard that food should be produced in terms of environment, social and welfare conditions, the private sector will follow suit very quickly, I would say. If farmers don't want to change fine, they can fend for themselves or get out, and they should be incentivised to get out and bring in new blood. We need new blood in this industry, but we've got too much old thinking. I would put a lot of money into a get-out scheme. I know that there's one down south that started up. We've got to be very careful. We're not just getting the next generation coming along with the same old ideas, we've got to get new blood and new ideas. Does that answer the question? Thank you, David. That certainly resulted in a flurry of hands being raised for the supplementaries. I'm going to go to Jim Fairlie, followed by Rachel Hamilton. Thank you, convener. I'm loving this conversation already. David, I think that you and I should sit down over quite a number of pints and have lots of blethers. The idea that you just spoke about there is one that I took to Rossfinnet almost 20 years ago, and it was poo-pooed then, so we'll see where it goes from here. Indeed, I also have a register of interest with yourself, because I actually bought a blackface tupper off your shepherd many years ago as well. The first thing is that we talk about regenerative farming, but as a new entrant into farming when I went into it, I wasn't bound by the same constraints of how it's been done. I did things that were what I thought was right, and I always had the environment because I got involved in farming because I wanted to be out in the countryside and I loved nature. I did things in farming that I was growing clover 30 years ago, and it's now been talked about as this great new product. It's not, it's been there forever. How out of touch are the farming industry with nature-friendly farming? I don't know who's best to answer that. Maybe Andrew, I'll go to you first on that one. Sorry. Yes. No, I think you've definitely hit on something there. There are the people who are already on the journey, and there are those who believe that they don't need to start the journey yet because the language that they hear is insufficiently clear, and sometimes it's insufficiently challenging, or it's too challenging in an unconstructive way. I pick, for example, something like soil carbon. We hear a lot of farmers saying, I'm an upwind farmer or I'm in this particular situation, I know that once you understand the carbon sequester in my soils, I'm going to be net zero. If they're not actually saying to us I'm already net zero, we have a farm carbon calculator called Agricalc that is increasingly looking at soil carbon. I'm not about to say it's the final word on the subject, but we're seeing a lot of farms that we're looking at that you're looking at around the mid-teens to mid-twenties of the percent of the emissions on that farm being offset by what's in the soil. We need to move the discussion on with a lot of stakeholders and say you're serving nobody's interests well here by saying we just need to wait until that particular bit of evidence and then everything's going to be fine. But I think that we've got a final language to talk to farms about that doesn't overwhelm them, because we certainly paralysis due to conflicting messages is equally a threat to action. But I do believe that we're too busy talking to one another in an echo chamber sometimes and not actually welcoming in more innovative and challenging viewpoints. We really need that. And Michael, could you address that same point? Born a kind of farm as a boy and never thought for a minute I'd be able to afford a farm. So ending up here is we're living the dream here. I'm not sure always it's a dream, but it's maybe sometimes a nightmare. So your question was really how are to touch of the industry from major friendly farming? Well, I think it's this mindset thing that we're trying to address. A lot of the industry, it seems to us, is focused on the top line of their business, the yield. Let's see how much we can get out of the resources we've got through using quick fixes like nitrogen in a bag and see how many cuts of silage, for example, we can get from our fields by putting on more and more bag, more and more inorganic nitrogen, that sort of approach. What we're trying to, the message we're trying to get across is have a look at the bottom line, have a look at the profitability, have a look at the maximum sustainable output. By cutting back on your inorganic fertilisers by putting clover, as you say, in the mix it's absolutely nothing new that that is there. But I think the industry slightly forgotten it. Not really the industry's fault. We were encouraged by the likes of Aberystwyth and all these places to put in these high yielding Italian ryegrass mixes, focusing on the top line. If you put in clover, if you put in chicory, if you put in plantain, as we know, more and more farmers are doing across Scotland. If you try and outwinter your cows for longer, if you try and really cut your inputs, really it's the lowest cost producer that's going to win out here as we go through this period of immense uncertainty and the need to get us focused on nature positive and keeping temperature rise below 1.5. Then we think that we know the networks in a very good position to scale this kind of mindset change by demonstrating that it works on our farms in crofts. I'm very interested to ask about the private funding coming into farming for carbon sequestration. I'm really interested to hear how you would see that working because I know it's one of the things that people are up in arms about is the fact that big companies are coming in buying up huge sways of land and then saying that my company is now green because I own an estate in Scotland. So where do you see the private money coming in and how do you hold it here? I think that's a very, very good point. One of the things that we want to avoid is that if businesses come in that they're not only helping us improve what we do and help net biodiversity gain, they're actually, before they do that, are reducing their own carbon footprint rather than just offsetting, which I think is the wrong solution. I think there are huge potential for carbon markets and what it does is it brings private money in and it ultimately, if it's taken to its ultimate conclusion, would mean you wouldn't require any farm subsidy from the government and government could spend that money in other places because there's so much private money coming in. To me, there's two parts of it. We want to stop and reduce carbon, but the other thing is we want to deliver net biodiversity gain. I think this is where the whole natural capital comes in because if there's a value on natural capital, we need to force people by a mechanism, and I don't know what that mechanism is, come in and put money into land and farms, not by land but to help the operators of that land by putting money into the natural capital and valuing the natural capital. The money that goes in is delivering a natural capital benefit. I think that valuing anything and valuing natural capital—unfortunately, we haven't valued natural capital for ever, really, since the war. People see it as a value and they will respect it and value it more. I think that this is a key driver. How do we get there? I don't know, because if you're not careful, the private sector take over and get greedy and jump in, so there needs to be some sort of a mechanism to say, yes, you can do that, but you have to do this at the same time. I'm sorry, that probably wasn't a very good answer, but I'm not sure how to do it, but I do think that we need to be wary of it, but there is a potential there if we can get it right. Andrew Whittle would like to come in at this point. We are involved, I'll declare an interest here at SSE Consulting, as a forestry team, and that team is involved in working with land managers to sell the carbon in new planting. Our focus is mainly on integrated planting on farms, crops and the states, rather than on the larger end of the scale, but we are involved in some projects like that. I think that it's important to disentangle the headlines from the reality on the ground. Most of the carbon sales that we do are for smaller projects, and I think that the companies that we are dealing with, who are, I suppose, a further intermediary in the step, are aware of the importance of having a range of products. We know that there are products coming onto the market where the farmer retains some of the carbon and sells some of the carbon later on down the line so that they have something that should the Government policy or their supply chain make demands on them later on down the line. It's always the case where something looks like a cold rush, that there are risks involved, but we need to be careful not to give one or two examples and assume that that represents everything that's going on. There is a diversity of activity and, in some cases, it is the carbon sale that is enabling woodland planting to happen. Not so much in the central belt where there is a grant uplift, but when you move further north, quite often for us now, it's the carbon that makes it viable. Thank you. David Finlay would like to come in at this point and then I'll move to Rachel Hamilton. Thanks, Finlay. We are sequestering five tonnes per hectare per year, and we are emitting four and a half tonnes per hectare per year according to AgriCalc. If I sell that five tonnes of carbon credit, I'm no longer net zero. I don't understand how the industry can sell its carbon credits without becoming carbon positive. We can't all win from this carbon credit thing, where somebody is going to have to lose. I don't see how you can square that circle. Thank you. Thanks, David. That was useful. Rachel. Can I start with Dee, please? Dee, there are two questions I'd like to ask you. Can you tell us a little bit about your integrated land management that you do alongside peatland restoration and moorland management and grouse shooting? The second point is that you mentioned the aches scheme. I've spoken to a lot of farmers who've had difficulties accessing the aches schemes because of the narrow scope of those schemes and also the reduction in the budget from the Scottish Government between 1718 and 2021. Can you talk us through those two points, please? Yeah, absolutely. Starting with what we do, I have, just so everyone is aware, we have an eight or 3,000 hectare, 8,000 acre estate, probably six and a half thousand acres of it is moorland, but on that we're doing peatland restoration, we sheep farm, we have stalking and grouse shooting, we have hydroelectric, so we're using a lot of the same land for multiple purposes and also further down, so if you can imagine taking the estate in three sections, we've got the top, which is the grouse moor, we've got a middle band where we're doing a lot of riparian planting and contour planting of native species, which is to help flood mitigation and also for wildlife and biodiversity, and then at the bottom we have fields where we canoeba winter sheep and so on and we've remeandered the rottle burn and we work with the fishery board and stuff like that, so there's a lot of overlay of benefits where I think different people, for example, we work with the fishery board, Angus Council, we've all, you know, Angus Council are talking to us about flood mitigation and improvements to the river further down and so on, so there's a lot of crossover and I think there's a lot of collaboration that goes on and I think this is to be encouraged, so that's sort of what we do and taking up some of the other points that were made, we're very much working on growing all we need on site so we don't away winter anything, we just grow things like turnips that we've improved our grass and reducing deer numbers has made a massive difference to the amount of grass we have available over the winter, the trees we're planting have a lot of grass underneath them and actually running the sheep through as they get bigger, they do a good job because they reduce some of the grass and actually when the trees get very thick, they're quite good, especially the natural region, they're quite good at sort of breaking it apart a bit which is quite good for natural processes and then we have things like highland cattle on the low ground that just trample around in the marshy, rushy ground, break that up and since we've been doing that we've noticed a huge amount more over winter, well waders like snipe which will over winter with us and in the summer we get a lot of visitors like curlews and that wing and so on so it's been really beneficial, it all seems to work together and I think one of the problems that we've had is since the war we've been focused on food production and then things like fertilisers have been invented and we've forgotten how to farm naturally which we did 100 years ago, a couple hundred years ago and I think everyone on this call is slowly learning to do that again and I think that holds the key for us to live sustainably. Moving on to EECS, yes EECS it was disappointing last year, there was a little budget for EECS but it was very specific, I think this year there has been declared a bigger budget but the point I'd make on EECS is people once they're in EECS they stay in EECS so if you use a five-year term you tend to renew it until another five years and another five years and actually that money is incredibly valuable to be able to farm in a nature friendly way so I think money spent on EECS, I mentioned it in my initial opening for wildlife estates members, one thing that would be good if you were for example trying to scale wildlife estates is if you could get into EECS schemes a lot easier and there was money available to do these but you know nature benefits or nature-based solutions I think a lot of people would be a lot more people would become wildlife estates accredited and I think EECS is a fantastic scheme and I just wish it had a lot more money behind it basically. Thank you and can I move to David and Andrew and Michael might want to come in on this as well it's really David I just want to say my father is an organic dairy farmer so I've got a register of interest here with a family member but he complains to me a lot that the price for organic milk is moving very much towards the price for conventional milk now my question really is is that if we are to ensure that people especially in urban areas have access to high quality nutritious food and farmers are being asked to do more to meet net zero particularly that will cost money how can we ensure that the price that we get is relative to the costs associated with the productivity? Well at the end of the day it's driven by the market and market demand and I think perhaps point a finger again at government and say well you know we haven't educated our population to understand the benefits of organic in terms of not just in terms of the the environmental impact and animal welfare impact but also health in so far as some chemical residues antibiotics fertilisers in our food and water supplies so you know the public don't understand that there is a wide benefit a holistic benefit of our from coming from organic farming or from ecological farming or from regenerative farming even therefore we we are not prepared to to pay the extra price and that then comes back to if good quality high welfare environmentally friendly food was being provided to the public through the public sector which would incentivise the private sector to follow suit that would create the demand but it's a demand situation. It also links back to the previous question about connection with of agriculture with the environment how well we understand it and the problem stems back to I mean you know as a child I was sent out with a tray of eggs with strict need in them to lay eggs out on the farm to kill wildlife and you know you've got sixpins for it it was a wee while ago and that was the mindset and the mindset hasn't changed greatly since then and so there is there is a huge disconnect both at the early stages of learning on the farm but also through our education system our education system does not support environment the friendly production so we've got a whole industry which is at odds with the these environmental welfare issues and so sorry I've strayed a little bit from your question but we have a we have a whole cultural disconnect that requires leadership from government I would say because no one else is going to do it off their own back to re-educate the we've lost David just now so while we're getting David back can I move on to Alasdair with his questions questions for David to be honest so okay I'll come in if he comes back have we lost everybody okay can we just we'll just suspend this meeting