Innovation for Agriculture’s Post

Transcript

Innovation for Agriculture is a UK based organisation that connects farmers with the latest research and technology to improve agricultural practices. We spoke with Soils and Natural Resources advisor Aaron Redmond to understand how the agricultural industry can both adapt to and mitigate climate change. Aaron Redmond from Innovation for Agriculture, thank you so much for joining us. And can you start by telling me a little bit about Innovation for Agriculture, Innovation for Agriculture or a charity? And we provide an impartial platform that bridges the gap between innovation and research to on farm practice. So we have a a consortium of partners who we work very closely with and then we build on the trusted relationships that we have with farmers. To test different innovations to gauge their responses to policy changes to things like climate change. And we know there are so many challenges facing farmers. How are you helping with that? The biggest challenge at the moment is climate change and that's because of the scale and severity and the range of the impacts that climate change gives to land based businesses. So the way that innovation for agriculture. Helps is by helping land managers and farmers navigate through those challenges. We help them increase their business resilience through delivering adaptation and mitigation plans, which is very similar to like a business plan, and we then match their businesses with potential options and practices suitable to their individual landscape. We're currently the UK lead on the largest climate project. Across Europe in our industry, which is the Climate Farm Demo, and what that project enables us to do is to test the carbon auditing process to see how we can measure carbon on farms, and then use that data to help farmers design and implement an adaptation and mitigation plan. And why do you think it's important that farming businesses do develop these resilient systems? So as with any business, resilience is absolutely key to progress into the future, to remain profitable, but specifically to change what you're doing already to become more resilient, to increase your adaptation for the impacts of of climate change and and to mitigate against emissions of greenhouse gases. That's important because collectively we're working together to reach those. Net zero goals farming is in a unique position where they can mitigate not only by reducing the amount of emissions that they're producing, but they can actually sequester carbon, draw carbon out of the atmosphere and into the ground through soil carbon, hedgerows and woodland. When we talk about smart farming, what do we mean by that? Smart farming in general is adopting many different innovative and technological solutions to your. Daily on farm management, smart farming can be really helpful because it can reduce your reliance on resources by providing data-driven decision making. So for example, if you're applying fertilizer, you can screen the field and see whether you need to apply fertilizer as a blanket to the whole crop or individually. So that could save you a huge amount of input. So therefore that's both saving the usage of that. Resource, but also helping that business because they're not spending so much on those resources as well. And when we talk about the future of farming, are you feeling optimistic? I am certainly optimistic. I think farming is part of the solution. I, I think people are starting to realise that farming and agriculture is part of the future to create stability within our entire business framework. If other sectors need to be net 0. Agriculture lies in a unique position where they can not only mitigate their emissions, reduce their emissions, but they can also sequester carbon, draw carbon back into the ground, back into the hedgerows and woodland on land based areas. Agriculture is most certainly part of the solution. I think it's just going to require some time to transition to understand how farms can be part of that solution, how they can. Not only be resilient for themselves, but provide resilience to other businesses in other sectors. Aaron Redmond, thank you so much. Thank you.