‘Lost’ five years make farming’s net zero ambition difficult to hit, NFU warns

Farming leaders have warned their goal to hit net zero emissions by 2040 is going to be “very difficult to deliver” because of a lack of government policy in recent years.

Tom Bradshaw, National Farmers’ Union (NFU) president, said the first five years since the commitment was announced by his predecessor Minette Batters had been “lost”, making the target very hard to hit.

His comments come after the independent advisory Climate Change Committee warned in its annual report that there had been a lack of progress and policies on cutting emissions from agriculture, while tree planting and peatland restoration to store carbon were also off-track.

In 2019, the NFU set out ambitions to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of the agricultural sector to zero overall by 2040, with a range of ways the industry thought it could be achieved.

We've always been absolutely reliant on government helping deliver that ambition and the first five years have been lost

This included making food production more efficient through measures such as precision fertilisers, implementing wildlife-friendly schemes including tree planting, managing soil, improving animal health to cut methane emissions and growing energy crops.

But at an event in Parliament following Labour’s landslide election win, Mr Bradshaw said there had never been a co-ordinated strategic policy in place for the decarbonisation of food production and how to curb its environmental impact.

The NFU had an ambition to be in the top quartile of countries in the world in terms of having the lowest impact on the climate from food production, he said, but warned there needed to be a co-ordinated policy to get there.

Asked if the NFU was still committed to its net zero target by 2040, he said: “We’ve always been absolutely reliant on government helping deliver that ambition and the first five years have been lost.

“So I think it’s going to be very difficult to deliver by 2040, but that’s because there’s never been any co-ordinated government policy there.”

He said he did not expect the Labour Government to yet have all the answers for net zero, an issue which stretches across all departments, but added: “We hope we will have a much more strategic approach with the new Government that can plan for the future”.

The post-Brexit “environmental land management schemes” (Elms) to pay farmers for public goods such as ensuring healthy soils and clean water and creating habitat are expected to play a key role in the country’s drive to net zero by 2050, by helping store carbon in the environment.

But Mr Bradshaw raised concerns about how that would be delivered, and said there was a need to gather baseline data on the sources of emissions and carbon storage in places such as the soil, as a “clear picture” was currently missing.

And Labour has yet to confirm the budget for agriculture for the coming years, with Mr Bradshaw reiterating the NFU’s calls for an increased multi-year funding settlement for this Parliament of around £4 billion a year for England to deliver environmental targets and food stability.

That amounts to around £5.6 billion for the UK as a whole, he said.