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Farming Today: 20/04/21 - Pick for Britain ends, Carbon storage

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20/04/21 - Pick for Britain ends, Carbon storage

BBC Radio 4 - Farming Today, 20/04/21 - Pick for Britain ends, Carbon storage

The end of the Pick for Britain campaign.

As the Pick for Britain campaign is closed, who now will pick our fruit and vegetables?

It’s a year since the ‘Pick for Britain’ campaign was launched by the government, with the aim of employing British pickers for fruit and vegetables, replacing overseas staff who were unable to travel to the UK because of Covid restrictions.  Now it's been closed. Instead, the National Farmers Union has issued guidance for horticultural farms to contact the Department for Work and Pensions directly, to link up vacancies with people currently unemployed. Meanwhile, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers pilot scheme will allow 30,000 pickers to come from abroad - but will that be enough?

A new report by Natural England assesses how all our managed countryside and habitats - from fields and rivers to coasts and seas - can contribute to carbon storage and sequestration. It finds that peatland in good condition stores the most carbon, but that other habitats like saltmarsh are also an important store. The report aims to show how restoring these habitats could help England reach its target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

As more farmers look to the carbon stored in soil as a way of earning money in the future, through the new Environmental Land Management Scheme, we visit a farm in Leicestershire where sampling is taking place.

Presented by Anna Hill
Produced for BBC Audio in Bristol by Heather Simons

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