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Farming Today: 09/04/22 Farming Today This Week: IPCC report, labour shortages, carbon offsetting, leaving farming

09/04/22 Farming Today This Week: IPCC report, labour shortages, carbon offsetting, leaving farming

BBC Radio 4 - Farming Today, 09/04/22 Farming Today This Week: IPCC report, labour shortages, carbon offsetting, leaving farming

The role agriculture can play in tackling climate change.

With the IPCC report out this week, we look at what agriculture can do to mitigate the impact of a warming climate.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report came out earlier this week, focusing on the action that needs to be taken globally to mitigate the impact of a warming climate. It says agriculture, land-use and forestry can all help provide large-scale emissions reductions, but cannot completely compensate for any delayed action on reducing emissions in other sectors, such as industry and travel. The report also points out that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak in just three years’ time, and then reduce by 43 percent by 2030. It highlights that methane - a major emission from livestock farming - would need to be reduced by a third during that same timeframe. 

Recently there has been a lot of talk about planting trees to offset carbon emissions - which this week, the Welsh Affairs Committee has warned will impact family farms in Wales. The committee says it ‘recognised the importance of woodland to tackle the climate emergency,’ but ‘that companies could be attempting to “game the system” by investing in farming land to offset emissions which is then lost to Welsh agriculture’. 

The Environment Food and Rural Affairs Committee has been investigating the impact the lack of staff is having on farms, food processing and distribution, and is critical of what it says is the government’s failure to engage in the labour shortage problem. MPs from the EFRA committee have warned that a failure to tackle labour shortages ‘will permanently shrink the food sector.‘ 

And all this week on Farming Today we’ve been talking about farmers leaving the industry. We hear from arable farmer Henry DuVal in Hampshire about how he passed the farm onto his son Ed by setting up a bio-gas plant, where instead of growing crops for food, all their fields are producing fuel for anaerobic digestion. Most of the methane they produce goes into the gas grid, some makes electricity.  

Presented by Charlotte Smith and produced for BBC Audio by Caitlin Hobbs

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