'The NFU's Net Zero goal is misleading, flawed and unimplementable', writes Dr Alex Lockwood
In September 2019 the National Farmers’ Union published their Achieving Net Zero: Farming’s 2040 Goal that laid out its plans for making UK farming ‘carbon neutral’, but is it achievable and what would it mean for non-human animals? Dr Alex Lockwood writes.
Agriculture in the UK contributes over 10 per cent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, around 45.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) each year. The majority of these gases are not carbon dioxide, but methane from cows and sheep (50 per cent) and nitrous dioxide from fertiliser (40 per cent). Only 10 per cent is carbon from the burning of fossil fuels (although farming’s figure doesn’t include the transport to move food and animals around the country).
“Net Zero” doesn’t mean zero emissions. It means balancing out the ongoing production of emissions with activities that reduce or take emissions out of the atmosphere. The NFU’s plan is to reduce its overall impact to “net zero” through three main pillars of activity:
Improving farming’s productive efficiency (25 per cent of the savings);
Storing carbon in soils and vegetation (20 per cent of savings);
Boosting renewable energy and the bioeconomy (57 per cent of savings).
(If you do the maths, this shows they aim to be slightly ‘net positive’ rather than zero.)
As the NFU write, they believe it is a “challenging, but achievable, ambition.” But is it achievable? Is it the right goal to set? And what does this mean for the animals?
My conclusion is this: the NFU’s Net Zero goal is misleading, flawed and unimplementable - and, critically for climate change, way too slow. This is because:
The vast majority of the NFU emissions savings rely on unproven technologies;
The vast majority of their plans are not in their hands, but rely on governments to make significant and uncharacteristic action to create necessary conditions;
Their starting point is a denial of the most obvious route to reducing the bulk of their emissions by ending the farming of cows and sheep.
If you want to know how and why I came to these conclusions, get a cup of tea and settle in to read on. I guarantee this will help you be confident in debating farming’s Net Zero promise. If you want to make your mind up for yourself, you can download their report here.
This isn’t about farmer bashing. I’ve spent the last 24 months interviewing farmers and food policy experts and benefiting from their generosity, time and expertise. Most care about nature and combating climate change. And unless every vegan grows all of their own food starting today, we need British farmers.
We don’t agree on everything - especially on animals - and it is fair to criticise where criticism is due. But the overall goal of liberating animals and shifting to a fair and just plant-based food system will be slowed down if we get caught up in a ‘vegan vs. farmer’ fight that, in reality, is more to do with the media than what most vegans are really like. (Or most farmers, for what it’s worth.)
With that said, though, let’s go through the proposed pillars. The NFU 2040 report deserves some criticism for its problems, not all of which are of their own making. This is offered to highlight where farming can do better and must step beyond their current plan’s limited scope and flawed proposals.
The NFU’s Net Zero strategy doesn’t stand up to scrutiny in regards to boosting productivity while also reducing emissions
Pillar 1: Boosting productivity and reducing emissions
The NFU believes that changes to farming efficiency will account for 11.5 MtCO2e savings per year - that’s 25 per cent of the total balance. These will come through:
Controlled release fertilisers to reduce nitrogen;
Feed additives to reduce methane emissions from cows and sheep;
Precision farming to deliver nutrients and crop protection;
Loosening compacted soils;
Anaerobic digestion to turn manure and by-products into renewable energy;
Energy efficiency measures such as fuel reductions;
Gene editing of animals and crops.
Some of these are underway and welcome, at least in terms of mitigating agriculture’s impact on the climate (perhaps less so for jobs). Farming is now precision-driven, from the analysis of what and when to feed crops, through to GPS planting. Other measures such as loosening compacted soils are about undoing the damage that seven decades’ of a “cheap food paradigm” and monoculture farming have done to our land.
But many of these measures need the use of animals as an unquestioned assumption. We wouldn’t expect anything else from the NFU. But are there economic, scientific or environmental cases to make against these proposals too?
Can feed additives reduce methane?
Let’s look at feed additives to reduce methane emissions. These are being developed to suppress the enzyme that triggers methane production in a cow’s rumen when she is eating (and she produces a lot: up to 330lbs of methane a day - a lot of farts and burps).
This is critical for quick action on climate change. Methane has a 100-year global warming potential 25 times that of carbon dioxide. Over the short term (20 years), methane is 84 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2, according to the UN.
But do feed additives work? The Dutch company DSM is leading the development of an as yet unproven technology (the NFU’s plan, sadly similar to most Net Zero plans, relies a lot on unproven technofixes). The most recent trials at the beginning of 2021 suggested a reduction in methane by around 30 per cent. But the Dutch Carbon Footprint Monitor/Climate monitoring service is still waiting for the information from the trials to substantiate accreditation.
Over the last decade, results have been inconclusive and mostly negative. Research from 2011 showed that “the decrease in methane production was not evident when methane emission was expressed per kilogram of milk produced.” A 2017 summary of research from the University of Reading stated “more research is required” as “a whole ecosystem within the cow, including hundreds of different species of microbes, has evolved over thousands of years. Removing one group of microbes affects others and can negatively impact the whole digestive process.”
In 2019, an earlier version of DSM’s feed additive showed that “once it hits about 0.75 per cent of an animal’s diet, the animal starts eating less.” This means the cows don’t like it and produce less milk and less lean flesh anyway.
There’s more. So it’s all a big unknown - and uses the cow as the living laboratory in which to test new technologies that may not work. Why treat animals this way when we know that removing cows from the farming system will meet most of the sector’s climate change reduction targets?
Gene Editing
One of the most controversial proposals in the NFU report, opposed by most of the population, including supermarkets and food organisations such as the Soil Association, is the gene editing of animals “for disease resistance to improve health … and reduce emissions”.
Genome editing is a group of technologies that enable an organism’s genetic material (DNA) to be directly manipulated, for example by adding, removing or ‘splicing’ (breaking and joining) genetic material at particular locations.
Gene editing (GE) animals enables instant and significant changes to the genome. As we wrote last month, “we can think of GE as a shortcut to all the horrors of selective breeding and more, the idea being that we would do them anyway given enough time and by selecting for the right traits.”
Vivisectionists already argue for gene editing to “disenhance” (a disgusting euphemism) the ability of animals in labs to feel pain. Rather than stop testing on animals - and meet their 3R commitments - they would rather genetically modify them. This is, of course, a quiet admittance that these animals do feel considerable pain under their experiments.
The NFU supports gene editing. They say: “the central principle of NFU biotechnology policy is choice to access the best available tools to farm sustainably and profitably. Biotechnology is not a silver bullet, but the NFU sees great potential in new precision breeding techniques, such as gene editing, to tackle challenges associated with climate change, nutrition and crop and livestock disease.”
Their argument runs that gene editing, by making animals healthier and more resistant to disease, will boost productivity and reduce emissions. They note gene editing research currently underway that may benefit farmers as “swine flu resistance in pigs; bovine TB resistance in cattle; mastitis resistance; hornless cattle; chickens that cannot spread bird flu; elimination of milk allergen.”
And of course “increase lean muscle” for more direct profit from the flesh. As the RSPCA succinctly put it: “the use of GE technologies threatens to push farmed animals even further towards, or further beyond, their biological limits.”
Do we really want genetically modified animals? Isn’t it just better to switch to a climate-friendly plant-based diet, which would drastically reduce agriculture’s footprint without the need to create genetically modified animals? But that is not admissible in the NFU’s line of thinking.
There is a #NotInMySupermarket campaign led by Beyond GM and Slow Food UK you can join. Their letter signed by 44 leading food experts and civil society groups is a list of the organisations that are good for our food system, trying to protect us from a future of unnatural and unethically manipulated gene-edited animals.
A government consultation on the regulation of genetic technologies is currently open, and runs to 17th March. You can contribute here - especially with evidence, rather than opinion.
You can also sign the RSPCA’s letter demanding a moratorium on gene editing of animals.
Does Pillar 1 stand up to scrutiny?
The problem with the NFU’s plan is that, because their starting point is the taken-for-granted continuation of the highest emitting sectors of farming - beef and dairy - they make no argument for reducing the size of those farming sectors. As such, the proposals offered come without comparison to other scenarios.
That is, there is no measurement of how feed additives and precision farming are comparable to the end of cow and sheep farming. Models of the farming system provided by Harvard University, Chatham House, Oxford University, and other institutions, via the scientists Helen Harwatt and Matthew Hayek, Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek, and Marco Springmann and others, all show that switching from animal-based systems to plant-based systems are the quickest and most efficient way to make farming climate sustainable.
If you were being mean-spirited, you could say that feed additives and precision-farming are tinkering at the edges, or fiddling while Rome burns. But I wouldn’t say that. With a chronic and catastrophic problem like climate change, you need every available measure to respond.
So why isn’t every available measure in this plan? Every available measure would include the most obvious: a transition out of beef, dairy and sheep farming. But the NFU is trapped by the existing system, exhibiting the defence mechanism of denial - knowing what would work best, but refusing to look at it for fear of having to make changes that would be too painful.
Instead, the NFU offer infographics with no response to these questions. It also offers a myth-busting toolkit on methane and ruminants which does their case no good. As we know from research, framing issues as “myths to bust” confuses the public, who forget which part was the myth and which was the fact anyway.
Much of Pillar 2 of the NFU Net Zero strategy rests on the financial instruments of carbon pricing that many experts believe will not work, or at the very least is not sufficient.
Pillar 2: Farmland carbon storage
The NFU believes that managing carbon stores in soils, woodland and other habitats such as hedgerows could make 9 MtCO2e savings per year - that’s 20 per cent of the total balance. These will come through:
Enhanced soil carbon storage (the NFU’s bulk of savings, at 5 MtCO2e);
Peatland and wetland restoration;
Replanting and looking after hedgerows;
Increasing agroforestry and wood-planting.
There is very little here to argue against, as the practices are beneficial to environments and the free-living animals who rely on them, such as songbirds in hedgerows and the increased biodiversity that comes with agroforestry.
We desperately need these changes. Intensive agriculture has caused arable soils to lose 40-60 per cent of their organic matter. Ammonia and nitrogen pollution from pig and poultry farming have impacted more than 60 per cent of the UK’s land, affecting sensitive ecosystems. In the last 50 years, 60 per cent of species of UK wildlife have declined, much more than the global average. A quarter of native UK mammals are at threat of extinction, caused by agricultural practices and climate change.
So does Pillar 2 stand up to scrutiny?
Well, yes. These are all nature-friendly farming proposals. But the numbers feel wrong.
Let’s have a look at the Woodland Trust’s agroforestry programme. At present 70 per cent of all UK land is farmed - much of it for grazing animals. Only 3 per cent of farmlands use agroforestry, despite the many benefits of including trees and hedgerows. The Woodland Trust’s campaign is to increase this to 10 per cent in line with the Committee on Climate Change proposals.
According to the Woodland Trust, this would need an extra 39,000 hectares of agricultural land for agroforestry each year – only about the size of Rutland, England’s smallest county. By 2050, they estimate, this could deliver 6 MtCO2e savings. But that’s considerably more than the NFU’s calculations of 0.7 MtCO2e by 2040.
So where did these numbers come from? How many hectares are the NFU proposing that are converted to woodland to make 0.7 MtCO2e savings - and why not 6 MtCO2e?
It’s difficult to tell where this has gone wrong, because the only thing the NFU says about the data it has used, is that it all comes from... the Committee on Climate Change’s report, and the Royal Society report on Greenhouse Gas Removals.
Much of this pillar also rests on the financial instruments of carbon pricing that many experts believe will not work, or at the very least is not sufficient.
Pillar 3: Coupling bioenergy to carbon capture, utilisation & storage
The NFU believes that growing the bioeconomy, and utilising carbon capture and storage technologies could make 26 MtCO2e savings per year - that’s 57 per cent of their total balance. These will come through:
Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, BECCS (making 22 MtCO2e savings);
Bio-based materials in construction (0.5 MtCO2e savings);
Displacement of fossil fuels e.g. renewables for farming practice (3 MtCO2e savings).
The big one is obviously bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS) - an umbrella term for a number of so-called ‘negative emissions technologies’ that convert biomass to energy, for example through burning crops, capturing the emitted carbon and locking it underground. BECCS delivers up to nearly half (48 per cent) of the NFU’s entire net zero plan, but is, as Climate Home News puts it, “controversial and commercially unproven”.
As Imperial College’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment put it in 2019, “Scientists scrutinising BECCS in detail are questioning its ability to deliver any negative emissions at all, let alone at the scale required, and in a sustainable way.”
In looking at the pros and cons, they conclude that “BECCS alone cannot deliver the scale of negative emissions required without serious challenges to agriculture and the natural environment.”
The organisation FERN outlines six major problems with BECCS - including its demand for land that would push up the price of food! (There is nothing inherently wrong with food costing more; we need to value food more, especially in the UK and for British farmers. But this comes with many issues tied up with UK and global food poverty and inequality.)
The Hoffman Centre experts say this: “Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) cannot be deployed at the scales assumed in Paris-compliant emissions pathways. This would consume land on a scale comparable to current cropland.” Indeed, new research suggests we can limit warming to 1.5 degrees without BECCS.
So does Pillar 3 stand up to scrutiny?
Not at all. The majority of savings in their plan are based on unproven technologies.
It’s not solely the NFU’s fault. The UK government has put its faith in BECCS, as outlined in the Committee on Climate Change’s getting to 2050 report. This is despite Imperial College academics stating: “Policy makers should be sceptical about a future that is uniquely or heavily reliant on BECCS, and instead prepare for and implement alternative mitigation options as soon as possible.”
So why are governments, and industries such as agriculture that rely on government to set legislative and policy leads, relying on unproven and potentially dangerous technologies?
Other researchers writing in the journal Energy Research & Social Science suggest the reason is that the global climate policy community has, in a way, deceived itself to the potential of BECCS. The researchers put BECCS in the class of “speculative technologies” which climate policymakers put their hopes on because of their desperation to find solutions. They write that BECCS was really only a “back-stop for reaching ambitious targets” but has “become normalized due to a lack of credible alternative visions.”
Farming’s “Great Food Failure”?
The EAT-Lancet Commission, a committee of 37 food, farming and policy experts, called in 2019 for a “Great Food Transformation” to urgently tackle the climate and ecological emergencies we face. Calculating the global impact of the food we eat, they say we must eat 65 per cent less meat, and increase our consumption of vegetables by 75 per cent, fruit by 50 per cent, legumes by 75 per cent and nuts and seeds by 150 per cent. Only by doing this can we fix our health and climate.
Every other major report demands we move in the same direction, whether that is from the RSA’s Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, the Eating Better Alliance’s Better By Half campaign, the United Nations, or indeed the Committee on Climate Change.
It is an unprecedented challenge and one that will take a generation. But change is coming. For example, Tesco’s have set a target to increase their meat alternatives by 300 per cent by 2025. Sainsbury’s now reports on its healthy food sales. Over 80 per cent of the retail sector has made the ‘veg pledge’ to promote fruit and veg sales as part of the nationwide Peas Please programme.
So where is the role for the NFU in contributing to this great food transformation? It is nowhere to be seen in this 2040 plan. To that extent, the NFU is going against the grain of most other major voices in food and farming. This is in four key ways:
1. Cherry-picking from the Committee on Climate Change
The NFU leans on the credibility of support from the Committee on Climate Change for their plans and references the major CCC report Land use: Policies for a Net Zero UK. The NFU plan argues that “a variety of measures to boost productivity and reduce emissions, as identified by the CCC” will be required to achieve Net Zero.
But one of the key ones - the CCC’s recommendation for “low cost, low regret” reductions of 20 per cent in meat and dairy consumption, is as you would expect, nowhere to be seen. And around agroforestry, the numbers don’t add up.
2. A problem with “Net Zero”?
A bit like “Get Brexit Done” which works as a campaign slogan but is far from the truth of the detail of how the new relationship with the EU operates (i.e. very far from “done”), there is a problem with the idea of “Net Zero”. This is laid bare in the NFU’s plan.
The story behind the phrase “Net Zero” is interesting in itself. Back in 2013 pioneering women climate leaders knew they needed an idea that was simple enough to rally the globe to action. After the failure of the 2009 global climate gathering in Copenhagen to agree to anything, they knew the 2015 meeting in Paris could not afford to fail.
And it didn’t. We got the Paris Climate Agreement, and “Net Zero” became a measurable benchmark that could be translated into national and regional laws and business plans.
“There was a lot of reluctance to put numbers on the Paris Agreement goals,” Laurence Tubiana, climate change ambassador in the French presidency, said at the time. “[But] without any benchmark, it was a recipe for failure… We knew that the benchmark had to be more precise than ‘well below two degrees’.”
Net Zero has been hailed as a game-changer that can cross international boundaries and herald a new measurement standard for progress on climate action. One of the women at that meeting in 2013, Rachel Kyte, now the UN’s chief of sustainable energy, put it this way: “Leadership looks like a clear net zero emissions commitment, enshrined in legislation.”
But as many NGOs argued at the time, the “net” is wildly misleading. Action Aid’s 2015 report put it like this: “while ‘net-zero emissions’ may sound similar to ‘zero emissions’, the two concepts actually mean very different things, with entirely different consequences. Academics continue to question “Net Zero” - great as a catchphrase, terrible as policy.
It means, for example, that Norway’s ambitious “Net Zero by 2030” plan relies on overseas carbon-cutting projects to “balance” its continued extraction of fossil fuels from its oil fields. Norway can continue to rake in billions from oil while planting often inappropriate monoculture forests in poorer nations elsewhere.
As we’ve already shown, the NFU plans to reach not “zero” emissions but “Net Zero” emissions relying on BECCS. This gives UK farming, like Norway, the freedom to continue to emit methane into the atmosphere at alarming rates, as long as it soaks up carbon elsewhere. If the technology comes online.
That is: the NFU’s plan allows them to continue to emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases - 10 per cent of the entire UK budget - by basing a “net zero” plan on mainly unproven technologies. All the time making animals the laboratory for those unproven technologies.
3. The problem with 2040
As many have argued and shown through research, 2040 is not ambitious enough. Because the UK led the world by putting into place binding legislation to get us to net zero by 2050, anything like 2040 looks like a radical and pioneering proposition. For example, Sainsbury’s has committed to becoming net zero by 2040, saying the government’s 2050 plan is not good enough.
But as the IPCC said in 2018, we had then 12 years - that is, by 2030 - to act before we saw unstoppable tipping points in the climate come into play.
So 2040 is a political number, not a scientific one. The NFU have all the comfort in the world, afforded to them by a slack government target, to appear radical and practical.
4. Blame the government
The NFU states that their plans can only happen through partnerships with industry and government. There is an urgent emphasis on Defra “immediately” introducing pilot projects, but also calls for a Shared Prosperity Fund and for the Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to pull its weight and commit fully to its Industrial Strategy.
It’s likely that successive governments will not do all - or enough - of what the NFU have asked for in their report. Nearly every page of the NFU’s report asks a different government department (Defra, BEIS, the Treasury) to invest in what the NFU say they need.
So if farming doesn’t achieve “net zero” by 2040 it is easy to flick back to these pages and apportion the blame elsewhere. Just like this current government’s handling of the pandemic and its relocation of responsibility on to a handful of people not following the rules (ten year jail sentences for people evading quarantine from overseas?), the NFU’s 2040 ambitions are caveated so heavily that they can always shift culpability to others.
Conclusion
When in 2019 I visited a dairy farm in Redcar and Cleveland it was because of climate change. Andy, the farmer, knew that farming needed to be drastically different because of climate change. Especially his kind of dairy farming, with methane from cows and sheep almost 60 per cent of farming’s total contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.
While at his farm, he showed me the solar panels, the wind turbines, and the plans for the biofuel generator to turn the slurry into energy. He showed me a picture of their grandchild. “For them,” he said.
If UK farming fails to achieve its ambitions of net zero by 2040, it is failing this farmer and his family too.
The NFU is committed to this work, and many farmers are trying their hardest: these 26 examples show just that. But this plan will fail as it stands.
Let’s come back to that cow in the room - methane. This potent greenhouse gas may stay in the atmosphere for much less time, but its impact on the critical next 10 years is huge. Agriculture’s immediate improvements rely on removing methane from its production - now. By 2040 and via unproven technologies, it will be too late, if it happens at all.
Of course, plant-based systems end the use of animals, end their vulnerability to gene editing and other technologies that see animals as little more than machines for profit.
We implore the NFU to think again. We ask the NFU to engage with plant-based food system models that can and do reduce the immediate impact of UK agriculture on the climate. All this, without relying on technology that may never meet and achieve what they imagine.
Dr Alex Lockwood is an academic and author of the vegan memoir The Pig in Thin Air, which makes the connection between climate change and the food we eat. He is writing a report for The Vegan Society on the policy we need for a UK plant-based food system.
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