Carbon Management Policies - A Practical Start for Farmers

South Wales FWAG Cyntaf Seminar

Carbon Management Policies - A Practical Start for Farmers

Farmers belonging to the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group, Cymru's premier membership scheme, FWAG Cyntaf are keeping well ahead of the game by considering their farm carbon footprints. About 50 farmers attended a seminar on carbon management policies was held in conjunction with Pembrokeshire Agricultural Society at the Pavilion at the showground in Haverfordwest on Tuesday, 9^th December. The event was chaired by the President elect of the Pembrokeshire Agricultural Society, Malcolm Lewis, and sponsored by Birch Farm Plastics with support from  the Countryside Council for Wales.

The speaker was Gareth Edwards-Jones, Professor of Agriculture and Land Use at the School of the Environment and Natural Resources, Bangor University. He explained the sources of the various greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide at various points along the food supply chain. Farmers are in the front line with climate change and will soon need to include carbon management as part of their future planning. This will necessitate change - bringing opportunities as well as obstacles.

The first step is to benchmark current performance. Earlier this year FWAG Cymru Farm Conservation Advisers had collected data from 25 FWAG Cyntaf farmers who had been invited to participate in a process that calculated carbon dioxide equivalent emissions from their farms, in partnership with Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones and his team at Bangor University. A more detailed picture has been formulated from the initial analysis, and results are now available that give each farm a specific figure or value that allows comparison between farms with different enterprises, working at different scales and between organic and conventional systems.

Results from this relatively small sample of farms using a new and radical process, can only indicate where the priorities for change on the farms in question might lie. However, even with this caveat, the results can be used as an important starting point because future policies in the Welsh Assembly Government are likely to place very high importance on the reduction of CO₂ emissions from farming.

The seminar used results from this pilot group of FWAG Cyntaf farmers as a focal point for some lively and thought-provoking discussion.

• Carbon Management Policies FWAG Cyntaf Seminar 9-12-08 Press Release (MS Word 26KB)