Farming: Net Zero

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 20th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Lord has great experience in this field. He is right that there are a great many tools available for use by farmers and their advisers to support on-farm calculations and audits. The Government and I share his concern because a number of those tools differ widely in their complexity and underlying methodology. We are therefore working at pace to find the most credible and consistent on-farm tools to assist farmers to understand their baselines and thereby to prove additionality, so that they can actively seek carbon credits and biodiversity credits, which will help them to hit net zero and their income accounts.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, everyone, including farmers, has to be committed and involved in attempting to achieve net zero. This year the Government turned away farmers from their higher-tier countryside stewardship and landscape recovery schemes. Those farmers were ambitious to cut greenhouse gas emissions and restore nature to the land. In future, is Defra likely to encourage farmers, rather than discouraging them from playing their part in cutting GHG?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I do not know where these stats come from. We have doubled the number of farmers in countryside stewardship. When we increased the rates two years ago, the number of farmers entering countryside stewardship doubled. I do not know where the noble Baroness is getting these figures.