Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to assist farmers transitioning towards net zero; and what steps, if any, they are taking to (1) support carbon auditing on farms, (2) standardise carbon calculators, and (3) invest in water management infrastructure.

We are taking a range of measures to support farmers’ transition to net zero. We are investing in a range of actions through farming schemes such as the Sustainable Farming Incentive and Countryside Stewardship and Landscape Recovery. Our schemes will help farmers deliver environmental outcomes on the land they manage while helping their businesses become more productive and sustainable.

We will also pay farmers for improvements to animal health and welfare, as those improvements in turn can support lower emissions and improve productivity. We will also support market-led approaches such as improved productivity and use of precision techniques.

Robust and accurate carbon audits which are based on business-level data can be valuable in benchmarking performance and help farm businesses plan and action decarbonising measures and enhance management of negative emissions. To help farmers confidently understand the emissions on their land and take advantage of the new financial opportunities this will unlock, we are committed to developing a harmonised approach to measuring carbon on farms. We are also considering how we can best support the implementation of carbon audits through a controlled expansion of the Defra Farming and Countryside Programme sustainable farming advice offer.

We recognise the challenges in improving the robustness and consistency of carbon auditing tools. Defra is currently funding a 'Harmonisation of Carbon Accounting Tools for Agriculture' project to assess the level of divergence between a number of market leading carbon calculators, to understand the causes of this divergence and how it impacts tool users and consider recommendations for harmonisation. Defra aims to publish the full research report in 2024. Building on this research and working with existing tool providers, Defra aims to support carbon tool providers to harmonise their underlying methodologies so that outputs are consistent and comparable, and their ability to serve different customer needs is maintained.

Defra is also working to provide greater access to the calculations and the models developed as part of the UK’s Agricultural Inventory of Ammonia and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions to interested third parties. This will support longer term alignment between the UK’s national GHG accounts and primary data gathered from farms

The Government and the Environment Agency also support the agricultural sector with the Water Management Grant, under the Farming Transformation Fund, for the construction of new on-farm reservoirs and the adoption of best practice irrigation application equipment to help ensure farmers have access to water when they need it most. Through the first round of the grant, launched in November 2021, we are forecast to create an additional 4.7million cubic meters of reservoir storage. The total investment in reservoirs and irrigation equipment is predicted to be £7.4 million. Round 2 of the grant was launched in April 2023 with a total budget of £10 million.