Green Farming - our work towards carbon neutrality

I have refreshed our Carbon Audit for our 2019 harvest year. It seems a long time ago but some of the crops are not sold until well into 2020.

The trend, I am pleased to say, is still downwards for CO2 equivalent emissions per unit of output. There are a number of reasons for this; we switched to a green electric tariff in September so our imported electricity is rated as zero emissions; our total emissions increased but our yields increased with a better growing year and that more than compensated.

It is disappointing to see our total emissions increase. Our propane for crop drying usage doubled with a very wet harvest of daffodil bulbs and onions and our red diesel use was well up, again with a very wet harvest of potatoes and celeriac.

It will be enormously difficult to reduce diesel use until new technologies emerge but where we can combine operations we are hoping to see an impact.

For instance, our Ploeger self-propelled harvester for potatoes has an engine that generates more than 600 horsepower but that will replace four and a half tractors (and drivers) totalling more than 1080 horsepower. It is a start but nowhere near enough.

We are trying to increase our Soil Organic Matter which is good farming practice, improving soil health, water holding capacity and often crop yields.

Every 0.1% increase in SOM (for instance from 2.0% to 2.1%) sequesters or saves 2.96 tonnes CO equivalent per acre. If we could increase our SOM by 0.033% per year it would save the total emissions on our diesel, electricity, gas and nitrogen fertiliser last year.

It doesn’t sound like a difficult target but it is with our current rotation. Our vegetable cropping demands busy cultivation and ploughing most years. Every cultivation uses diesel and some soil organic matter is oxidised and lost in the physical process. Farmers that grow only combinable crops like wheat or rape are adopting minimum cultivation systems that are not available to growers of root crops and vegetables.

We must increase our use of cover crops or green manure as much as possible but even then we cannot leave them over winter as we need the action of frost on our land to create the fine tilth needed for potatoes and most spring planted crops.

Perhaps the new Environmental Land Management Systems that will be the driver of agricultural support in a year or two will encourage organic matter friendly rotations and we will adopt the ideas where we can but in highly productive areas on the best land it is not going to be sensible to take land out of production for long periods.

We are going to find it difficult to achieve carbon net zero without new technologies like renewable hydrogen.

Is Bubble and Squeak the answer?

Potatoes are trading today at well below the cost of production with good quality product for prepack at not much more than 10 pence per kilo ex farm. There are a number of reasons. The difficulties of fish and chip shops in the pandemic is a big one, a slightly higher yield and production last year is another and now, as a result of Brexit we cannot export to Ireland so that market is lost.

Contracts with packers are a bit higher priced if we had taken them out before planting but unless crops are very good it is difficult to be profitable that way and many growers rely on a high priced year every so often to change the enormously expensive equipment required to grow a potato crop today.

Whilst the area grown and production has declined a little, the number of growers has halved over the last twenty years. Many years ago there was a Potato Marketing Board and growers were allocated an acreage quota which attempted to balance supply and demand. That has of course gone in our strong market culture today but it cannot be said it has resulted in greater prosperity for growers. Potato growers are an optimistic bunch. A high priced year is inevitably followed by increased plantings and the resulting price crash.

We grow for the fresh market and hope to sell smooth and bright skinned spuds to customers who wash and pack for the top supermarkets. In the pandemic, sales in this sector are 20% up but over the longer term sales are slowly declining and statistics show that younger customers are  falling away.

Other carbohydrates are gaining ground and meat and two veg option is far from the dominant choice today. The charts below are from 2018 show that our fresh market sector is only about a third of all potato sales

Trends to vegetarianism and vegan do not seem to be helping. I looked at a vegan frozen meal website recently and out of thirty dishes only one contained potatoes and that was fifty fifty with sweet potato. This adds insult to injury, as we do not have the temperatures required to grow sweet potatoes in the UK.

I discovered an utensil called a ricer in Sweden some years ago and I thought that had potential to revitalise the potato market only to find most people already knew of it and it is commonly used on the way to mashed potato. Creativity is badly needed and whilst my idea is hardly creative I think it warrants consideration.

Bubble and Squeak is one of the Great Dishes of the World and it can be vegan, with versatile ingredients and if you make a double helping of mash on day one, a quick and delicious standalone supper on another day. It is quintessentially British and would work well prepared and chilled and probably frozen too. Perhaps the creativity will be needed in selling it to millennials!

The Great Celeriac Sandwich Endeavour

At Jack Buck’s we make much of the versatility of celeriac and rightly so but so far we have yet to find a successful sandwich containing celeriac.

The British Sandwich Association says that more than 4 billion sandwiches are bought in the UK every year, there is a British Sandwich Week, it’s in May, and of course an awards ceremony called “The Sammies” and we are missing out… What can we do?

We do have form in this area. Some years ago, my daughter part funded a year out by winning the prize, well, second prize actually for designing a sandwich in a competition run by the British Sandwich Association. The sandwich was called the “Wickedwich” and contained red chicory because, yes, we were chicory growers then. It also contained prawns and had a sort of retro 1970’s prawn cocktail feel to it.

It has not become mainstream yet but we have hope and we have creativity so I am launching a competition, open to all our website visitors; “The Great Celeriac Sandwich Endeavour”

Entrants are invited to invent a sandwich containing celeriac, probably amongst other ingredients. The celeriac may be cooked or raw and the wrapping can be any sort of bread or flatbread.

It may be that this creative excitement has quite a slow fuse so I am giving plenty of time, until the end of June 2021 for the imaginations to run riot. And you may be rewarded with a box of celeriac for your efforts…

Entries and further questions should be sent to robin@jackbuck.co.uk

If we get lots of entries I will probably try to get my old chum, Greg Wallace to do the judging.

Perhaps “chum” is stretching a point. We met many years ago for a BBC Radio Good Food programme with Derek Cooper. Greg was a greengrocer at the time. Of course, he went on to do great things and I stuck to my last in farming. We have not kept in touch a great deal since but I feel sure he would be pleased to help.

Let’s get the entries rolling in.

Research Debate

The Future of Research and Development in UK Horticulture

There is a debate going on in the world of Horticulture about how and even if we should continue to work and pay together to do the research and development to take our industry forward.

Currently there is a statutory levy of about 0.5% of the value added to our horticultural output collected by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. (AHDB). In our case this means daffodils, celeriac, fennel, onions, peas and squash. Our other crops such as wheat, sugar beet and potatoes are classed as Agriculture and work on those is funded in different ways.  With these funds AHDB contract research and trials all over the UK attempting to solve problems presented by new and old pests and diseases, trial new techniques and varieties and offer growers energy and cost saving methods to increase efficiency.

We have benefitted enormously from the work that AHDB has done although it has to be said that much of the work done has been necessary to find replacements for crop protection products withdrawn by regulation or not supported by the manufacturers for our small acreage crops rather than doing development research. The list of approved crop protection products diminishes most years, challenging the industry to find new ways of managing crops that use less chemical solutions and where chemicals are used, to be closer targeted and less persistent. This is also what our customers want, of course and we are very happy with it as long as imported competition is grown to the same standards.

However, many horticultural businesses operate on very small margins in a very competitive market dominated by a few large purchasers and finding close to a half a per cent of turnover is hard.

AHDB is responding by examining all its costs, structures and the way the levy is uniformly collected which is, of course a good thing but the proposal to narrow the focus and vary the levy across different crops and to where work is being done will no doubt be more complicated and at times contentious. It will still require cooperation between growers and cooperation is not something that British farmers are traditionally good at. Our major competitors in Holland take a different view and cooperation has been the keystone of their success in dominating many of the horticultural markets in Europe.

There will be a ballot of levy paying growers in January and virtual meetings in between to express views. Our view is that AHDB is a great asset to the industry and if we turn our back on cooperation and self help it is very unlikely that the government will take up the slack. An industry that fails to research is certain to stagnate and decline.

Time to talk turkey - will we be growing your meat?

There is little doubt that the trend towards lower meat consumption, to flexitarian diets with more plant ingredients and plant based meat substitutes is here to stay. Meat substitute sales are doubling in Europe every five years. Some of the discussion is about health, and some is about cost but the most compelling is perhaps about environmental issues such as rainforest loss and CO2 emissions in meat production. Production methods vary enormously but frequently quoted figures for CO2 equivalents  are:

Beef per Kg                   25Kg CO2
Pork per Kg                   9  Kg CO2
Chicken per Kg             5  Kg CO2

Plant based meat substitutes are much lower with mycoprotein quoted at 1.1 Kg CO2 per kg of product.
Will we, at Jack Buck’s be growing any of the ingredients for the future?

Quorn is the longest established product dating from the 1980’s. It is produced by a fermentation process involving a naturally occurring fungus and it does use wheat gluten or maize as a feedstock so that is a good start, we grow wheat.

Since the development of Quorn, soya protein is dominating the market and of course that will give rise to other environmental problems depending where it comes from.

All plants have different amino acids in their protein and it is important to have a good mix of the essential amino acids. Different plants will also have different textural possibilities and this is all before you get into the small matter of taste!

So the search is on. Peas are a good protein source and there is a great deal of interest in this crop which we can also grow. Other pulses or legumes are increasingly used like chickpeas, navy beans, lentils and lupins and there may be possibilities there.

After that it gets more difficult for us I don’t see us trying quinoa, rice or Jack fruit. Algae is often mentioned as a possible ingredient especially for omega three but it is a difficult crop to grow at scale. Potato protein is occasionally mentioned in the industry news which is a glimmer of hope.

Another “meat alternative” is laboratory cultured meat. This is grown from specific animal cells which could be pork chicken, beef or other. I don’t pretend to understand the process but it does need a feedstock of carbohydrate, protein and essential “dietary” ingredients so perhaps there is a chance for us there. There are more than thirty start up businesses or researchers in this field already and there are in the food industry press frequent stories of successful funding rounds for meat alternative businesses. Singapore recently licenced one product of this type for human consumption.

But perhaps the worst news for farmers generally is the Finnish company Solar Foods that has developed a process to produce protein from just air, water, carbon dioxide and renewable energy.  Hydrogen is bubbled through a bacterial mix, utilising ammonia nitrogen from nitrogen in the air. We are told that the bacteria is naturally occurring, that the protein will be competitive with soy protein in a few years and a pilot production plant is approved. There is no agricultural involvement at all.

Perhaps I am being an ostrich with my head in the sand but it is difficult to believe that this is a serious competitor to farming. Watch this space!