Transforming agriculture to deliver climate and nature friendly farms
The agricultural sector is facing many challenges
A drive to transform it into a low carbon and nature positive industry while delivering healthy food for a growing population will require action beyond farms and across the whole supply chain.
In this article, first published in Farmers Guardian in January 2025, ADAS Climate and Sustainability Managing Director Sarah Wynn shares how innovation across farming is already supporting a shift towards climate-friendly farms and how future advancements are taking this even further.
Farming is an industry of constant transformation, driving great change for centuries. As we look towards a future of farming that is climate friendly and continues to thrive, changes will be needed.
In the post-war period, mechanisation of ploughing had a big impact on the scale of production. In the 1930s, my great-grandfather ploughed his fields with a pair of Shire horses – less than 100 years ago, the average team was able to plough an acre a day in this way. Since then, tractors have overtaken the horses, and a single tractor can now plough over 30 acres a day.
In my great-grandfather’s time, using machines to do jobs that had previously been done manually and with working animals was a big departure from the norm. But it resulted in significant positive change and enabled farmers across the country to meet the growing demand for food. We must take this same view and embrace innovative and novel technology.
Achieving a climate-friendly farm
When thinking about how to meet the industry goal of net zero emissions, it is important to remember that a climate-friendly farm does not look the same for every business. While the industry target is to achieve net zero emissions, this can’t and shouldn’t be achieved on every individual farm. Some businesses are better suited to certain actions more than others, and finding the options that work best and will maintain a healthy farm environment is important.
The collective impact of our individual actions will make a difference. But where do we start?
The building blocks to a climate and nature-friendly farm
There are three key foundations of a climate- and nature-friendly farm – healthy soil, high biodiversity and responsibly produced food.
Soil
The healthy soil is the starting point. A healthy soil is teeming with microbial activity and has good structure that enables it to absorb rainfall and store moisture to increase resilience to weather extremes. Good structure allows for strong rooting systems that penetrate deep beneath the surface to facilitate water and nutrient uptake.
A healthy soil will also contain lots of organic matter, which will be feeding microbial communities and ensuring that nutrients are efficiently recycled and delivered to the crop’s rooting system, leading to healthy crop growth. In a healthy soil, crops will require fewer inputs, as more of their needs are met by the environment.
Biodiversity
Encouraging a wider variety of biodiversity around the farm directly supports its natural functions. Having biodiverse habitats on farm will benefit pollinator populations that are critical for ensuring good yields of flowering crops. They also support natural predators that can enhance the management of pest species. Including nature in a farming landscape facilitates other ecosystem services, such as reducing the risk of run-off to protected waters, providing flood defences and holding carbon in vegetative stores, such as in the trees or soils.
Efficient production
The final building block is efficient production and responsible use of resources. We now need to farm in a way that works with nature and supports the wider ecosystem services that farming relies on, such as climate, water and biodiversity. We need to ensure that resources are used in a responsible way, with greater consideration for finite resources.
Transforming agriculture
This century’s transformation is to a system that is climate and nature friendly. We need to look at actions that create significant shifts, not just small incremental changes. We need to be brave in the actions we take, but the risk needs to be shared more equitably throughout the food supply chain and not just sit with the individual farming business.
1. Improve productivity and reduce waste
In developing a climate-friendly farm, the first part of the transformation is improving productivity and efficiency while reducing waste. Improved productivity on livestock farms could enable us to produce the same amount of meat and milk as we do now but with far fewer animals.
Actions to reduce disease, manage lameness, improve fertility and reduce the number of replacements required can all support in reducing emissions from the agriculture sector by about 10%.
Further measures that improve overall productivity by reducing the number of livestock needed and the number of days they are present on farm will impact all sources of emissions, from enteric methane (from digestion), through manure methane and nitrous oxide, down to those embedded in feed and fertilisers.
2. Methane reduction
It is widely recognised that methane is the major greenhouse gas produced by agriculture, and enteric fermentation in ruminant livestock is the most significant contributor. There are already technologies on the market to reduce methane emissions from cattle, which include manipulating diet to increase digestibility and feeding methane inhibitors to housed cattle to reduce methane emissions.
Future developments are expected to include more effective methane inhibitors that can reduce emissions still further and delivery systems that enable the inhibitors to be provided to grazing as well as housed livestock.
It is also expected that there will be increasing focus on genetic traits that are associated with methane emission reduction in cattle. Addressing methane emissions could reduce agricultural emissions by 10–20% depending on the level of adoption and development of new technologies.
3. Manures and ammonia
Manures are the next major source of emissions on farm, and it is critical that emissions are managed right from the point of deposition in housing, through storage, and to application. Most measures to mitigate emissions from manures will require financial investment in infrastructure but can also deliver some benefits on farm.
In housing, the key action is to reduce ammonia, an indirect source of nitrous oxide. This includes the separation of urine and dung to minimise the contact between urea in the urine and urease in the dung, which results in ammonia emissions. Improving layouts of housing to facilitate this separation and using flooring that allows urine to run away and dung that can be scrapped to be captured will contribute to reductions.
Storage
In manure storage, keeping stores covered, especially liquid slurry stores, is important. Reducing the loss of nitrous oxide and ammonia to the atmosphere will help to maintain nitrogen in the manure and enhance the nutrient value to the future crop. It is also possible to include passive methane capture of some covered slurry stores, which can be processed and compressed into a useful fuel to power tractors and other farm machinery, displacing the need for fossil fuels.
Application
Application is the final stage, and if investments have been made in the earlier stages of the process to protect and maintain nitrogen levels in the manure, this stage is all the more critical to ensure all those benefits are returned to the crop and not lost to the atmosphere. There is already widespread adoption of low emission application technologies, such as trailing shoe and injection applications for liquid manures.
Future technologies that will help to reduce emissions from application further include nitrification inhibitors and acidification at application.
4. Fertilisers
In the broad acre and grazing crop sector, the main source of emissions arises from the use of manufactured nitrogen fertilisers. These have a dual impact as a result of the embedded emissions from their manufacture and the nitrous oxide emissions from their applications. Action in the manufacturing sector has already halved embedded emissions since the turn of the century.
There is a lot of activity to identify scalable, low carbon nitrogen fertiliser sources. These include biogenic fertilisers, where nitrogen in organic materials is enhanced and made more available to the crop. Another alternative is green ammonia for manufactured nitrogen fertilisers, which uses renewable energy to produce hydrogen that can then replace the energy used in ammonia manufacture, effectively reducing embedded emissions from nitrogen manufacture. Cost and availability are major barriers to widespread uptake of these fertiliser processes at present.
From the application perspective, nitrification and urease inhibitors are already available and can reduce emissions. More novel approaches look to utilise biostimulants to enhance the uptake of nitrogen, reducing the total amount of nitrogen required.
5. Switch to sustainable fuels
In fuel-intensive production systems, there are also a number of options available to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels; these include biodiesel; biomethane from manures and anaerobic digestion; and electrification. Electrification will require the development of robotics to enable machines to be made small enough that battery weights don’t cause issues with regard to soil compaction, enabling smaller driverless vehicles to replace larger heavy vehicles.
Conclusion
There are many actions that can be taken now and into the future to minimise emissions from farming; however, it is unlikely that, even with new technologies being developed, it will be possible to get all farms to zero emissions, but the combined effect will make a significant difference.
Ultimately, a climate-friendly farm is one that looks to both reduce emissions and increase carbon removal. This increase might take many forms and look different on every site, and farmers will need guidance in identifying the best solution for them.