Next Steps with Regenerative Agriculture - Stephen Briggs
Stephen is a first-generation farmer who has been farming organically for over two decades. He runs Whitehall farm in Cambridgeshire where he grows oats and a range of organic vegetables depending on marketplace opportunities. In 2009 he created the largest commercial agroforestry system in the UK integrating 2,400 apple trees into his crop land.
He is Non Exec Director of AHDB, Principal Farm Consultant at Abacus Agriculture, and Head of Technical Development at Innovation for Agriculture. Stephen has an MSc in Soil Science and extensive long term experience in soil and water management. He is also a Nuffield Farming Scholar and was awarded the Bullock Award in 2020 in recognition of him being the scholar who most influenced the agricultural industry in the 10 years since his scholarship.
This talk was recorded at an Agricology event focusing on regenerative agriculture that was held at the Waddesdon Estate in May 2023. Stephen speaks about implementing agroforestry systems on a tenanted farm with a built-in financial return model, highlighting some of the many benefits and challenges.
Highlights
- 🌳 Agroforestry systems enhance land productivity and biodiversity.
- 💰 Financial models can support sustainable farming practices.
- 🌱 Transitioning from conventional to regenerative agriculture is crucial.
- 🌦️ Climate resilience is built through diversified farming systems.
- 📈 Enterprise stacking increases profitability and resource efficiency.
- 🤝 Collaboration between farmers and foresters is essential.
- 🏞️ Long-term policies are needed to support agroforestry initiatives.
Key Insights
- 🌍 Agroforestry Benefits: Integrating trees with crops and livestock can optimize land use, enhancing biodiversity and productivity while providing multiple income streams. This approach counters traditional monoculture practices.
- 💡 Financial Viability: Implementing agroforestry can lead to better financial outcomes. By capturing various market opportunities, farmers can mitigate risks associated with crop price fluctuations.
- 🔄 Sustainable Transition: Moving from conventional agricultural practices to regenerative methods is vital for long-term sustainability and resilience against climate change impacts.
- 🌿 Resilience Through Diversity: Diverse cropping systems can better withstand extreme weather conditions, such as droughts and heavy rainfall, ensuring consistent yields.
- 📊 Efficiency in Resource Use: Enterprise stacking maximizes the use of resources, allowing farmers to achieve higher productivity without the need for additional land.
- 🤝 Collaboration is Key: Bridging the gap between agriculture and forestry sectors can lead to innovative practices and shared benefits, promoting a more sustainable future.
- 📜 Policy Support Needed: Long-term supportive policies are essential to encourage farmers to adopt agroforestry and other regenerative practices, ensuring alignment with environmental goals.
Transcripts
Transcriptions
so welcome back everyone to this afternoon session um so we've talked about how to get started and how to make it pay and now we're looking sort of further ahead onto next steps um and in this session we're going to hear from Steven Briggs um about implementing AGR forestry systems particularly and extra impressively on a tenanted farm um with a built-in Financial return model um after that we're going to have a bit of discussion about where agricology should be focusing what you've learned from the the day the questions that I've been um thrilling you all with um today so we're going to do a little bit up bit on that afterwards um but first uh Stephen is going to talk
Afficher la suite
to us about some of his more complex longer term regenerative agricultural systems um Steven's a first generation farmer who's been farming organically for over two decades um and uh managing over uh mostly tenanted Farmland Steph grows a range of cereal crops and organic vegetables um and in 2009 9 created the largest commercial Agro forestry system in UK in the UK um and we've just been talking about it here actually seeing a system um in in its maturity is is really rare and and really really interesting so really looking forward to Ste what Steven has to say he's also a non-exec director at hdb lead consultant consultant at Abacus Agri head of technical development Innovation for agriculture um and has an MSE and S science an exp extensive long experience in Soil and Water Management and is also an a farm scholar so over to you Stephen thank you that's my talk done anyhow thanks Alice um yeah I was asked to sort of do all this in a nutshell so what I wanted to do is sort of take you through a few things um clearly there's some issues around the kind of regenerative uh practices we've been talking about today around uh some of the stuff we've been doing around around Agro forestry uh thinking about sort of tency land tenure given that you know 30% of our land over 30% of our land tenure is tenanted there's some CH challenges around this transition between where we were under the the common agricultural policy and as we we move forward in this Brave New World in a in a domestic context um when we're talking about things like Agro forestry there were some things to consider between sort of Forestry and Agriculture and what does that look like um we've already heard that phrase from a number of the speakers about Enterprise stacking and that's certainly a uh a principle that we we followed and I'll explain about how we've we've we've sort of implemented that and um I I suppose I I'll try and share some of the sort of lessons and Progressive approaches that we we've done and I think that also need to happen to to facilitate some of these changes sort of going forward so to put things in a few bit of context um you know the climate change committee uh Adis government um they they've looked at where we are in terms of uh land use at the moment you know 30% grassland 26% crop land uh some some rough grazing and you know tree trees are in there uh I think at about sort of 13% of land use something like that and and and the suggestions are to get where we need to get in terms of building more resilience into our our Landscapes to meet some of the challenges around biodiversity and um and also uh carbon uh under the sort of Paris Accord we we've got to move uh to to changing the way we sort of manage land and some of the ambition is around moving moving tree cover from 133% to 177% okay may not sound much but given that most of our landscape is agricultural if we're going to if we're going to have trees we trees tree cover or perennial cover some of that's going to have to go on agricultural land and how do we do that whilst maintaining product itivity and also profitability and and all the resilience and biodiversity we're looking for so just in context really uh under the common agricultural policy there's been there has been support for more than well over a decade on planting AGR forestry maintaining Agro forestry um you know it it came up under the old efas uh ecological Focus areas and Greening measures when they were in place that was an option article 23 pay for the establishment of Agro forestry and the maintenance over a 5year period our our particular governments couldn't see the relevance a decade ago and said we don't think we'll make that available to UK Farmers um so we've never had the option of that facility being available to us in the UK even though it's been available on a on a uh on a wider basis for EUR Europe and the big change actually was in 2011 uh I stood up in the parliament in Brussels and I argued for change change and post war if you planted more than 50 trees per hectare on a parel of land it ceased to be agricultural it became forestry so of course farmers are never going to you're never going to plant more than 50 trees per hectare and and come out of the subsidy regim yep 2011 we got that changed to 100 stems per hectare myself a Greek gentle an Irish gentleman there's a joke in there somewhere um and we got it to 100 trees back there which is quite quite a significant change now at a deer level at domestic level provided you can undertake agricultural production of grazing and or cropping there's no loss in eligibility for land use uh and uh it remains Agricultural and that's quite important but we still have these issues I mean we're talking England here today but we still have these issues between Scot Scotland uh uh between Scotland England Wales Northern Ireland we all have slightly different takes on this in terms where it goes between the different different departments and services so we've already heard uh um from the previous speaker so I'm not going to dwell on this we're on a different transition away from the common agricultural policy with more more around environmental services and the sort of Elms being essential to that um and and as I've already said there's some challenges here for us we need to think about Lenna if we're looking at longer term ambition longer term OB Ives having short-term Tendencies really doesn't play to that long-term ambition in terms of biodiversity uh building Sol carbon nature recovery you know we we we're we're working shortterm to not not not longterm we've always always had separate Agricultural and uh and Forestry policies perhaps we need a land use policy that's a bit more joined up between the two different disciplines um it shouldn't be difficult our current uh leaders in the political landscape have a tree as part of their uh their logo but it would seem but U maybe we're not quite getting through the uh the thing so we'll go beyond that um the the test and trials uh which we've heard a little bit about today uh the new stuff coming in 2023 just so you know the there's an agro forestry SFI coming which will come in in 20124 that's designed um uh I've been involved with that and it's sort of with treasury at the moment I think um so hopefully that should that should roll out in 2024 there's been a test and trial which has just come to the end that's been running three years uh to inform that um and the important bit is that the land that is planted under Agri Forest which we talk about um will remain eligible as an agricultural landscap so the context is do we carry on farming like the way we've always farmed for the last 40 50 years how do we deal with climate change how do we deal the challenges of 40° which apparently was 100 one in 100 Year exercise but we had it for 3 days last year uh how do we deal with the increasing intensity of rainfall uh with those those shifts in in in wet and cold and temperature and we're we're we're projected to hit temperatures you know in that 40° uh projected by the EA by 2070 2080 scrub that number and put 2022 um uh aggro forestry is not a new idea you know um Nature's worked this one out a long time ago nature doesn't do monoculture it Stacks things in time and space uh with different elements to make use of all those resources and all that space that's available it's only the Agriculture and the policy Landscapes which have made Farmers remove trees from the landscape and the fact that we want mechanization and and and and and and Roots just sort of simplicity so the picture in the top right there is is in northern France in Normandy in the in the late 19th century looks very different today because the common agricultural policy said take the trees out okay so only now we're starting to think about things in a different context so Agro forestry really is a land use where trees trees are combined with either crops Sil past or or or livestock Sil pastal where there's a significant ecological or economic interaction now they can be negative interactions competition or they can be positive and giving us giving us benefits but some of the challenges are that Foresters and Farmers well we have a lot in common probably more in common than we think we both make a cck shirt look pretty damn good um but but actually we talk a different language we we use different measures and metrics for measurement um but there's a there's a there's a shared interest in terms terms of in terms of actually achieving the same goals and and you could say that Foresters have a good healthy infection of Agri phobia and Foresters uh sorry Farmers have arop phobia and Foresters have Agri phobia and we need to get over that infection and But ultimately as Phil said right at the beginning today so there's a nice little segue here um we're all in the same game we're all about harvesting sunlight now whether we're a farm or a Forester or even a photo voltaic engineer we're all harvesting sunlight and as a farmer myself I worked out you know a decade or more ago that there are periods of the year as a grain farmer when there's near maximum solar radiation like today and I'm but by the middle of July when those serial crops are going golden we've turned the solar panels off so at the point of year when we've got maximum solar radiation we've turned off our major input how can we capture that major input because it's that input that's giving photosynthesis that's actually driving those sugars and starches and polysaccharides into the so it's feeding all the biology that we've all talked about today so part of my rationale was how do we actually capture more input to make our farm more productive the second thing is well you know uh you talked about nitrogen the price of nitrogen earlier on having gone up spiked come down a little bit nitrogen use efficiency in the UK is 48% so when you get home tonight go down the pub buy a pint pour half of it down your front because that's effectively what we're doing the reason that TS water hav't we've got a European nitrates directive and we've got a uh a cleanup treat in the treatment plants is because all those nitrates are Lo losing our farm that's money that's leaving the farm so Agro forestry is not necessarily the answer but it's part of the answer some work done by the French would suggest that um you can probably cut some of those losses by about half by capturing some of that nitrogen turning into a form of carbon stopping it getting in the drains and and leaving the farm so there's a there's an element there in terms of actually uh slowing the flow of water in terms of natural flood management uh water management stopping stopping silts leaving the farm which are the best soils not the worst stopping the nutrients leaving the farm if we can capture them in our landscape and turn them into a resource actually that that can be useful and you could say that lowland agriculture this part of the world is largely an AGR forestry landscape anyhow apart from the trees and hedges don't give us a direct income to the bottom line of the farm but they could the other part of the conundrum is on this sort of light uh and nutrient management bit that got my head really hurting about a decade or more ago two decades ago uh was that the crops and the grasses really use the those nutrients in the early part of the Season they're all growing really quickly over winter early part of the spring trees have only just started putting their leaves on in the last few weeks and they'll carry on till October so there's a temporal overlap we can make the make the resource capture more efficient by layering on those different elements at different times and then also and I I apologize for coining the phrase three-dimensional farming my fault um the uh the idea actually we can make the farm bigger by going three up and down and sorry Tim but actually if I make the farm bigger by going up and down I don't need any more money because actually uh I don't have to buy more land I don't have to rent more land it's all free up there and it's all free down there you can make the farm bigger so this is some work done uh um looking at a plantation of popler uh and actually an agro forestry system and the the rooting patterns are in a completely different place because in an agro forestry context with a bit of soil disturbance and and annual cropping in the upper Horizon you end up with a completely different rooting structure on the same species of the same age of the tree than you do in a forestry context because the forest in a forestry context they'll put all the resources near the surface so this is all contributing to money this is where I'm coming to so the AGR forestry can help towards Soil and Water Quality protection wind speed reduction Vapor transpiration um improved infiltration and drainage flood mitigation and modifying microclimates and there's lots of research to back up those sort of statements there are lots of different options whether that be uh Timber trees walnuts there uh fruit trees biomass uh short rotation Copus whatever that might be in a silver arable context and a silver pastural context that can be you know poultry pigs sheep cattle grazing and it doesn't have to be planting necessarily it can be taking some of that Woodland that was planted under Woodland gr schemes that frankly hasn't been looked at for 25 years and he in a pretty sorry state but thin all the crap out and and actually reintroduce some animals into that Woodland and have a mixed species uh sort of oh dear 5 minutes bloody hell bit of crack on um um so there's some really good data availability around around uh uh animal welfare and production on Agro forestry there's some really good data around uh biodiversity some of the other stuff we were looking at that we can leverage in terms of income uh uh hard biodiversity in terms of birds flocks P Pung and insects and it tends to be more of the better stuff the more of the worst stuff some of the data we've looked at on our own Farm I've been working a lot with PhD and M students highly recommend it they're free labor students um we we've had work published at home showing two 200% more solitary bees and off flies 240% more bumblebees and 10 times species richness in enhancement there's some really good data around forestry models and income and obviously around around Crop Production it's a bit weaker on the Agro forestry side domestically because there aren't so many models out there but in terms of looking at productivity if you compare a mixed agroforestry context um using uh what's called a land equivalent ratio you can um text has got a bit funny on here but uh uh you would need 08 hectares of Agriculture and6 hectares of trees to get the same productivity as one hectare of AGR forestry giving you a land equivalent ratio 1.4 means you've got about a 40% bouncing potential poal productivity um that's probably at best um big European project looking at 42 tree crop combinations said that those land equivalent ratios between 1.1 and 1.4 that's between 10 and 40% more productive and you think well hang on a minute if it's more productive how on Earth is that possible it's possible by making the farm bigger and actually capturing those resources for a longer period of the Season not to solar panels up so what have we done at home and how are we capitalizing our value we uh we're tenants we're first generation Farmers started with nothing got most of that left um we we uh we took out a farm year 15year Farm business teny uh convinced our landlord that we were going to go mad Farm it organically and actually put all these trees in across the landscape um uh so we're over here in sort of South cambri inia Peterborough um uh the driver for us was that actually when we moved onto the the farm we had some really bad soil erosion problems um and as a s Scientist by training I couldn't accept those uh so we wanted to move towards a more multifunctional land use spread cropping Enterprise and diversity improve the soil biodiversity and open up new markets we Farm a mixture of py loom soils and what I would call minute brick soils I one minute they're CL they they're porridge and the next minute they're concrete and it's taken us over a decade to move those away from what was quite intensive potato sugar be rate wheat production before we took the farm on so we put on a uh a uh 52 hectare Agro forestry system uh on 85 trees per hectare so below that 100 trees per hectare on a farm year 15year Farm business tendency all apples 13 varieties all late maturing so that we could Harvest the cereals and then go and harvest the fruit um that's what they look like when they went in little sticks with poles um with a 3 meter strip uh uh running down there planted to pollen nectar and funded under Countryside stewardship um that's sort of what it looked like when we went in 3 m between each tree 27 M between each row 3 m strips 24 M working alleys I'm I'm going to run over by two don't worry uh uh um that's what it looks like now it's grown a bit in that 15-year period um uh it allows us to use large scale Machinery it's bought a whole bunch of resilience to the farm which I'll explain in a second the understories provide uh provide a pollination service for a b Enterprise as well as a Countryside St income the trees provide us a a a a working barrier to reduce that wind erosion problem and provid us an income we can stack from from the trees um we've got a Serial crop in the in the inter in the alley and then we have a clover companion plant that pumping nitrogen into the system as well uh because we're growing everything on a wide row into row H so no insectoid no herbicides no fungicides no bag nitrogen since 2007 it's possible and we're still making money it's not without its challenges so just some pictures of sort of what it looks like now um I'm the one that plants it I'm the one that combines it you have to learn to drive in a straight line otherwise it doesn't really work um everything's planted north south so that uh sun comes up in the East goes down in the west there isn't that sort of shading issue trees aren't too big because otherwise you we haven't got Dutch Pickers um we have to have at a reasonable height and um um and also we we want to inter interrupt wind but not create too much shade so that's sort of what it looks like in the in the spring what's really interesting sorry is that I was always expecting more crop in the middle less crop at the edge from competition 15 years on seeing the reverse we're seeing more crop on the edge here than we are in the middle what's happening it's happening better drainage in the winter better water retention in the summer more micro rizy in the soil proven because we've got researchers doing that work so some funny stuff going on building us some resilience my screen sa home is of a friend of mine in portier in France uh who's been doing this for a long time these are walnuts on a class combine that screen saver I looked at more recently and thought same thing's happening there why is that happening so there were stuff we don't understand but it's happening the oh dear sorry it's it's de formatted the money so we're growing organic cereals uh you know we're average about 61 a hectare of Oats as an example that's giving us a gross margin of about 1,800 quid a hectare um we're growing wheat uh with gross margin last year about 1600 pound a hectare the fruit is about 1,800 pound a hectare but if I put that in a bottle I can treble its value so so it's about it's about yield for vanity profit for sanity it's about stacking those Enterprises and extracting that value and when we come on to Value this is some work that was done looking at where the value sits in the value chain of UK food and in farming's the blue bit down the bottom yeah orange is the food manufacturing gray is food wholesaling food retailing and and and residential or C catering yeah uh whatever it is takeaways Etc in 1998 we had about 11% of the food chain that's between 7 and 9% now yes I've got a time up sorry I'll be very quick so we went completely mad and said we want a piece of that um as others have talked about today and we in 200 uh well 14 months before covid we opened the farm shop brilliant timing um and um and uh but that that sort of worked CU we we put everything through the farm shop now to capture that value um and I put this picture up in terms of stacking in diversity this is darting down in um down in to in Devon and one of the one of the challenges in front of us as Farmers is that we're constantly being asked as land managers to do more things produce food produce biodiversity produce landscape produce resilience produce Etc that assumes that we have all the skills and capital available to all those things and time so one of the things if we want multifunctional outputs on our land perhaps we need a new paradigm of multifunctional operators stacking people on the land yeah so that may look like uh a an agro forestry system but there's actually four Farmers operating on that piece of land there's the farmer there's the land owner there's the farmer that Farms the bit in between and there are three different tree operators growing sashan pepper growing um uh uh uh Elder flour and growing fruit so stacking people with different skills different time different Capital to achieve those outcomes there are models around for Timber production fruit production nut production biomass Recreation imunity and carbon by layering the these sort of things together um certainly people at the fio have said aggr shopen a really good opportunity for carbon sequestration uh there is there is data out there on whether it's a fast or slow growing species the Agro forestry can contribute between 1 and a half and four tons of carbon per hectare from the trees we know we're doing about 3 tons per year I'm not getting any income from that yet but I'd like to and we're in terms of chg emissions from Timber we're way down the packing order compared to others in Europe the challenge is whether it's biodiversity or nature or carbon if you pick up John Nicks or agricultural costings ABC those three words don't appear in the in the uh in the index at the back or anywhere in the text cuz I've looked so the three things we're trying to build our business on don't figure on the p&l or on the balance sheet but they should do they should be part of every business so farmers don't you don't we don't need to do all our Farms as agroforestry we could easily do 20% of our farmland and and and and it wouldn't massively interrupt what we're doing if we did 5.8% of our Farmland I'm 8% that's all um we will completely meet our targets under the Paris Accord according to work I've done with forestry commission and National Trust in terms of um uh carbon sequestration um there are some blockers in the way land tenure we need to think about new models about shared occupation of land so that we can we can use that we can break down that arop phobia and Agri phobia by using those different skill sets more check shirts uh we need to think about policy the code design thing been useful but it's slow um tree health is an issue we now can't import and one of the bigger blockers no one's looking at at the moment is where are we going to get all these if we want to move from 133% to 17% trees where are we going to get all the planting material because there's a shortage now so maybe there's an opportunity to be a nursery producer so closing slide uh long-term policies on Agri forestry are vital we need closer uh forestry and agricultural policy land use policy uh the permanence can be a bit of an issue but um those trees that are put onto agricultural land that land does remain agricultural uh Capital hopefully a bit of SFI money or some private Capital money will help public and private private Finance models um uh we do need more economic data AGR forestry because there's a limited number of uh systems in the UK um the carbon or biodiversity income is coming and I think it will become more and more to the front for those kind of things definitely the opportunity to stack Enterprises and skills and people um someone raised it earlier on every time I get an LPA inspect sorry visitor that was the word us inspector sends them into a complete flat spin uh you know if we're looking for more complex systems complexity in the RPA just don't mesh and and and we need to get that overcome so perhaps the most dangerous expression that we hear too often is well we've always done it this way um I found a nice little picture from a visit to Canada a few years ago where someone had using used photovoltaic capture mimicking a tree which I thought was quite praic uh but but the one thing that as Farmers we're really good at and we will continue to be good at is to adapt and uh and innovate and and I think we can continue to do that to have resilient profitable systems and stack those Enterprises and move the game forward thank you brilliant thank you very much Steph um uh yeah fascinating to see uh the development of that system and and where it's got to and thank you very very much for your Insight um any questions for Steven [Music] please I was just going to ask what are you actually doing with the apples you talked about bottling so uh a small proportion initially they all went to a well-known cider manufacturing suffk uh and ciders part of your five day cuz it's a fruit brace product uh um uh but now actually we've we' over the recent years we've moved everything to retailing directly so we sell some fresh fruit and but the majority of it goes into a bottle and is sold we do about 5 and a half thousand bottles A year of of fruit juice because I can treble treble the value from from a wholesale perspective hi one of the most extraordinary things about AGR forestry and I know this because I've seen it on your farm is exactly what you've just said about crops growing higher where you think they' be shaded out having had to do a debate about this on live radio where I was told by George Momo that agosi doesn't work because it Shades out where can we find the evidence that you just talked about that's being gathered to prove this phenomenon that you have seen and that others are seeing um well it' be nice if George actually came out and saw things in person rather than just reading things in books because because he tends to be rather selective in the evidence he selected to support his arguments um so there there is there is research data globally uh looking at um I say globally in different places around the world on on on crop performance and and it is different in some with some tree species there is a drop off in in uh um in parts of the field and others there isn't so it is a bit mixed depending on on on the on the on the location but um you know that's why we're doing some of the research we're doing um and and and I guess the challenge is it's quite difficult to apply some of that research let's say from melier in France to suffk in the UK because it's a different EO eological context so the only real way is to have have those examples in the UK and generate the data ourselves doesn't answer your question does it if everyone here does it then we W have the answer um yeah um I was just wondering do you buy your seed every year or do you um save it cuz uh wakand the yq has adapted to grow uniformly across the alleys I believe yeah I I grew some of the very first yq in the country with Martin uh years ago as it in the moment we're we're we're a bit abnormal in that we're we're growing 100% oats which is really odd uh and I haven't bought any seed for 10 years so it's all farm saved and the reason we grow 100% oats is we're one of the few Farms that's gluten-free certified so we're growing we're stacking we grow organic we grow oats and we're gluten-free certified and we're also Swiss certified to sell into the Swiss market uh so that gives us a bounce on a bounce on a bounce on a bounce in terms of in terms of margin capturing margin price taker be a price maker not a price taker I think is the uh is is the expression brilliant well thank you very much Stephen um yeah really interesting and yeah I like that point to finish being price maker not price taker um so thank you very very much
