Farming for carbon in the UK uplands

This Guardian article sets out a dire future for UK hill farming: recent research shows hill cattle and sheep farm incomes falling by up to 30% in the next five years in the South West, and even more in remoter areas. It's a combination of changes to the farm payments scheme for the uplands, making it a more complicated scheme, and rising input prices for sheep and cattle farmers.

Upland areas, including Exmoor, Dartmoor, the Peaks and Lake District, provide valuable landscapes for the UK, generate tourism, and provide much of our clean water. Peatlands are also the single largest carbon reserve in the UK, storing over three billion tonnes of carbon. That's the equivalent of 20 years of the UK's CO2 emissions. As the article states, "the effect of sheep and cattle grazing on the ability of Britain's moorlands to act as 'carbon sinks' is one of the most crucial functions of upland farming."

What the article doesn't mention are the likely direct impacts of climate change on these vulnerable areas, and the additional pressure on farmers to adapt. We know for example that higher summer temperatures could increase grass production and stock carrying capacity, but that more storms could make soil management very difficult. Warmer, drier summers also mean drying out of peat, making it more likely to be eroded, and then there's the increased risk of fire.

These are all difficult impacts for farmers to deal with - especially with sometimes very localised impacts. There is a strong argument for rewarding good management by paying farmers for carbon management of these vulnerable soils, particularly through restoring areas which are already affected by erosion and peat loss. The Moors for the Future partnership website states that "peatland restoration activities in England and Wales could absorb around 400,000 tonnes of carbon a year. This is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from... 84,000 family-sized cars per year. If these savings were marketed as Certified Emission Reductions on the carbon offset market, they could pay for large-scale restoration."

It looks like farmers in these vulnerable areas are going to need all the help they can get.

www.farmingfutures.org.uk