Research also reveals that a mixture of arable crops and cattle helps improve the biodiversity of the land
Cows may belch methane into the atmosphere at alarming rates, but new data shows they may play an important role in renewing farm soil.
Research by the Soil Association Exchange shows that farms with a mixture of arable crops and livestock have about a third more carbon stored within their soil than those with only arable crops, thanks to the animals’ manure.
Joseph Gridley, chief executive of SAE, which was set up by the Soil Association in 2021 to support and measure sustainable farming, said it was unlikely that carbon captured in soil would balance out the enormous amounts of methane created by cattle. Farm livestock around the world creates about 14% of human-induced climate emissions.
“It’s pretty unequivocal in the data that having livestock on your farm does mean you have more emissions – five or six times more emissions,” he said. “But if you integrate livestock into the system, on every metric on soil health, there’s an improvement, and on a lot of the biodiversity measures as well.”
Soils are degrading, but by how much exactly is unclear. In 2015, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation claimed that the world had only 60 harvests left, but researchers at Oxford University and Our World In Data said in 2021 that there was a complex picture, and that while there were 16% of soils with an expected lifespan of fewer than 100 years, a third were expected to last at least 5,000.
Lee Reeves, UK head of agriculture at Lloyds bank, which helps fund SAE, said that the research showed farmers were taking steps to improve sustainability if they could see a direct link between a grant and a new farming practice, but this was not always obvious
He suggested ministers should create a decarbonisation strategy, and a standardised carbon calculator, so that farmers and other businesses could use a single tool to calculate their carbon impacts.
“Moving from traditional to regenerative farming can see a dip in profitability for the first five years, so the government needs to support farmers and banks in that,” he said.
