Farming on the frontline of climate change

Cambridge, historically, is one of the driest counties in the UK. In fact, the botanic garden in the centre of the City recorded the second highest temperature ever in this country - 39.9c - during the heatwave of 2022. Where it sits, in the east of England, is also the country's most important area for arable farmland. And so farmers here are at the frontline of the food production battle with climate change...

Martin - I'm Martin Lines. We farm at Papworth Grove Farm in Eltisley. Predominantly an arable crop farm, so combinable crops of wheat, barley beans, oil seed rape. But we're reintroducing livestock into the system to get more fertility into our soil, to reduce the amount of artificial fertiliser we have to buy in and kind of look at the whole farm approach around productivity of nature and as well as crops and food.

Will - Now we're at that wonderful time in the year here in the UK where I could not tell you what the weather's going to do in the next 20 minutes, but the trend is one of increased warmth and hotter summers and potentially greater drought. And have you been feeling that on the farm particularly in the last few years?

Martin - Definitely. The seasons are really becoming unpredictable. We're seeing hotter temperatures, warmer winters, and a lot more rainfall, and that has really been challenging our ability to be an effective business producing crops and sort of managing our work.

Will - Historically, as I said before, this is kind of used to being somewhat dry. This is a dry part of the country, but we are having wetter winters and I feel that might be playing as much or even a bigger part of the sort of disruption of your food systems as the drier summers.

Martin - Very much so. So if we look at this, this winter's been an exceptionally wet winter for us in Cambridgeshire, but when I look nationally, we are still relatively dry. We are unable to plant our autumn crops because it got too wet. We managed to do some in some dry windows in December and January, so our crops are further backwards, but that also means we have more crops we need to plant in the spring, and we're seeing a really prolonged wet spring. So actually our output may be 50, 60% down on normal years. And that becomes really challenging, not just as a business, but much of what we produce is food. So where's that food going to come from if we can't produce it?

Will - No, exactly. And as you say, this is really throwing your business and everyone's ability to find food into really disruptive territory.

Martin - Very much so. I mean, we've seen times where we're 60 to 80% down. Other years we might be 120% up on what we'd hoped, but that unpredictability not just here in Cambridgeshire, but across the UK and in wider afield, it's having huge volatility in prices. We go from prices for 170 pounds a tonne for wheat to almost 300 pounds a tonne, and then we're back down to 150 pounds a tonne. So my business is increasingly being challenged. I'm having to plan a lot further forward in trying to guess what prices may be and yields not just here, but around the world of that volatility and price.

Will - I appreciate that this is an organic farm because it would, if I were a farmer, which I'm very much not, would almost feel like with such short windows that you can successfully produce crops, you might want to fall back on fertilisers.

Martin - Yeah, so we are not completely organic. We're still using some products, but we must move away from fossil fuel based fertilisers. That's the only solution we must de-fossilise and decarbonise our system. So to do that, I need to build fertility into soil by using legume crops that can build nitrogen into the soil. Bringing in manure. My favourite saying is fertiliser is better out the bum than out the bag, we need to recycle it from ourselves and from animals back into our soils. That means I can eliminate fossil fuel-based fertilisers.

Will - What do you think then is the forecast for the near future? We've got all these predictions coming up that say food prices are going to massively spike between now and 2035. What do you as someone on the front lines think is the case?

Martin - I think we're gonna see huge volatility in price and supply and opportunity. We are already seeing this climate having a pretty devastating impact and it hasn't really got bad yet. But if we look at all the science that's coming and all the data we understand, I'm going to have to adjust my business. I'm going to have to make it deliver more products because we are never sure if it's going to be hot, dry, wet, cold. That's the unpredictability of what we have. So we're going to see food prices be volatile, the availability of food really disappear in many products, and we're going to have to move food around the world more because we may not be able to produce some products some years, but other places can. But we're going to have to really look at where the availability of water, moisture, and nutrition is going to be to think about our own diets in availability of food as well.