This week, fresh off the back of the World Meteorological Organization's scathing report of the state of global climate 2023, we’re taking a look at how the increasing trend of torrid weather extremes are affecting our relationship with food production. How do we reconcile our demand for food if the expansion of farmland will only exacerbate climate change’s effects?
In this episode
00:53 - Farming on the frontline of climate change
Farming on the frontline of climate change
Martin Lines
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.
05:37 - Climate change to inflate food prices by 2%
Climate change to inflate food prices by 2%
Gordon Fletcher, University of Salford
What is happening to the economics of food production? Well there have been some pretty startling studies out recently addressing this question, and to take us through it is the Associate Dean of Research and Innovation University of Salford’s business school, Gordon Fletcher...
Gordon - The interesting thing about this is that it's a relatively new sort of aspect to the science or the economics of agriculture. The recent paper in Nature really does outline a very clear measure and they talk about the notion of a climate event, an unexpected weather event, potentially contributing around a 0.17, 0.2% effect on food inflation. And that of course is inflation in the sense that it adds to the cost of the food of those items. The interesting thing of course is that that doesn't immediately go away when any sort of adverse weather goes away. It's something that sort of sits in the system and takes a long time for the system to kind of adjust, which starts to give you a measure of the scale of the challenge. Because even though a 0.2% change in food inflation doesn't sound significant, obviously multiple events that go against the expected accumulate and they kind of add to the effect. And you can look at a projection of potentially a 2% effect on food inflation in the next 10 years. Because effectively, even though it is complex, different environments, different temperatures, different latitudes have different effects on food production, It translates to a 2% increase.
Will - There seems to be a similar attitude towards this 2% increase in price, like there was towards the 1.5 degree increase in temperature. Like that's not that much. It's like yeah, but that's not the point.
Gordon - <laugh> Yeah and that's the thing, isn't it? Because 2% does not sound particularly dramatic. It does not sound like we should be too bothered. But in fact 2% is significant and 2% is the sort of thing that if you become complacent and you accept the fact that 2% is something that's the price you have to pay, that leads you down a route of really quite significant agricultural disaster. It makes all sorts of things unviable within the agricultural sort of sphere, but the repercussions are out across the supply chain and across consumers. It's massive.
Will - With that 2% in mind, we assume that to be kind of an average. Do we know if there are particular foods that are going to spike more than others?
Gordon - Well, this is where it comes back to the location if you like, of the weather event. So if you're in warmer climates, the effect can be potentially exaggerated. It can be worse if you're in mid-range latitude. So the forties, luckily into the fifties, the effect is slightly softened and smoothed out. But that of course doesn't really help because you have a global supply chain for food. So when you're talking about, for example, the scale of tomatoes that come from Morocco, that weather event in Morocco, which potentially affects tomatoes, really is felt in the UK.
Will - The headline of extreme climatic events implies that the majority of the damage and therefore rise in food prices will be because crops become unusable. But is there also an aspect that the supply chain is disrupted as well and that will boost prices increasingly as well.
Gordon - People like to talk about complex supply chains or they talk about supply chains that are very long because of the distance travelled, and that's obviously a factor, but then it's also that supply chains are fragile in general. They're optimised for profit, they're not optimised for resilience. So if there is a weather event that's adverse, then the fragile supply chain itself is also affected and that's only compounded if there's effects that relate to the cost of, for example, fuel that increases the cost of transporting any food items from a long distance.
Will - Yes, it seems to be this really unfortunate catch 22 in that, because of the fluctuating weather and climate, we will have to begin to work together worldwide to be able to grow food optimally in one place and then when they have a rough year, we switch to another place. But if you've got this supply chain that is, as you say, so fragile, that could all crumble.
Gordon - Yeah and that does imply a high level of cooperation. Having that level of cooperation isn't something that we generally see with the contemporary capitalist kind of nature of buying and selling because profit is the primary driver.
Will - We here in the UK are still very fortunate, despite everything going on. A 2% price rise is very rough for some of us, absolutely. But in areas of the world where they have a lot less access to income, it could be catastrophic.
Gordon - And I think the other thing that does come through is of course, that at different latitudes, people experience different weather events, different effects of increasingly adverse climate conditions.
Will - And I appreciate that the obvious answer is fight, climate change, but what economically speaking would be the most effective way of combating this rise in food prices?
Gordon - Well, there is a need to take action now, obviously around climate change, because that's obviously the thing that most long term will benefit everyone. But in the shorter term, one of the things that often gets pushed to the side, and particularly during election years and a sort of political debates, is discussion around the way that farmers are subsidised by the state. If you are encouraging people closer to this point of consumption to perhaps produce food that might not be necessarily viable from a global supply chain point of view, but from a point of view of food security is actually a better option, then you've got a really strong justification for subsidisation. There's also obviously the argument that we need to look at the diversity of food that we consume, the nature of the food we consume in terms of its ability to sort of withstand climate pressures. And again, obviously particularly fruit and vegetables have been kind of bred increasingly to be effectively efficient from a very sort of narrow point of view in terms of increasing profit, but they're not necessarily being selectively bred to be resistant to weather events. And that itself is another avenue for exploration. Of course, again, that requires and implies some degree of support at a governmental and national level that might not necessarily be there currently. But all of that resolves back to the fact that we need to look at how, how we consume and, and what we demand as consumers in terms of expecting to see in the basket at the end of the week. Those expectations are one of the things that drives current food production and those supply chains in certain directions. And that consumer behaviour needs to shift as well in order to perhaps become more resilient to what we see increasingly is these adverse weather events.
13:16 - How does farming contribute to climate change?
How does farming contribute to climate change?
David Edwards, University of Cambridge
The relationship between our increasingly volatile climate and our increasingly insecure food production are caught in something of a vicious cycle. The more we warm the climate, the more pressure on our farms and our ecosystems. But farming itself plays no small part in global emissions. Agriculture, forestry, and our changing of the land accounts for nearly 25% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. So which aspects of farming are behind this, and what needs to be done to bring down our farming footprint, as well as protect our biodiversity? The head of the Tropical Ecology and Conservation group at the University of Cambridge, David Edwards.
David - I think there are probably three key issues with farming. The first is that it's driving massive land clearance and that's the single biggest driver of the global extinction crisis. Secondly, would be fertiliser overuse. And that is causing major harm to waterways globally and in particular, where large rivers meet the sea, they're driving massive algal blooms, which is causing problems for fisheries. And then lastly, agriculture is the second biggest driver of global climate change after the burning of fossil fuels.
Will - Given that it's such a large emitter, what is being done at the moment to try and minimise the environmental consequences of farming?
David - Given the scale of the problem at present, too little is being done. First thing I think we really have to do is to make use of the farm and that we do have better indeed there are some models of farming systems globally that suggests that we might need a billion hectares of new farmland to meet rising global demand. And that's simply land that we cannot afford. So that really points to us finding ways to intensify farming on the lands, that we do have to attempt to do that in a way that involves sustainable intensification. And it would suggest then that we would be moving away from the concept of reducing yield on farms that we already have in a bid to perhaps make it a bit more wildlife friendly. Fertiliser is going to remain a key component of the agricultural systems for decades to come, but I think something we really need to target is fertiliser and pesticide and herbicide overuse. And that will be through transfer of technologies and education to communities that are perhaps overusing these commodities. And lastly, and an absolute critical thing at a global level, we've really got to start moving away from the consumption of ruminant meat. So in other words, from beef and from lamb. These two kinds of meat are massively land intensive and they produce massive amounts of carbon dioxide. We're talking around 10 to 50 times more land use and more carbon emissions relative to alternative protein sources like chicken, pork or soy and other vegetable-based proteins. So reducing that demand for ruminant meat will really create space for us to grow other types of crops, to use crops in their feed and for human consumption instead. And to make space as well for habitat restorations, which we really need to help us rein in climate change and keep it beneath two degrees C.
Will - People have been saying that whilst there's this rush to phase out our use of cows due to their individual emissions, if you were to put them in a field, say, in the UK, they can subsist wholly off that field. Whereas something like a chicken would need an adjacent field to grow the corn it eats. So is there a need to balance organism emission versus land emission too?
David - I mean, that's a very interesting take. I think you need to look at this from a kind of whole system perspective. Cows rarely, not always, but they rarely in the UK would live solely upon grass all year. Many of them are brought to the barn in the winter. They may eat silage, but you'll find that a lot of that silage will be enriched with things like soy. And the fact is that cows transfer energy through grass and whatever else they're eating into meat far less efficiently than does a chicken. So a chicken really doesn't require much food to create a usable unit of protein, whereas cows do. The other issue of course with ruminants is the way that they digest their food emits a huge amount of methane. And methane is about 80 times more potent to climate change gas than carbon dioxide. So it's not just about land, it's about the kind of emissions that are embodied in the animal itself
Will - In terms of being able to make best use of the land we currently have. Is there anything to be said for the idea of diversifying agriculture within that same space? If we did mix livestock with crops, could they benefit one another?
David - There clearly are potentials from diversifying farmland. I would suggest that we also have to weigh those in terms of how we would produce land. If you're having mixed cropping, can we use this kind of industrialised agricultural equipment? Perhaps we can't. Then how can we actually farm hundreds of millions of hectares of land? I'm taking a slightly more global perspective. I agree that in the UK, largely in our lowland agriculture at least, in our vegetable production et cetera, we're pretty much at maximum potential yield. But throughout most of the world there are massive areas in which we are failing to produce outputs, yields at the level that is possible. And there's a really nice study from a few years ago that was looking at if we attempted to intensify land globally to bridge those yield gaps in unyielding areas through technological transfer and some advances. And they estimate you can reduce future land demand by about 80%. So that really is hundreds of millions of hectares of land that can be saved. They think you can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 65%. So there are ways for us to bring agricultural yields and land we do have up and ideally in a sustainable way.
Will - What would be your call to arms as it were? What would you want to see happen to both reduce farming emissions and to increase the biodiversity
David - In terms of reducing emissions and in fact reducing the severity of the biodiversity crisis? I think we really have to accept that the day has come that we cannot afford globally to be consuming ruminant meat. As we have done it's such a climate change driving a land use intensive, a deforestation driving commodity, we can really make the space for massive areas of cropping for human consumption and massive areas of land, either being avoided deforestation or being abandoned. Because we no longer require that land and that can recover to meet some of these massive global restoration targets we have as well to help mitigate climate change. So I think that really is the thing we have to focus on and we have to do that urgently if we're to really tackle the crisis we find ourselves in.
20:38 - Is there enough food for everyone already?
Is there enough food for everyone already?
Rachael Garrett, University of Cambridge
If we really cannot afford to expand farmland any further, yet need to reduce our use of substances such as fertilisers, where is the food needed to feed our growing population going to come from? Well, here’s the thing. It’s kind of already here. There is enough food currently being produced on Earth to feed 10 billion people. To explain, Moran Professor of Conservation and Development at the University of Cambridge, Rachael Garrett...
Racheal - The overall problem is that some people on this planet are eating more than their fair share. They're eating a lot of beef and pork, and all of that requires a much higher amount of land than eating the same amount of protein and calories from plant-based products. And another problem is that we're not just talking about food supply. A big challenge to feeding people is how much that food costs. And many people are simply too poor to be able to afford the prices that are being offered on markets. And in some really extreme cases that we are seeing increasingly throughout the world these days, there's many conflict zones where people just lack physical access. So there's a lot of dimensions to food security, and not all of them come down to how much land we have under agricultural production. And then finally, the ways that we're feeding people just can't go on forever. So we might be just managing to keep up our current consumption levels right now. But in the process of farming the way that we're farming right now, we're actually undermining the capacity of the land to keep producing this way indefinitely. The amount of greenhouse gas emissions involved, the pollution from fertilisers, the impacts on pollinators from harmful pesticides, the massive amount of soil loss and fertility decline, they're all undermining the basis of the existing agricultural areas. And they're leading to declines in yields in some places and causing significant cost to human health and ecological health, especially to all of those really poor labourers all over the world that have the most immediate interaction with the land.
Will - Is it as simple as the fact that we have enough land, but it seems that the meat is bearing the brunt of how much is being used. And if we didn't do that, we'd have far more to play with.
Racheal - Absolutely. We need to talk about reducing the overall amount of land that we're demanding, and there's no way we can do that in the future with population growth if we don't actually try to change how much meat that people are consuming. And the other issue is we're not just talking about reducing demand overall. We're actually just talking about reducing the growth in demand because demand just keeps growing and growing and growing disproportionate to population. So it's not the amount of people that's the problem, it's their levels of wealth and their changes in their diet based on urbanisation and access to supermarkets. And also just different advertising. Because of advertising and because of misinformation, people think that they need a lot more protein than they actually do. And I've actually worked with nutrition professors on this before, and we found that if you just decrease the amount of protein that you were consuming by 25% and shifted just 25% of that remaining protein away from animals to plant-based products, you could cut the amount of emissions that the American population was contributing to through their food consumption by 40%. So these are small changes that are not going to leave somebody hungry. We're not talking about them going completely vegetarian or vegan. These are small changes that they can make that will make a massive, massive difference. And all of that would also reduce water use, which is really important in the context of climate change. When access to fresh water will be decreasing in many areas, we're currently wasting about a third of all of the food that we produce. So we just need to get smarter about reducing food waste at that consumption and in our own homes, but also at the level of supermarkets and throughout the whole supply chain.
Will - So all of these problems are huge and global and all encompassing. <laugh>, I don't want to put you on the spot here, but what on Earth do we do about it in terms of where the food is made? How much of the land is used? What on Earth could we begin to do about it?
Racheal - These things might sound so big that they're overwhelming, but you can look at it from two different perspectives. You can look at it from the individual perspective, and I don't want to rule that out. I mean, individual consumption choices can make a difference. And I think most importantly, they make a difference in terms of our own cultural change, our own awareness and our own comradery, and the movement that we're building as individuals to care more about the planet and to care about what we're consuming. But I do think a little bit too much attention is paid to that labour and not enough is paid to the other kind of broader structural factors that are involved in creating these problems. First of all, for example, if you're talking about companies in the supply chain, if you actually pay attention to what retailers are doing and regulate those processes better, or focus on greater transparency about their sourcing rules, then all of a sudden you could walk into a supermarket as a consumer and only be faced with options that are sustainable. You know, that would be a much better situation than being overwhelmed with all the information and not knowing which products contribute to deforestation or which ones have very high methane emissions embedded in them, et cetera. You know, which ones are not paying a living wage. We need to take that onus, that burden away from every individual person by tackling these things at the level of the supply chain. But then you can kind of abstract more and more and talk about how we are even designing our economic systems and our food systems? And we need to talk about that. So many of our sustainability challenges come down to the same underlying causes, which is that we've not prioritised fairness and justice in our economic system. And we've for too long really gotten hung up on metrics like GDP growth and overall consumption. And we're not paying attention to things like, what is their actual wellbeing? How happy are they? And so I really think that a lot of this comes down to transformation. Transformation of our economies, transformation of our cultures. A lot of economists now are finally <laugh> questioning decades and decades of classic economic thinking. But in the Amazon where I work a lot, you also have Amazonian scientists and practitioners and policymakers calling for socio bio economies, which is designing the economies in the food systems and the Amazon are around justice, diversity and around welfare. So it's about actually thinking, what do we want out of the land? What do we want out of the economies? How can we build on the diversity and value that we already have in our amazing ecosystems and our amazing countries and design something that works better? And so of course you have to take incremental steps, get there, but I think we need to start talking about that. What do we actually want out of this system? Not just how do we tackle food supply? How do we tackle climate change? How do we tackle biodiversity independently, but how can we change things in a way that really gets its synergies for all of those and doesn't just boil down to solving one problem in one minute location, and then displacing it to another.
This issue remains complex, but the way forward is there. But it will take all of us, at all levels of the production and consumption chain, to be willing to change for the sake of current and future generations. And so I put some of the points discussed in this show back to Martin Lines, and asked what he thinks we need to consider going forward too.
Martin - We have a landscape that can produce enough food for 10 billion people. We have more than enough landscape, but we need to be sensible about what we choose to produce and where we choose to produce it. We are currently choosing to produce a lot of our vegetables and fruits in other countries where we could do it here. We're bringing in their water resource in a depleted southern Europe. Why are we not looking around at what we could produce well in the UK? And then what may we need to bring in from other nations and think about how we trade those products?
Will - And that kind of implies a certain dietary shift that we should perhaps be more open to.
Martin - I really think we do and I often hear from lots of people, we must stop eating meat. And I'm saying actually we need to eat quite a lot less meat, but we need the right animal in the right place doing the right job. If you want enhanced grass, meadows and beautiful areas, they need to be grazed or managed. What's the point of starting a tractor up to mow a Meadow when I can put some animals on and then sort of get the biodiversity in the insect life that works with animals. So we've got to get them win-wins and work out how we get the right amount of livestock in the landscape to deliver the right outcomes and fertilise the soil where we grow our food from.
Will - And deliver that equally to the people who need it the most in a minimally wasteful way. That sounds like, it sounds like common sense.
Martin - Yeah. And if we look at the figures, we're wasting up to 40% of the food we produce. That's kind of crazy. In the processing system, how much we throw away. And then as consumers, we buy two for one and then don't eat it. Bread that goes off. We have huge waste and we really need to sort of only buy what we need, concentrate on where there is waste, making sure it gets recycled in a system that can put fertility back in the ground, but we should only buy what we need to eat.
Will - As a farmer on the front line, what is your advice to the general public who are hearing this and might be concerned?
Martin - Really think about what you eat. Where's that food coming from? Can you change your diet a little bit to be more seasonal? So we are only eating what's really available at the time and think about where that food comes from and make sure the packaging, the label is, respectful of where it's been produced. So there's a truth and honesty around whether it is a local produced or a regional produced product at the time of year that it's an abundance.
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