Tom Allen-Stevens travels forward to 2030 and looks for the farmers who would emerge strengthened if the bubble burst on the carbon market.
Here in 2030, it’s very easy to claim the benefit of hindsight. But it’s fair to say few could have foreseen the depth of the scars that would lash the farming landscape when the carbon bubble f inally burst. In the UK, this wasn’t helped by the disastrous and now notorious family farm tax the incoming Labour government introduced in its first budget, back in 2024. As land rapidly changed hands, its value as a carbon sink was overplayed by unscrupulous traders, keen to sucker in a new generation of hapless landowners.
The deregulation brought in by the Trump administration in the US fuelled worldwide growth in carbon markets that many economists warned was dangerously unstable. Following market collapse, the question many in the food industry are now asking is whether the measures brought in by the new Lib/Lab coalition will stem the current meteoric growth in food prices. It’s probably too late for family farming businesses to come back into land ownership and make a credible difference to food security, following its dive to a reported 40%.
The NFU has also dismissed the proposed food security capital fund the government is intending to pour billions into – this won’t be incentive enough for new landowners to rebuild the farming infrastructure lost over the past five years, they say. But the carbon market has now stabilised in the US, thanks largely to measures the new president brought in shortly after she took office. So could confidence in carbon tempt landowners to make the investment needed for farmers to grow the nation’s food on so much of the UK’s land that’s just been left to deteriorate? There is a glimmer of hope.
One sector of the carbon market that remains rock-solid is where it’s built on the new Regenerative Carbon Standard. This came about because scientists worked directly with farmers to develop on farm new technologies in measuring and understanding the soil microbiome. And that’s where the benefit of hindsight comes in. If you have retained your 2024 copies of Tech Farmer, you can leaf through the pages of those early editions and remind yourself of the tech you saw first, and that’s now underpinning the standards of more sustainable farming systems. It was why we featured Rachel and Jacob Holmes back in November 2024.
At a time when there was precious little scientific measurement of practices claimed to build soil health, they were determined to bring this into play across A more scientific understanding of the soil microbiome could be the key to a rock-solid carbon market. their farm on the Isle of Wight (see Issue #31 p41). Photosynthetic promoters are another example (see p6). Working with scientists, farmers trialling those early, pre-commercial products developed an understanding of their crops’ biosynthesic pathways. It’s this knowledge that now forms the backbone of cropping solutions for carbon capture that can be reliably measured and consistently improved.
Then there’s the World AgriTech Innovation Summit (p26), the biennial event that takes place in San Francisco and London, now recognised as the stimulus for pioneering farmers on both sides of the Atlantic to take on new tech. Few growers in 2030 would trust anything other than RNA diagnostics for a truly accurate and measurable picture of crop health. This was first presented at WATIS San Francisco in 2024. Perhaps the most promising tech for sustainable and reliable soil carbon capture is now coming from precisionbred crops, however. Cast your mind back to November 2024 and the launch of #PROBITYPledge, the campaign that encouraged farmers to find out about this new technology and help shape how it should be introduced on farm (p39).
These are among the technologies we now consider as fundamental to delivering a robust and sustainable agriculture. But five years ago, in 2024, they were seen as fairly remote, with the opportunities they held unclear. They would never have made it into the field had it not been for pioneering farmers who diligently undertook the trials to acquire the knowledge the entire industry now relies on. So what were you testing in your fields back in 2024, and what will you glean from the pages that follow in this issue that could stave off a catastrophic crisis in five years’ time? Happy hunting.
Tom Allen-Stevens farms 170ha in Oxfordshire and leads the British On-Farm Innovation Network (BOFIN).
