Yorkshire farmer and entrepreneur Alastair Trickett NSch 2020 has published his Nuffield Farming report, The role of corporate supply chains in scaling regenerative agriculture. A farmer perspective.
The report was sponsored jointly by The National Trust and The Yorkshire Agricultural Society.
During his Scholarship, Trickett travelled to Australia, Germany, India, Netherlands, Singapore, United Kingdom, United States, and Qatar.
In his report he says, “Due to low profitability, farmers are locked into a growth and under-investment paradigm; soil health, the basis for long-term profit and resilience to extreme weather events, has been eroded. This forces the farmer to channel any available investment into short-term profit drivers with a known and immediate return, namely artificial fertilisers, agrochemicals and tillage.”
He notes that this approach further degrades soil health and natural capital, but that a system change to regenerative agriculture can be challenging.
While corporates are interested in supporting farmers to transition to achieve their own sustainability objectives, current efforts underestimate the scale and nature of the challenge.
Trickett said, “They take a pilot and project approach characterised by top-down interventions of singular management changes, devised by consultants. However, it isn’t fit for a challenge of this scale and pace, nor does it give credit to the new technologies available to make interventions both more meaningful and cost-effective. Most importantly it misses the enormous challenge of changing a farmer’s mindset, and accounting for the fact each farm operates in its own unique environmental and management context.”
Trickett also observes that corporates invest in infrastructure to segregate ingredients from farm to fork as a pre-requisite to sustainability. However, this overlooks some of the most successful initiatives bringing about sustainable market transformation, such as Better Cotton, fairtrade or renewable energy.
He said, “Precompetitive collaboration between corporates would enable targeted bottom-up change on farm. The recognition that farms supply multiple customers with overlapping needs presents the opportunity to pool resources, get more support to farmers and ease the overall burden of change.
“Shared investment in platform technology would unlock the asymmetry between data held on farm and budgets held by corporates. I consider this to be the best vector for achieving a farmer-driven system change, financially supported by the corporates whilst meeting quantified reporting requirements.”
Key findings
- We must start thinking about farm management in terms of complex systems not a linear process.
- Most farms remain profitable by unknowingly liquidating their natural capital. This undermines long-term profit and resilience and makes change increasingly difficult.
- The sustainability objectives of corporates stand to benefit farmers, and farmers are fundamental to the corporates hitting these objectives. We are just not good at working together yet.
- Corporates need to drop their pilot and project approach to working with farms in favour of collaborating pre-competitively to enable a bottom-up farmer-led transition to regenerative agriculture.
- Any corporate intervention on farm must consider the unique context of each farm and support change with appropriate investment and risk sharing.
- Platform technology should be embraced to target investments on farm, nudge behaviour change and collect verified ground-truth data.