Nature-friendly and sustainable farming practices go hand-in-hand with higher farm animal welfare, says the charity Compassion in World Farming. By transitioning away from industrial livestock monocultures and towards extensive, regenerative systems, higher-welfare farming reduces stocking densities and reintegrates animals with the land.
Food production requires more than a farmer with a field. Farming depends on the wider environment – healthy soils, populations of pollinators, and climatic conditions suitable for growing crops. There is no food security without a stable climate and healthy natural environment.
We spoke with Johnnie Balfour from Balbirnie Home Farms in Fife about the way his farming is evolving to be better for nature and the climate, about some of the problems with Scotland’s current farm funding system, and about what he would like the new system to do.
The Scottish Government must commit to a radical new system of farm funding to deal with climate change, environmental campaigners have said. The call comes after new figures show that climate emissions from agriculture have risen to become the second largest source of Scottish emissions.
Many of Scotland's farmers are changing the way they farm, to allow nature back and to reduce climate emissions. They are the trailblazers, and what they are doing matters to us all.
Research has estimated that in excess of a quarter of all species on Earth exist in soils. Ranging from tiny bacteria to large burrowing earthworms, this ‘underground livestock’ needs to remain biodiverse.
Healthy soils of species-rich grasslands are full of abundance and diversity of microbes, mycorrhizal fungi and invertebrates, such as earthworms, that facilitate greater carbon sequestration and storage.