description
- Business and agricultural drivers focussing on sustainability, coupled with UK policy focus in these areas have led to the increasing demand for the food and drink sector to manage its own environmental impacts. Industry-led methods such as ISO standards and PAS2050 have been available for some time to assess supply chains and products, but frequently lack the precision regarding the sensitivity to local variables and farm management practices to yield reliable information about how such impacts can be managed on the farm. Recently, the Cool Farm Alliance (a UK based CIC) has been formed as a cross-sector organisation to develop and manage a "farmer friendly" GHG calculator called the Cool Farm Tool. It has benefitted from significant NERC funding in the past and as a result of this is recognised as the de facto practical tool for farm gate GHG assessments. Examples of its application to drive changes in the supply chains of global businesses include PepsiCo (https://www.2degreesnetwork.com/groups/2degrees-community/resources/cutting-carbon-farm/) or more generally at www.coolfarmtool.org. The Cool Farm Tool won the 2015 Oxford Farming Conference "Practice with Science" award and has been shortlisted for the Times Higher Education Awards in two categories. The above demonstrate the applicability of the Cool Farm Tool to annual field crop and livestock systems. However, key processes relating to perennial production systems in the Cool Farm Tool are somewhat lacking, in particular in biomass carbon storage, soil carbon storage in perennials, and post-harvest processing. In the scientific studies to date, these components have been identified as being critical in deciding the GHG balance of crop production. Representation of perennial cropping systems will provide the necessary framework to integrate bioenergy crops in the Cool Farm Tool. Renewable energy, and bioenergy as part of this, is topical and of increasing importance to policy and industry because of its potential to support UK and global needs for low carbon and secure energy. As such, adding capability for such systems in the CFT will open new markets for the CFA and enable the addition of significant NERC research. There have been many research activities in recent years to conduct such assessments with several key studies funded by NERC, and in which the University of Aberdeen has participated. In addition, there are also several businesses in the energy sector specifically focussed on bioenergy (e.g. Terravesta, Rokwood) and it is part of the energy portfolio of major energy companies such as BP and Shell, and electricity generators such as EDF, E-ON, Drax, and Vattenfall (via ETI; Milner et al., 2015). In this project we will work closely with the Cool Farm Alliance and food and drink and bioenergy industries to add these necessary functionalities to the Cool Farm Tool. The inclusion of the above will ensure that the assessment of agricultural raw materials destined for food, feed, and energy markets can be performed in a consistent manner to enable fair cross-comparison and benchmarking. It will have the additional benefit of serving farmers and different industry sectors in assessing the relative benefits of crops and co-products which serve both end-markets (such as wheat, straw, and oilseed rape for bioethanol and bioenergy as alternatives to food or feed) and for agricultural waste, such as manure. This tool will aid farmers and land-owners to improve energy and input use efficiency and thus improve profitability. From the start of the project, we will establish a cross-sector working group to: 1. determine the key needs of end-users in the bioenergy domain 2. to identify the key science algorithms and methods to be employed 3. make the proposed developments "Cool Farm Tool ready". This will ensure that the project translates NERC-funded research into an industry endorsed product for immediate use by the relevant end-users.