Supporting Sustainable Farming

SAOS’s involvement in sustainability initiatives has continued to develop over the last twelve months. We worked in collaboration with our members and different partners on a wide range of innovative projects and programmes.

Our initial natural capital scoping work with the pioneering Pentland Land Managers Association (PLMA) has now been extended into other collaborative ventures. One emerging development is assisting cereal growers to address natural capital opportunities with their supply chain customers, Diageo and PepsiCo. This has involved working with a group of Fife farmers to develop a proposal and prospectus focused on an ABC (Agronomy, Biodiversity and Carbon) approach. Partnering with the farmers on the project are SAOS coop members, Scottish Agronomy and GrainCo, and the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust.

We continued to support NatureScot with its ‘Piloting an Outcomes Based Approach in Scotland’ (POBAS) project with the Milk Suppliers Association in Dumfries and Galloway. Outputs from the trial of on-farm biodiversity measurements have been shared, and the findings are now being evaluated.

SAOS is involved in two pan-Europe agri-sustainability projects. The MIXED Farming Project involves working with SRUC and EU partners to share knowledge of different production systems. Work here to date has involved completing repeat samples to assess the soil life changes following cattle grazing on arable land, and co-ordinating cover crop grazing trials during winter 2022/23. The IntercropValueES project, a collaboration between 27 partners, again including SRUC, aims to harness the benefits of intercropping to design and manage productive, diversified, resilient and environmentally friendly cropping systems reducing the dependence on inorganic fertiliser and chemical inputs. SAOS’s work will involve producing case studies in relation to the supply/value chain of high value products derived from intercrops.

Two pioneering climate change pilot projects were successfully completed with funding from the Scottish Government’s Knowledge Transfer and Innovation (KTIF) fund. The first was a joint project involving East of Scotland Farmers and Highland Grain, exploring decarbonisation of malting barley production. Involving sixteen growers across the two co-ops, the primary focus is for the co-ops to take a leading role in helping members reduce their GHG emissions in malting barley production. The project involved desktop research of good practice mitigations for arable farming, undertaking on-farm carbon footprint audits, and delivering a joint workshop to discuss the outcomes and recommendations for mitigation actions and priorities. These findings are now being cascaded across the 300+ growers of both co-ops. The project has secured KTIF funding to move into a second phase.

The second project, ‘Data Driven Decisions in Potatoes – Tackling the Climate Challenge’, with the Scottish Potato Co-op, focused on how to improve decision making and the productivity of the potato sector, to reduce GHG emissions and its impact on the natural environment. The initial benchmarking group involved eight growers with more joining later. The group has made good progress, now having a more detailed understanding of the production costs of ware potatoes and the associated environmental impacts. This benchmarking work has been complemented on some of the growers’ farms, with carbon footprinting audits and pilot project outcomes being circulated around all the co-op members. This project has also secured second phase funding from KTIF.

SAOS’s CarbonPositive (CP) environmental data platform work has been re-initiated following its mothballing as it was due to launch during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. With SAOS’s sustainability work expanding, the team has now started exploring re-purposing opportunities for CP, including as a potential user interface for farmers to see their own data, as well as a geographical grounding and mapping tool for farm and natural asset locations, and offering access to live, dynamic input from digital sensors.