Farm carbon foot printing and the importance of dung beetles…
Ben and Hannah discuss soil health on camera
We recently had a fascinating chat with Farm Carbon Toolkit’s, farm carbon and soils adviser, Hannah Jones. Farm Carbon Toolkit is an independent, farmer-led community interest company that’s doing incredibly important work supporting farmers to measure, understand and act on their greenhouse gas emissions, while improving their business resilience for the future. Farm Carbon Toolkit is working with Six Inches of Soil principal Ben Thomas as part of its Lottery funded Farm Net Zero project in Cornwall, which will show the contribution that agriculture, and in this instance regenerative livestock farming, can make to achieving Net Zero. We filmed Hannah with Ben at his beautiful farm Treveddoe along with The Cornwall Project’s Matt Chatfield who featured in another of our recent blogs. Here, Hannah explains how she’s working with Ben and the huge importance of dung beetles in the farm ecosystem.
What is Farm Net Zero is and how is Ben involved?
We’re running a range of activities that will develop and deliver practical advice for farmers on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, showcase innovation, provide robust science through soil testing and carbon foot printing, and inspire other farmers to tell their stories to consumers on the steps that they’re taking to address climate change and protect soil health.
The soil at Ben’s farm Treveddoe is in a great state, none of it is cultivated and it’s on the edge of Bodmin Moor and the biodiversity is phenomenal. He has a lot of experience through his conservation grazing on Goss Moor, which is in another part of Cornwall. He grazes Belted Galloway and red Ruby Devon cows and he’s incredibly knowledgeable about how to handle and work the cattle in these rough grazing situations. As well as the work at Goss Moor, Ben has also brought the Belted Galloways up to Treveddoe, where the soils have to be handled carefully. Normally, we would come onto a farm that’s already in operation to do a carbon footprint but with Ben we kind of did that before he started. He knows exactly what he wants to do, and he can check in with us and say if I do this what’s the footprint? His land is permanent pasture and there’s opportunities to increase grass yield on some of those pastures. He’s so enthusiastic about his cows and working with nature.
In April, we hosted an event with James Daniels, Director of Precision Grazing Ltd who’s incredibly knowledgeable about paddock grazing, which is a way of moving cattle around a field to optimize grass and improve soil carbon. Ben has worked with James, independent of our project, to improve his grazing and so we showcased that dialogue and explained how they were working together. Ben had just got some new fencing, because when you’re working with cattle regeneratively, you need a whole set up that’s quick and efficient to use. He explained how he’d completed that to provide a case study for other farmers. With Ben it’s a case of supporting him on his journey and providing that data.
When we were talking to Matt Chatfield he mentioned how important dung beetles are in the soil ecosystem can you expand on this?
I was speaking at the online version of The Oxford Real Farming Conference and I listened to a session where there was this really enthusiastic, incredibly knowledgeable vet, Claire Whittle who had been working with Bruce Thompson a farmer who had developed an efficient animal handling system. They were dealing with parasites (worms) that infect livestock. Traditionally, farmers need to use potent wormers to kill parasites, it’s important for animal health because worms can sometimes kill animals so it’s good animal management to have those wormers and the dialogue between the farmer and the vet is really important.
However, when some wormers come out in the muck, that muck is still contaminated with those wormers and the dung beetles can’t survive. So, there’s a dialogue to be had because dung beetles are a keystone species. Just like worms and bumble bees, there are a lot of other species that depend on that dung beetle activity. Swallows and Swifts quite often follow livestock around to get to the dung beetles. The dung beetles can move into a dung pat and take it into the ground really quickly, which can reduce methane emissions from that dung pat. They can increase the porosity in the soil and improve the nutrient release but what is super exciting is they have little piggyback mites on them, which the dung beetles carry from pat to pat and those mites parasitize fly maggots, which are the maggots of the nuisance flies that attack the cows. So what function is the dung beetle achieving? It’s reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving soil health, producing nutrient release, reducing parasite burden on those cattle, to name just a few.
You still need wormers to keep the cattle healthy, but you want to use wormers only when necessary because you need your dung beetles. One of our national dung beetle experts is Sally-Ann Spence who is an Entomologist and Honorary Associate at the Oxford University Museum. She was speaking at a Farm Carbon Toolkit event in May, with Pip and Matt Smith who are highly innovative sheep farmers of Trefranck farm in Cornwall, and their vet Tim Bebbington from the Castle Veterinary Group, who is also really clued up on wormers. What they’re doing is breeding resilience into their sheep so the sheep can carry a few worms but they still carry on growing and they’re healthy. This needs strong collaboration between the vet and the farmer.
Historically, flocks moved around and the worms and the sheep had a relationship that the sheep tolerated. It’s the intensity of farming that’s caused the problems. There’s an important breeding aspect and it’s also important to make sure that at certain key stages the animals go onto fresh pasture that aren’t affected with worms. Then when there’s a point of stress, for example, if a ewe is about to have two or three lambs, which is pretty stressful for that sheep, under those conditions, if her immune system goes down, the worm burden rises and she may well suffer. In that instance, you can do specific treatments of the wormer but they’re short acting so they allow the sheep to get over that situation and that allows for this resilience.
They’re doing some really clever stuff where you have the vet, the farmer and the ecologist working together. They have a high number of dung beetles and low parasites, reduced emissions and they have better nutrient cycling, it’s just beautiful.
