In the beginning of 2025, the Fuel to Fork podcast headed to the Oxford Real Farming Conference, a huge gathering in the UK for people who want to transform our food and farming system. We hosted a session called “Is a fossil free food future possible?” The three panelists offered different views on the pathways and uncertainties of this transition. How much should we focus on changing consumption patterns vs. changing how we farm, or should we be replacing inputs into the food system with greener alternatives vs. rebooting the entire whole system. The best part of this session for me was getting questions from a room filled mostly with farmers. It was great to see a lot of interest in our discussion with so many people grappling with this topic. Here’s a lightly edited version of the recording. We’ll link a video of the full episode in our show notes.

Thank you everyone. We're gonna get started. And welcome to a live recording of the fuel to fork podcast from the Oxford Real farming conference. Here we find out whether it's feasible to phase out fossil fuels from our future food and farms. I've had a lot of practice saying that sentence over the last year, so I'm Matthew Kessler, podcast host and science communicator, working with table where we explore the evidence values and visions that shape the future of food. This field to fork project has been a collaboration between table, ipes-food, the International Panel of Experts on sustainable food systems, and Global Alliance for the future of food. It has been a pleasure working with these organizations, and a huge thanks to the Oxford Real farming conference. So we're going to split this session in two halves. The first will be a panel discussion among us, with the brilliant panelists who I will introduce shortly, and the second half the last 45 minutes is going to be with the audience. So we really want to hear from you. There is a lot of interesting life experience and expertise in this room to tackle this question of phasing out fossil fuels in our food. We talk about climate a lot. We talk about biodiversity, we talk about the health impacts of a food system, but we don't always link that to the fossil fuel inputs that go into food, and that's what we're specifically tackling here, and what we've been doing throughout the podcast series, and it's been a really revealing experience. So we will have questions from everyone in this room, from the online audience, and you will find Robbie and Jackie. So just I'll give a signal, and you'll raise your hand, and we'll call on you. So first, I just want to warm up a little bit and ask, what part of the food supply chain do you think is most dependent on fossil fuels? And because this is a podcast as well as a video, I'm going to ask if you cheer as well as raise your hand. So the options are on farms, across transportation, in processing and packaging and in our kitchen and in our homes. So if you think fossil fuels on our farms are the most intensive use, give a shout or a cheer, raise your hand. It's weird to cheer for fossil fuels. I know if you think it's on transportation, yeah, yeah. A little little bit little bit louder there, okay. And then in processing and packaging, yeah, okay, slightly muted, but it's there, and then in our kitchen, in our homes, in also our retail sector, yeah, yeah. So it is everywhere you are all correct. We maybe have some podcast listeners that learn that it's revealed that processing and packaging actually makes up more than 40% of fossil fuel use in our farm. It's incredibly energy intensive. This largely connects to diets and a lot of other things. So we're going to explore all that, and we're going to start with Rupert Simons, who leads systemic nature Food Team in Europe, engage you with major food and agribusiness companies aimed at supporting transitions to net zero and nature positive business models. So Rupert, starting with you, can you tell us where fossil fuels are throughout the food system? If you could give us a journey throughout the supply chain?

Rupert Simons

Well, good morning, and thank you, Matthew and Table debates for inviting us. It's a real privilege to be here. I think your opening question, in a way, captures where we are with with fossil fuels and food, which is that they're, in a sense, they're everywhere, but they're sometimes hidden. So obviously diesel and tractors and trucks driving food around are relatively easy to identify. But as you pointed out, there's a very large amount of fossil fuels that are embedded in processing and packaging, around 40% of the total that we don't necessarily think of as fossil fuel derived products or processes, but actually heating and processing mostly is powered by natural gas still and and plastic packaging is a petroleum product. It's a byproduct of the oil industry. And then on the farm, not necessarily for everyone in this room, but but across the world, the biggest emissions driver and the biggest fossil fuel component is the fertilizer. A very significant share of global fossil fuel consumption, particularly for natural gas, goes into fertilizers, especially nitrates, which you have to condense out of the air using a very energy intensive process, and it is possible to do it with electricity. And when the process was invented, it was dominated by electricity, but as natural gas became cheap and widely available, natural gas took over, and so overwhelming majority of of mineral fertilizers now are produced with natural gas. And that process is starting to change, but, but slowly, and global fertilizer demand is still, is still rising. And then it's worth mentioning that sort of crop protection products, pesticides, again, maybe not everyone in the rooms in that in that space, but there is, there is a very significant fossil fuel component in there as well. So short answer is, is everywhere. And then there is, of course, and this is, is it a fossil fuel? Slightly debatable whether, whether, whether land use change really counts as a fossil fuel. But let's just say, when people start using biofuels as a partial substitute for fossil fuels, that's also driving land use change and land conversion, especially in South America and Southeast Asia. So some of the substitutes from fossil fuels might not be fossil fuels themselves, but still have land use change and emissions implications. The short answer is everywhere. But that doesn't mean that we're powerless about it, and there's lots we can do. So looking forward to unpacking that later.

Matthew

We will get into what a transition looks like. What are the barriers to transition? What are different supports? What are different pathways? We're going to get into all of that, but we're also now going to focus on where fossil fuels are on the farm and what we're very lucky to have Helen Browning, organic farmer and chief executive of the Soil Association, UK's leading charity for organic farming and healthy food systems. So Helen, you've been thinking about this question, where are fossil fuels on your farm? Have they increased or decreased over time? And interestingly, Rupert mentioned fertilizers, and I assume you don't have a fossil fuel footprint from nitrogen fertilizer on your farm, but where else might fossil fuels be?

Helen Browning

Thank you, and great to be here too. So I mean, I suppose to say for the first to start with that, yeah, it's not only in the last five or six years that we've been properly carbon footprinting our own farming systems. And I suspect that's the same for a lot of farms. Some, some would have been ahead of the game, but I think we've only got really an evidence base over the last few years. But as you say, as an organic farmer, we turned our back on the nitrogen fertilizers and that kind of thing, and the pesticides, you know, nearly 40 years ago, but we're still dependent on fossil fuels in a whole bunch of areas. I think, Where, where, in a way, one of the challenges for us is that when we look at our carbon footprint as a whole, actually fossil fuels are a very small part of the picture. As a farm. You know, we've transitioned from one system to another within the organic sector, but one of the challenges for us is obviously methane. So if we're looking at the total climate change impacts of farming, fossil fuels on an organic farm are quite a small proportion, and those have decreased over the last few years for us, partly as a result of us changing the way that we're doing, the kind of things that we're doing on the farm. So we used to be doing more arable cropping, where we have more tractors running around using diesel, and in our livestock side of things we had, we were making more silage and more hay. So one of the things that my, particularly my daughter and her husband, have brought into the farming system is this kind of much more extensive dairying system, where we're only milking the cows once a day, so we've got less power being used for for milking and for cooling, but also out wintering more of our cattle. So all we need to take do is take a quad bike up onto the downs to kind of go and move the cows onto their new strips each day, rather than running around with feeders and and silage and making a lot of silage, which is a very energy intensive thing to do, especially if you're wrapping it then in black plastic. So I think our system is very much evolving to be a very low fuel system, because we're actually working with nature a lot more. We're planting more trees to give shade and shelter. We're trying to do all those kind of things which are actually reducing our need for for diesel, because that's now where the majority of our of our challenge, our challenge is so that. Those kind of system change things, along with we have to remember that a lot of the fossil fuels that we use are embedded in the things that we buy. So if you're buying a lot of kit, you've got a lot of embedded fossil fuels in your new tractors and all those kind of things. So again, I think we're very cautious, partly because we're always strapped for cash, but we're always running old bits of kit where our fossil fuel our embedded fossil fuel in those kind of things as we should be doing across the whole of society. The more we make, do and mend, rather than keep buying new, the more we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. So I think, yeah, we are decreasing. For us, it is about, mostly about diesel and but in the in the bigger scheme of things, it's only one bit of the jigsaw in terms of our climate change impacts.

Matthew  

And now we're going to bring in our last speaker, Emile Frison, panel expert and co founder of IPES-Food, Senior Advisor to the agroecology coalition, and expert on agroecology and agricultural biodiversity. So Emile, I want to ask you, what do you see as a promising opportunity to reduce fossil fuel dependence across our food system? I mean, there's different visions and pathways for what that could look like.

Emile Frison

It really means a real transformation of the entire system. It's not just about looking at one particular aspect, but it's really thinking about reshaping the whole food system based on agroecological approaches that will tackle the issue from different fronts. We heard the fertilizer question. Just the nitrogen production is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire aviation worldwide. So that gives you an order of magnitude. And so getting rid of the use of synthetic nitrogen in particular, is certainly a very significant step forward. Then other part of the agroecological transformation is certainly changes in practices like reduced soil disturbance. Tillage is certainly the most energy consuming practice on a farm, so reduced or no tillage is one of the aspects that reduces this. But we should also look at the down side on getting closer to the consumers having shorter value chains, greater diversification, also to reduce risk, but that has also implications on the creation of synergies between different species in the system that makes the system more efficient. So I think it's really looking at reshaping the entire food system, rather than just focusing on one particular approach only.

Matthew  

And the question that we're asking on this panel is, is a fossil free food system possible? I think “possible” is an interesting word here, because then we could talk about, what are the economic realities, what are the political realities, what are the technical challenges of, you know, electrifying tractors. So I want to open this up to - to kind of center on this idea of what's possible, and think about this kind of broad scale transformation and what needs to get there. And also think about what is a more of an industrial, large scale Fossil Free food system look like as well. So Rupert, could you maybe lay out a pathway of what would you know, this kind of large scale, efficient Fossil Free food system look like.

Rupert  

Thank you, Matthew. And just to give some context for folks who maybe haven't heard of systemic So we work with industry on pattern pathways to decarbonization. But we also serve as an advisor and analyst to think tanks and to coalitions, and one of them is the energy transitions commission. And with them, we've wrote a roadmap to how a fossil fuel free world can be possible by 2050 so what would it take? and a large part of the answer is actually in demand reduction and demand management.

So wasting less and where it's possible in the context of a growing population consuming less. But there is also some need, obviously, even that, the population is still growing in much of the world, and the people who get richer want to eat more and more diverse food. You also have to acknowledge there will be some parts of the world where large scale, intensive production will continue, and some it will even increase because of climate change. So parts of the world that are currently fertile and suitable for farming will become less so because of a combination of droughts, floods and in some cases just the extreme heat, making it difficult for plants and animals to survive.

And so we do think that there will be some industrial decarbonization measures as part of that mix. So for those who continue to use synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, shifting to making those from electrolysis of water, which uses electricity rather than natural gas, and that is going to be most effective in those parts of the world that have abundant renewable energy resources.

So on the train up here, I was looking at, where are the ammonia plants that are shifting to renewable electricity. And actually a lot of the investments right now are going into parts of Africa and the Middle East where, yes, natural gas has historically been quite cheap, but actually now renewables are also quite cheap because of the collapsing cost of of solar power. So Namibia, for example, is building a green ammonia plant that can then export fertilizer to South Africa. 

Then there's the system change point that Emile has started mentioning. So that's about how you can change the farming system to, for example, integrate livestock with crops, and thus you can use more organic fertilizer. You don't need as much of the synthetic and that's linked to the demand management point, because if we're using a lot of land to grow feed for pigs and chickens, then that is land that can't be used to grow feed for humans. And if we're using a lot of land for biofuels, you know, to replace the diesel with biodiesel. That's good on the one hand, because there's less fossil fuel, but it's also problematic, because that is land that could be used for other things. And the supply of land, of course, is finite, and there is some deforestation, particularly in South America, for biofuels.

So we have to be a bit careful of some of these intermediate steps, biodiesel and so on that are quite, quite easy to do in the short term. They're sort of plug and play whether your tractor doesn't care if it's biodiesel or fossil diesel, but are not long term part of the solution, because of the heavy use on land. And so there's a set of technologies, green ammonia, demand management, demand reduction, waste reduction, that are essentially possible and feasible with today's technologies, some of the more expensive, but they are. They're coming down in price.

And then there's some technologies that aren't quite there yet, but as sort of round the corner, and electrification of transport is one of those. So obviously you can get electric cars, electric trucks and tractors are not quite there yet, partly because the batteries are very heavy. And I think the answer to that is twofold. I mean, one is ongoing investments in battery technology and making the batteries lighter and cheaper, but the other part is automation, because automation allows you to have smaller vehicles. And so rather than one big tractor, you end up with two or three smaller ones, but they're automated, and so they don't need to be as heavy. And so whilst, yes, you've got a battery, there is, there's, there's less soil compaction associated with that.

The last thing I'll mention is the process and packaging side. Matthew mentioned at the beginning something like 40% of the emissions and fossil fuel use in the system come from process and packaging, much of which is off farm. It's in food processing plants. It's in plastic, all of that can be decarbonized and actually with existing technologies. In the processing side, you don't need super high temperatures for food processing most industrial food processing plants running at temperatures of sort of 150 to 200 degrees C and high temperature heat pumps are already in operation that can decarbonize that entirely. We had a client in the United States who, you know, quite a cynical corporate if I'm being honest. They're interested in the bottom line. They're not particularly motivated by fighting climate change. They got a $50 million grant from the US government under the Inflation Reduction Act to take gas out of their factories and replace it with heat pumps. That wasn't a climate decision, that was a commercial decision, and not all countries can afford to subsidize it, like the US, but the technologies are there, and they are going to get cheaper, because as fossil fuels become scarce and more expensive, the electric alternatives become progressively more attractive.

Matthew  

I’m always struggling with these 2050 plans that always feel kind of far away, and the kind of need for immediate action, But also that when you do these immediate disruptions - people, farmers, can fall through the cracks, right? Like not everyone is necessarily cared for in these transitions. So I'm curious to hear from the farmer perspective, Helen, who stands to win and lose in these transitions, what are some things we should be thinking about? Right? It sounds very nice. Let's just remove all the fossil fuels. But what does that look like? How does that look like for you on your farm in practice?

Helen  

Well, I think on the farm at the moment, you are very dependent on other sectors getting their act together, decarbonizing the grid, for instance, or being able to develop the kind of whether they're robotics, as you've just mentioned, or or conventional tractors that will run on electricity or on other sustainable fuels. So in a way, we're slightly helpless until some of those bigger changes happen, and that's the same for a lot of society. I mean, that's why the decarbonized, carbonization of the grid is such an enormously important project, because we all depend on that electricity, because electricity can be produced from fossil fuels as well, coming from from green sources. So, but looking at some of the potential wins, and the the win wins actually, because that's what I'm always really interested in.

This idea of, you know, we can shift our processing and distribution systems to be more efficient, as we've just heard, and to run differently. But how about if we really remodeled our food system and shortened those supply chains and delivered fresher, whole foods to people, rather than actually depending on this very big processing industry which is undermining our health and causing a huge amount of problem elsewhere. So I'd love us to be really creative and think, how do we tackle a number of the challenges that society faces together and try and find ways of making those shorter supply chains really work, because at the moment, they are inefficient, largely. And for fresh food, where you do need to get stuff to people quickly before it goes off, how do we actually manage that stuff really well?

Now I think this is a really complex world we're walking into. So it's really hard to predict exactly how it's going to play through which technologies are going to be found to be really sound. And certainly, as a farmer, when I'm thinking about what energy should I be investing in renewables on my farm now? And if so, where should I start? Because we could put up solar panels, or we could try and get a wind turbine, or we could be looking at things like AD or I'm really interested by some of these technologies about capturing methane from slurry and being able to turn that into gas which could run our tractors. Is that a more viable option than electrification for our farm machinery?

I don't know the answers to all of these, because the technology is emerging really fast. I don't know which ones are going to be winners, and that's where I think, as farmers, we really need some help in terms of picking our way through what is likely to be the sensible thing to do, because some of these things sound like great ideas, and then you realize they you're going down a bit of a dead end street on them. And we find that we've got challenges that we didn't quite recognize at the outset. So I think really thinking through what's the right routes for farms and for the rest of the food sector. How do we get those win wins built in from the start? How do we not just tackle one slice of the problem, but tackle the whole problem in a more holistic kind of way. That's where my head's at, and I don't have any of the answers.

Matthew  

Emile, do you have anything to add there on the who stands to win and lose?

Emile 

I like to bounce back on this idea of really whole system transformation, not just thinking in terms of substitution, and I think we should be going beyond just replacing the nitrogen production from natural gas to electricity, etc, But thinking about the production of nitrogen by nitrogen fixation. I think there's a tremendous potential there. Not just symbiotic nitrogen fixation introducing legumes in the system, but the potential of non symbiotic nitrogen fixation in the soil, by bringing life back in the soil. The potential there is still vastly unexploited.

Matthew  

I of course, also like the win wins. But I think also, just thinking about the history of the last 100, 150 years, fossil fuels have enabled the lives that we have today. Are we being too rosy in some of this picture? Rupert, do you have any thoughts on again these kind of trade offs?

Rupert

I'll give an anecdote from a visit I made to Wisconsin last year, and we were talking with dairy farmers about diversification, because they were experiencing more extreme weather events, and so could we sort of combine arable and dairy and the same piece of land? And I asked if that had ever been done before, and they said, well, 100 years ago, a lot of them were growing oats, and that was principally to power Chicago's transport system, because Chicago pre 1900 was largely powered by horses, and horses were powered by oats. So very large tracts of the Midwest were given over to oats. Now Chicago. Two things then happened. The Model T Ford came along, and so a lot of the transport system shifted to fossil fuels. And then the other thing happened was the electrification so the horse powered trams were replaced by electric powered trams. It seems to me what's happened in the 20th century is that we went very, very far down the fossil fuel route and sort of ignored the electrification route. And the job of the 21st century is to close off the fossil fuel route and go much more heavily down the electrification route. But we shouldn't, at the same time forget that in that transition, that earlier energy transition, from powering Chicago with horses to powering it with Model T Fords and Electric trams, the land that was no longer needed for oats could then be used to grow something else, which turned out to be corn and soy. And so it's the corn and soy is now powering biofuels, which are the current land use problem, especially in the US, that there's just vast amounts of land being given over to production of fuel and not to food. So I think all of these transitions come with, come with sort of costs and costs and benefits, and we need to, need to sort of be quite hard-headed about the numbers associated with that. But I do come back to the sort of point of wider, wider system change. If there's a more efficient technology that's plug and play.

Absolutely, you have to do that. At the same time, you have to look for the sort of technologies that are not quite there yet. And they don't just, they're not just sort of technologies in terms of automation or new crop varieties, but also behavioral technologies. So what can artificial intelligence do, for example, to improve farming practice or to improve sourcing practice by corporate supply chains so that less food is wasted along the way? Can AI be used to shorten supply chains and connect farmers and buyers in a more efficient way locally, so that you don't need as many processing steps and so I think it is possible to create a more efficient and a significantly decarbonized world with a combination of technology, but also significantly practice and practice and behavior change.

Matthew  

I want to move maybe a bit more of an optimistic like, what? What do we need in place? Not just the vision of this transition, but what supports need to be in place. So if we want to move to that direction, what do we need to do right now?

Helen 

Well, I guess, you know, in the really big scheme of things, the thing that we need at the farm level and probably everywhere else as well, is to make sure that we get the economics of the system right, so that we are not subsidizing fossil fuels into the system. And if we're going to subsidize anything, we're subsidizing those greener energy systems that we want people to take up. Because if you get the big scale macroeconomics of this right and the right messages flowing through the system, then we will all find a way to make that work. But at the moment, the signals aren't right. We're still subsidizing fossil fuels, and we are not necessarily supporting in the same way the transition to green energy. So I do think that's something we've got to think about. And I you know, I almost hate to mention it in a farming audience, but we are still supporting red diesel, for instance, and would rather that money was being put into supporting some of the rapid transition into green energy.

I've got really interested, over the last 20 years in agroforestry and the use of perennial crops. Because, as somebody said earlier on, you know, it's the plowing and the sowing and all that kind of stuff that's that's creating such a lot of the energy requirement. And if you're looking at, how do we actually maximize food production from an area of land whilst also sequestering carbon and providing space for nature and all the benefits that trees and perennial crops bring into the landscape, then we can do a huge amount in that space so that we don't have this trade-off between lower intensity farming using less inputs, using less fossil fuels, and producing enough healthy food for everybody.

So I think there's something we can really get into there. And obviously horticulture in the UK, you produce an awful lot of fruit and veg from a pretty small area of land, and yet we are still not focused on supporting the growing of those healthy crops, and if you combine that with a bit of new technology, some of the robotic ideas, you can manage much more complex environments. The reason we've gone down this route where we've ripped out all the hedges and made all our fields really big and compacted the ground is because we've needed to go to bigger and bigger tractors. if you can start to scale down and move to more autonomous vehicles on the land, you've got the opportunity to manage more complex environments that would be amazing in terms of food production and in terms of virtually everything else. So I think there's some really exciting stuff that can do here, but we've got to think about outside the box. It's not just about changing our current farming systems into a look alike version that's got a slightly greener feel to it. It's about reshaping that and building on the green shoots that are coming through of the people who are experimenting with these novel systems, and giving them the support and spreading that knowledge to others, because that's a really exciting future that can feed us healthily, well and resolve a lot of the challenges we're facing.

Matthew 

And Emile, you're based in Brussels, and you work with this global organization. What do you think are the right policy supports to help this transition? And also, if you can think of any successful examples that have already started to move us in this direction, that we can point to.

Emile 

Well, I would say the first thing is also to get rid of all the perverse incentives we heard about subsidizing red diesel, for example, but subsidies in general are still largely an incentive for a continued industrial model of agriculture, where you're just paid by hectare. Very little money is actually going to support a transformation towards more sustainable and resilient systems, or agroecological systems. So redirecting the money that is being invested in agriculture in a way that helps the transformation is certainly a very important aspect.

We need these incentives to prime the pump if you want and therefore, I think public procurement can be a very important incentive for supporting farmers that want to do the transformation. And I will give two examples. In Brazil, under the first Lula presidency, they had an important program that made it compulsory for all public procurement to have at least 40% of their procurement from local agroecological farms. So it was working both on changing the way the food is produced, but also making these supply chains shorter. That really created an environment that allowed much of the small farms to really prosper and become more mainstream.

The other example is at the local level in Copenhagen, about 15 years ago, the mayor of Copenhagen wanted to see a shift to move towards 90% of all the food in public procurement, in feeding school programs, clinics, prisons, etc, to go to 90% organic produce being used there. And as much as possible locally. They did that transition in a period of four years within the same budget. And what was required there is simply a small reduction in the meat in the diets, in the meals that were served, a reduction in the meat proportion. And the second one is to use only seasonal products. With those two changes, they were able to go to 90% organic food at the same cost.

Rupert 

I love the Copenhagen example. I do think public procurement is an important lever, and the UK government is trying to roll out more school breakfasts and school lunches and reduce barriers to accessing those. And that would seem to be a to me, to be a great opportunity. And I think the political and economic climate we're in at the moment is that realistically, companies not going to do a lot of stuff voluntarily, and their investors, I'm sorry to say, are discouraging them from doing so. So we do have to look to regulation and, trying to get as much as we as much change as we can for the limited amount of subsidy that's available. Not to not to bribe the people to make the change, but to sort of tip the balance from people who are already looking to invest in the in the electrification technology, or make large capital purchases that will allow them to drive down fossil fuel use, but to do so commercially, so that people are not going into debt for this. And I think the small amount of subsidy that remains in the UK system, the slightly larger amount that remains in the EU system does need repurposing,

Emile  

if you allow me, there is another dimension of how to help with the transition and support the transition, because, it is important to support the farmers with that transition, but we heard in the conference yesterday about the cost to our health system of the unsustained or the unhealthy food system we have today, and if a fraction of that cost to society was invested in helping with the transition, the savings we would be making on our health bill would be very significant. Really shifting costs from a health sector towards a sustainable food system and supporting that system. That is, of course, a very difficult thing to do, because it's coming from different budgets, 

Rupert

Very briefly It seems to me, we repeatedly, as a society, sort of fall into the trap of not tackling problems at source and then spending more to mitigate them. So the sort of obesity crisis, we haven't tackled that at the source of the quality of food, so we're going to end up tackling it through anti-obesity drugs, which are going to be more expensive and quite painful. We haven't tackled climate change at source, and the result is wildfires that are sort of wiping out chunks of LA which will cost vastly more to rebuild. So repeatedly, I feel we just sort of sleepwalk into situations where you have to pay more to clean something up than mitigating in the first place. So all I just, I just try and approach it with that, with that mindset to say, what is going to be the How can we prevent the thing from occurring in the in the first place?

Matthew  

Good point. So we'd love to hear from you. We've got questions coming in from online. We have Jackie and Robbie with microphones. We also have a microphone up in the balcony, so please, yeah, raise your hand if you have questions. We have covered different parts of the value chain. We have full podcast episodes on all of these topics if you want to dive in and learn more, but we want to hear from you. Maybe we could start with some farmers in the room, if we could just collect a few farmers who might have some questions that are specific to the fossil fuel transition.

Question 1

Hello. Thank you. Very interesting. So I have a farm that used to be a mixed farm, half arable, and now it is all pastoral, and I raise ruminants on it because I thought that it would be better not to be producing grain and using fossil fuels to produce that grain and the tillage, and instead to be capturing carbon, promoting biodiversity and producing high quality organic meat through beef and sheep. And yet I find constantly this issue of methane being raised. And do you think there should be more distinction between methane produced not by the fossil fuel industry or landfill, but from ruminant meat production, with all its benefits. And it should be understood that this isn't something to be penalized, but it is a short term climate gas which of course, avoids things like compacted soil and nitrous oxide production. So I'm interested in the analysis of methane as a carbon footprint, because, you know, my farm actually has a very high carbon footprint, even though we have many days when we are fossil fuel free farming.

Matthew  

Thank you for the question. I think that's a really interesting thing about what when you center the fossil fuel lens, as opposed to some other concerns, how does that change the equation? I want to take one more question, and I'm going to group them together, perhaps on this side of the room.

Question 2 

Hello. Thank you. Helen Browning said that quite rightly, that to mention pricing diesel in line with other fossil fuels would be very unpopular with farmers if red diesel was the same cost as other diesel. And of course, that's true, and it's also true that the exemption from the plastics tax, which agriculture enjoys would be unpopular to get rid of, and it's even more true that the incoming fertilizer tax will be very unpopular with agriculture as a whole, not necessarily with organic farmers, but with the vast majority of agriculture. So my question to the panel is, is it not the case if agriculture throughout the world had to pay proper prices for fossil fuels that farmers might actually be better off, not worse off, but the real problem is the fear of being undercut by production from other countries, and therefore should carbon border adjustment mechanisms include food and agricultural produce? Sorry, that's a bit complicated, but I hope that made sense. Thank you.

Matthew

So if any of the panel wants to jump in on either of those questions,

Helen  

I'll have a go. But I'm sure that Rupert will have a lot to say about the methane question as well. I mean, that was exactly, indeed what I was trying to reflect at the beginning, because we have a lot of ruminants too, and therefore the methane is by far the biggest climate impact that we have on the farm makes the fossil fuels look quite small. And the danger is that you take your eye off the fossil fuels, because actually, it's, it's dwarfed by the by the methane challenge.

I think the challenge with methane, without wanting to completely pronounce on whether it should, how it should be treated, is that it's, yeah, it's a short term gas, but it's also a very immediate lever, and one of the few levers that we have in terms of reducing climate impacts fairly quickly, because so I think whatever the rights and wrongs are, the way we treat it over time, I can understand why folk are turning to it and saying, This is something which could make A difference in the next two or three or five years, rather than over the decades that it takes to bring down levels of carbon dioxide in the in the atmosphere. But that is challenging. And I guess what is really important in terms of, if you're looking at a farm level or at a UK level, it's the trajectory of methane that's key. So you know, every time we add more ruminants into the mix, we are making a fairly rapid acceleration. But if you hold your numbers of ruminants static or gently bring them down very slightly at a farm or a national level, you are having because it's a short term gas, you're able to bring that back under control quite quickly. So I don't know what the right way to deal with this is. It is a complicated one, because it's a short term gas, but it is going to be right in the in the public eye, because it is also a very short term lever,

Question 1

What can you replace it with, if you're not that protein and fat from ruminants?

Helen 

So I would suggest, I mean, so I take into account one. We've got one field which we used to graze a few sheep, and now we have 30 different species of fruits and nuts and soft fruit, and we're producing about 500 times more food on that 10 acre field and a lot more protein. Because nuts, actually, if you look at nut crops on a yield per acre basis, they outperform livestock quite dramatically.

I love livestock, so I'm not making an anti livestock point. I think there is an opportunity cost about livestock. We need to be thinking about that a bit. I think that livestock integrated into farming systems can work really well, but I don't think we should kid ourselves. That it is the most efficient way to produce fat and protein, but I think that livestock in our farming systems have a role to play. Overall. It is about we've been saying this at Soil association for many years. It is about less but better. It is about reduction in consumption, but doing that in a pasture based way that will improve the nutrient profiles and will not continue to accelerate some of the challenges, like methane. This is incredibly complicated and tricky territory, but Rupert, you're the expert on this. Why don't you weigh in.

Rupert 

My disclaimer is that I'm an economist, not a farmer, right? So I don't have the practical experience of this. I spend a lot of time looking at looking at numbers. I'm just going to briefly touch on the second question about the sort of subsidy reforms and carbon border adjustment mechanisms. Because the that we worked on a report over the last five years, the food system economics commission in which we tried to tackle this question of what would a sort of optimized food system look like in terms of public support, and how would you repurpose the fertilizers to try and get to socially, socially better outcomes. And a very significant part of that was shifting support from fossil fuel intensive practices such as, you know, nitrogen fertilizers and red diesel and black plastic and so on, towards practices that are actually beneficial to the climate and nature, and getting paid for those. And the short answer is that it does save the world money, and it produces more food and it and it is sort of healthier. So it's a win, win, win. But as you say, in order to do that without people undercutting each other, you do need a carbon border adjustment mechanism.

And the EU deforestation regulations and the EU carbon border adjustment mechanism do together start to provide that, but it's going to be quite clunky and messy in implementation, particularly as the billionaires in Texas are now throwing, throwing stones at the whole trading system and at democracy and everything else. So sort of, this is going to be quite messy and how it has evolved and implemented. But I do think it will, it will eventually happen… just on the methane. I mean, I sort of, you're getting you're getting to…. 

Matthew 

We had another half hour of audience questions. Including why not replace machine power with human labour? What are some other options to replace plastics on farm? How to ensure that the transition to green energy – specifically mining the critical minerals needed for this energy transition - doesn’t exploit global South resources and communities in the way that fossil fuel extraction has? And some others.

We’ill link the video recording of the episode in our show notes if you’d like to check out how the panelists responded to those questions. Here was the final audience question:

Question 3

Thank you so much for a very interesting panel. I'm reminded of the old joke about asking for directions and being told. Well, I wouldn't start from here. So my question is to ask each of the panelists to imagine that they were starting from scratch and tell us what the ideal food system for the UK would look like for them.

Matthew 

If you could do that in a minute each.

Rupert  

I'm an economist, so I will continue to insist on the benefits of trade as long as there's a carbon border adjustment mechanism baked into it. But actually, the biggest change I would make in my ideal food system is that I would I would get a lot or go back to perhaps seasonality, and I would also make a lot more of domestic legume and nut production, because there are delicious, high protein, high fat products that can be produced by plants that are very possible to produce in this climate, in a very healthy - but we are, we are not producing, and we are importing animal feed for that is implicated in deforestation instead, so that my biggest changes would be on what we eat. 

Helen 

Well, you know, I go with that. I one of the things that always interests me is the is, how do we demonetize the food system to a degree, and how can we plumb in more food that is available to people for free everywhere? How do we enable more people to forage or to, you know, have more community orchards or just to, I would say, whenever you plant a hedge, you know, just put a fruit tree in every 10 meters, because it's always there. How do we make more food more available for nothing to people, because farming, much as we love it, and, you know, lifelong as a farmer, you know, does have massive impacts. And actually food, can we think about food in a slightly different way as to how it is genuinely a public good that everybody can access some of, in their own environment as part of their day to day life, rather than it all being bought through shops and so food for free is what I'm interested in.

Emile 

I think a real agroecological transformation of the entire system that involves diversification, shorter supply chains, certainly growing more of the things that are consumed here locally. I think while trade should not be banned, I think we are relying too much on trade today, and so I think re-domesticating a lot of our food system would be an important way forward for me.

Matthew 

Well, I want to thank all of you for helping me with my job in this whole second half of the session. I want to thank the panelists, Rupert Simons of SystemiQ, Helen Browning of Soil Association, Emile Frison of IPES-food, and all the many hands and organizations that went into the making of this podcast series. For those who haven't listened, you can have you could check it out on all the platforms. It's called Fuel to Fork. You can follow our work@tabledebates.org and one more shout out to the amazing sound engineer who also made a physical presence here, Adam Titmuss, for helping us. So a big round of applause for all the panelists and everyone involved.

Matthew

A big thanks to the amazing organizers at Oxford Real Farming Conference for letting us facilitate this session. And thanks to all the conference goers and to you, our podcast listeners we’ve followed us through this journey. We’ve been so impressed with the engagement of the listeners and we hope you keep sharing the series with the people around you.

The series was put together by TABLE, IPES food - the international panel of experts on sustainable food systems, and Global Alliance for the future of food. This episode was produced by Matthew Kessler, Robbie Blake and Chantal Clement. Editing by Matthew Kessler. Sound engineering by Adam Timuss. 

This has been a great way to close off the Fuel To Fork series. Though stay tuned and subscribed because we still have some bonus episodes dropping in your feed soon.