Land Use and lessons from Northern Ireland

While an academic, policy advisor and member of many industry committees, John Gilliland is also a fifth-generation farmer. Farming “literally inside” the city of Derry in Northern Ireland, his on-farm experience has been vital to his work spanning science, innovation, policy, leadership and delivering behaviour change.

He sees his strength as the ability to look at today’s complex farming issues “simultaneously through four or five different lenses and trying to find the middle ground.”

Frustrated by what he sees as the current siloed approach to policy, he said: “They have no recognition that I as a farmer, or any of my colleagues as a farmers, have to deliver multiple public goods, simultaneously, from how we use our land.”

He continued, “As farmers, running complex businesses that are all interconnected, we play this juggling act. My plea to governments, to policy makers, to regulators, is respect that everything we do, how we manage land, how we use land, is totally interconnected.”

Land Use Framework

With reference to England’s Land Use Framework, John was asked what we can learn from a landscape baselining project carried out in Northern Ireland, in which he was heavily involved.

He outlined how the voluntary (and free) scheme, aiming to affect behaviour change, gives farmers an unparalleled level of detail about their farm’s soil profile and fertility, tree numbers, hedges, habitat connectivity and impact on water quality.

And it’s delivering. So far, the scheme covers 75% of land in Northern Ireland with 93% farmers signed up. Measurements will be repeated over time to evidence changes made.

One of the reasons to baseline in this way was to help show Treasury what is being achieved in return for its investment of public funds and John stresses this needs to be done in England too:

“If you cannot measure what public funds are being used for, Treasury will not be able to work out their rate of return on public spending on farming and the environment, and you will not be anywhere near the top of their pecking list when it comes to dishing out the meagre funds that Treasury has.”

For farmers in the South West, there are obvious parallels with farmers in Northern Ireland; both places are “wet and mild” and “grow a lot of the green stuff”!

As John explained: “The benefit of what we're doing here is it gives you that data to allow you to make better quality decisions. It's about how do I go from where I am now to where I need to go? But I now know my baselines.”

Moving it on with ARCZero

Following the baseline work, John joined forces with six other farmers in Northern Ireland in a project called ARCZero. Continuing to focus on the belief that if you can’t manage it, if you can’t measure it; the group looked deeper into what was happening on their individual farms. They aimed to build the evidence of “farmers being land managers, are now also producing the solutions and not just being the problem.”

On John’s farm alone, he knows without any interventions at all, he is storing 24,460 tonnes of carbon in his trees and soil, with the whole group totalling more than 500,000 tonnes. He believes work like this can help the “rich, panacea of carbon” on farms become better recognised.

He also thinks the project has shown the value of land use diversity. His farm includes five different land uses from grazing grass to silvopasture and willow coppicing, with the measurements showing his future is in land sharing, not land sparing.

Being in Northern Ireland, as well as calculating carbon, the project has focused on other elements of grass use, showing how the move away from monocultures and nitrogen fertiliser to more diverse leys is reducing nitrous oxide emissions and improving herbage productivity.

These results further cement in John’s mind his insistence farming needs a detailed baseline to “find out what land is good for, where” to make it an “evidence-based journey”. He also feels it encourages farmers: “It gives the landowner or the land operator far better skin in the game; because they have been given knowledge, you've empowered them.

“Rather than being told what to do, they may actually get there under their own right, because you've given them information and you've shown them the toolbox. This is about having a process that respects. We aren't making any more land so how we use it is absolutely vital.”

The project is now being replicated across the UK through AHDB, involving 36,000 hectares of land, some of it in the South West.

Box: Land Use take-home messages

1. Drive change effectively by building up a database and creating knowledge to influence decision making – measuring to manage
2. Understand your context, both the physical – soil type, climate, weather patterns – and the people, skills and resources available
3. You can influence people by the way you talk to them so think about taking a moment to consider what you’re going to say

Listen to the full episode at https://www.cornishmutual.co.uk/news-advice/farming-focus-podcast/ - also available via Spotify and Apple podcasts.

John Gilliland OBE is Professor of Practice in Agriculture and Sustainability at Queens University, Belfast, chair of Sustainable Farm Networks at Harper Adams University, an advisor to AHDB and has a long history of working with Government on aspects of agricultural policy. He is also a farmer in Northern Ireland.