The Solutions Are Here. The Challenge Now Is Scale.

Sometimes progress is less about finding something new and more about making something useful normal.

Written by: Steve Holloway — Technical Manager, SFS

Prince William used a line around this year’s Earthshot Prize that caught my attention: “The solutions are here. The challenge now is scale.” There is something quite simple about that idea. Finding an answer is one thing, but getting it used often enough to make a meaningful difference is something else entirely, and that is probably where a lot of environmental ideas either start to become useful or quietly remain very good ideas on paper.

Carbon is particularly good at becoming a very big subject very quickly. Millions of tonnes, national targets and dates comfortably far enough into the future that most of us will have forgotten what we were originally measuring by the time they arrive. All of that matters, but it can also make the whole thing feel rather distant from what actually happens on a farm. Scale looks slightly different when you bring it back to a hectare, because a small change on one field is exactly that: small. Make the same change across a whole farm, though, and then across a few more farms, and the arithmetic starts to look rather different.

Nitrogen is a good example. Manufactured fertiliser has been enormously important to crop production, and crops are not suddenly going to stop needing nitrogen because carbon has become part of the conversation. The question is simply whether every kilogram has to reach the crop by exactly the same route. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria offer another one, using a biological process that was getting on perfectly well long before anyone thought to build a fertiliser factory.

That is the principle behind Bio-N. The aim is to contribute to the crop’s nitrogen supply biologically, improve overall nitrogen efficiency and reduce reliance on manufactured nitrogen where appropriate. And if carbon is going to be part of that conversation, it seemed only fair to count Bio-N’s footprint as well, because biological products do not, unfortunately, appear by magic. SFS therefore had Bio-N independently assessed by ClimatePartner, including the raw materials, packaging, inbound transport and production involved in making it.

The resulting figures are useful for doing the sums, although a kilogram of CO₂ equivalent is probably considerably easier to appreciate on a spreadsheet than it is while standing in a field. Put into something more familiar, the comparison starts to make more sense. Where a Bio-N programme allows around 40 kg N/ha less manufactured ammonium nitrate to be used, the difference in manufacturing footprint is roughly 140 kg CO₂e per hectare after allowing for Bio-N’s own production footprint. That is roughly equivalent to the emissions from driving an average petrol car for about 500 miles.

I’m sure the proclaimers would have something to say about that.

Five hundred miles from one hectare is interesting rather than earth-shattering, but across 100 hectares the same change is roughly equivalent to 50,000 miles of petrol-car travel. And on a larger farming business, that starts to become a meaningful amount of carbon and could be comparable with part of the carbon associated with the business’s own transport. That is where Prince William’s point about scale starts to feel rather less abstract.

Nothing particularly revolutionary has happened to the individual hectare. The crop still needs feeding, it still has to perform, and the weather retains its long-established right to interfere with whatever plan was made. The only difference is that a relatively modest change has been repeated enough times for it to stop being quite so modest.

Perhaps that is what “the solutions are here and the challenge now is scale” looks like from a farming perspective: not one enormous answer that changes everything overnight, but practical changes that work agronomically, can be measured properly and become significant because they are repeated over enough land.

Agriculture does, after all, have rather a lot of that..