Thank you very much to Anthony for inviting us to speak this morning. I'm going to talk on behalf of the BCA, but obviously I'll be drawing on my experiences of the work that I do in my practise and in various other settings as well. So I'm going to talk not entirely purely about region's largely what's going to be talking about.
I'm going to be talking about the role that cattle play. Then we are going to cover regenerative farming and and the role and influence of the vet in in our in our work and in our practises as well. So that's, that's what we're hoping to cover.
I just thought I'd tell you a little bit about me, so that you can see where I'm coming from. I'm I'm a farm animal vet. I've always been a farm animal vet.
I've spent some time part time working and and and some time full time. These days I do have a big interest in mastitis consultancy, so I have done a fair bit of that in recent years, but my current role in the practise is research leads, so I manage quite a wide array of research projects which actually, when I'm not getting bore. Down in the detail, I get really excited about.
So if anyone wants to talk to me about my research projects, I haven't been invited to talk about one of my favourite topics. I'm a BCVA board member and I've got the medicine group lead, so I sit on a lot of industry committees related to the responsible use of medicines. I'm also the industry liaison group chair for the medicine hub, so I've been trying very hard in the last couple of years.
To get that into use and successful, which has been a challenge. I'm on the red track board. I was responsible for the BCA sustainability policy and also the vet on the targets taskforce for cattle.
Probably in a personal capacity, I joined the sustained food and farming group, but then I persuaded BCVA that we should have a a presence there, so I now kind of along with Rob, Rob Howes sit sit there on behalf of BCVA but actually if I wasn't, I'd probably be there anyway. So that's that's some of my, my thing a little bit about my practise, which is we're a large farm animal only practise in the Southwest, we're independent. We've expanded quite a lot in the last few years, which is always very interesting when you're doing a carbon footprint.
We've got a lot of shareholders, so we've got a lot of people who are invested in the business. They're not all vets. Some of our shareholders are vet techs.
We've got a vet nurse who's a shareholder, and we've got a TB tester who's who's a shareholder. We run a laboratory. I put there that we've got a closed dispensary because actually when we're talking about the responsible use of medicines, I think that's really important and it doesn't get talked about very often, but our vets are not allowed into our dispensary.
I can if anyone wants to ask me about that, please do. But the year we did it, I was outraged, but anyway. OK we're a member of XL vets, we're a member of SAA, and we do, we've got a lot of vets who, who have got high qualifications and who do a great deal of referral and consultancy work.
So we have a lot of links outside our practise in the wider industry, and we have this research arm which I have the good luck to manage. And we also run a two week core module for the RCVS so we're teaching finally students. So just to give you a bit of a sense of the sort of activity that we cover.
So sustainability, when we, you know, wrote the BCBA policy, obviously the first thing you have to do is define what you're talking about. I think we can all define sustainability, but in a livestock agriculture sense, it's allowing for the production of healthy foods without destroying the ability of future generations to do the same. We sometimes forget about the food bit in agriculture, but I'll talk about that later.
But it's also considering the ecological, the economic, the social and the ethical impacts. It's not, it's not just about carbon, although carbon is very important. I'm not going to nobody here needs convincing that it's a real problem, just to remind you that we've got legally binding Lord Tres did cover a lot of things I'm mentioning, but we've got a legally binding target to be net zero by 2050.
In the UK that doesn't actually encompass agricultural specific targets. Now other countries are starting to look at that. Ireland has made a legally binding target for agriculture as has New Zealand, and it's causing enormous angst and and worry for those sectors.
So that's, that's quite important for us actually. But as has already been mentioned, our legally binding target is full of holes, so we don't include imports. So we could wipe out our entire agricultural sector and import all our food and say that we've made an improvement.
Nobody thinks that would be a good solution, so. Yes, so I've already mentioned sustainability is not just about net zero. It's it's for us, particularly in agriculture, it's about building climate resilience as well.
We're going to have to adapt. It's about protecting the environment. We're here to talk about biodiversity, in particular air, soil, water, massive for our clients, but it's also about protecting the health and welfare of livestock.
And also people, we mustn't forget our rural communities. They're the ones that are going to suffer, with any decisions that we that we make, and, and, and we have to have economic sustainability. If we can't, if our farmers can't actually stay in business, this isn't going to work.
And then it's quite difficult measuring all of these things. Some of these things have got recognised metrics, which I might talk about in a moment. Others much harder and much, much harder to define when you're so, so how do you know when you're successful and when you're not?
So here's the nub of the issue, what are cows and sheep actually contributing to global warming? If you were to listen to the mainstream media, you'd think they were kind of the majority of the problems sometimes. I honestly despair when listening to some of the quality outlets, what they come up with.
So this is, this is sort of the most up to-date one that I could find. It's a bit of a, of a maze, but you'll see agriculture down there in the green, the green stripe, and this is global from 2021. And it's got agriculture contributing 11.6%, but I don't think that includes the fossil fuels, the sort of energy from agriculture.
So if you add that in it, it comes out about 13% globally for what agriculture's contributing. That's not land use change, that's agriculture. From that, you'll see at the bottom, livestock and manure and agriculture soils.
So a lot of that is going to methane. And nitrous oxide, so relatively small amount is going to CO2. And that's where agriculture really differs from these other sectors in that you know, the energy sector and the transport sector, it's all about CO2.
Agriculture, it's all about methane and nitrous oxide and and so they, they do behave differently and that is really important. I'm gonna come to that. That's global for the UK we are lower than that.
We have an efficient agriculture sector, and we, I think the current estimate is about 10% that it's contributing to our, our emissions. And that's the whole of agriculture, that's not livestock. So I think livestock, I think we're, we're, we'll argue about that in a minute.
On here it's got livestock and renes being 5.8%. I think we again we would be much lower than that.
So, are, is methane emitted by cows the same as methane emitted by. Escape from fossil fuel extraction. If you look at the metrics, it's treated in exactly the same way.
If you look at actually more recent government reports on this, funnily enough, they're not talking about methane from agriculture nearly as much. And and that's for a good reason is because fossil fuel methane is coming out of the ground. It's new carbon that is being added to the atmosphere.
Methane from ruminants has come from the plant material that the ruminants are eating. So it's it's in a fossil fuel methane is a very long, long cycle. It's millions of years that it took to put that methane in the ground.
Methane from ruminants is a short cycle. It's so so that that that methane has come from CO2 that's been fixed by plants to photosynthesis, ingested by ruminants emitted as methane. Gets broken down to CO2 goes round again.
So this isn't taken into account in the metrics, but I'd just like you to bear it in mind, we're not talking about the same thing. The methane added to the to the atmosphere by ruminants is not new carbon. OK.
If anyone would like to disagree, please say now, but it's not new carbon. And and I I actually, I only learned this the other day, but a while ago now, but. It it's always, it always surprises me when I think about it.
The, the CO2 that we breathe out. Is not included in our emissions. Does anyone want to say why that would be?
So it's it's basically the same reason. It's because the CO2 that we breathe out originated from the short carbon cycle. It came from the food that we eat, which was created by photosynthesis.
So it was fixed by photosynthesis and it then ends up being breathed out by us. It's a short carbon cycle, therefore, it's not accounted for. But for some reason, the methane that ruminants belch out.
Is regarded by certain sectors of society as the root of all evil and that's probably because we make lots of cows to do it, so it's a product of us doing stuff, I would imagine that's why it gets counted. So you think it's because cow numbers have gone up? No, just because there's a lot of cows.
There's a lot of people anyway. We make cows in the same way that we make cows. We make people as well.
And a lot more people an awful lot more. Well, that is true, but that that's part of the natural state of affairs, whereas the agriculture industry is manmade. I think that's why the government would include those figures.
That's right, it's an interesting thought that the food system is man-made, but yeah, yeah, Alex, I think, I think you and Martin are both right that I I, I struggle with large numbers like that graph of all the. Flows of emissions are really difficult. There's a huge amount of information on there.
I think it's the the a a a way for people won't need to think about it is if you think of the energy flow through the system. The, the, the problem that we have with the cattle population is it's artificially high. And it's artificially concentrated because it's been subsidised by fossil fuel inputs, so I, I understand your point about the, the methane being part of the surface, but the, we're able to farm and have have a farm with 18,000 cows in in one building.
Only because we've got this massive cheap energy supply of fossil fuel and the whole agricultural system over the last 5000 years has been. Perhapserhaps we'll, we'll, we'll come back to this later because there's a lot that we're gonna cover that covers that. But I mean actually if you look at the fossil fuel contribution to agriculture, it's not big.
It's not big at all. . But I mean we're going to talk about regenerative have agriculture, so we'll come back to that later, but expressed in a different way, the same idea.
It's the two different carbon cycles and the fact that it's really not very fair on agriculture to treat the two carbon cycles as the same. Just a reminder really that grassland is an amazing carbon sink. It's not as good as a, as a, as a tropical rainforest, but it's pretty impressive.
If you plough up grassland, you're gonna release a lot of carbon. So we've got a lot of grassland in the UK. If, if, if we've already heard about peat bogs, but massively important, absolutely, absolutely vital, 3% of the world's surface, but they actually hold more carbon than the trees.
So not to be underestimated. I mean, that's that's kind of. Fringe issue, but, but, just thought I'd throw it in there.
So that was the short and the long chain. Carbon cycle. Then we get on to GWP star, which was also alluded to by Lord Tres, and this is really work done by by Mars Allen in Oxford, and he calculated that the current metrics do not really accurately reflect the warming potential of methane currently, and that's because methane is a short-lived climate pollutant.
It breaks down after about 10 to 12 years to CO2. So if you're doing 100 years or 20 years, it's not going to behave the same as the CO2. So you express it in CO2 equivalents, but it's not behaving in the same manner.
And this group worked out that GWPA reflects the warming potential of methane more accurately than the currently used metric, which is GWP 100. We just have to live with that because everyone's using GWP 100. So everything I'm going to talk about later in this talk about about reducing emissions, we don't get to choose which metrics we use because it's laid down by legislation we have to talk in G100.
But incidentally, it's it's not a good metric for agriculture because it doesn't reflect the warming. So why? What is that difference?
Because methane is, is, is a short-lived . Pollutant, the methane that was produced about 10 years ago is just at the point of breaking down now, so it's no longer an issue. So actually it's the change, it's the change in cattle populations that are going to be important because if we've actually got a stable ruminant population or a shrinking ruminant population, as is the case in the UK currently.
You're actually You're actually going to end up with with a shrinking population, you're gonna end up with a cooling effect, because the, the methane that was produced has gone and you're actually producing less than you produced 10 years ago, you're in a cooling situation. But again we're not allowed we're not allowed to take that into account when justifying our assistance, so we're waiting for that to be accepted. It will be a very difficult metric to implement because it's more complicated because you have to take into account.
What the population is doing and do you work that out on a national scale or on a global scale. Some people argue it's unfair if you've got a developing country which has got an increasing ruminant population, but I would argue there's no fair or unfair. That's the reflection of the warming effect of ruminants.
But likewise, according to GWP Star, if we increase our ruminant populations, it will actually have in the short term a greater effect than under GWP 100. So it's complicated That's, this is a graphic I stole and I can't remember who I'm supposed to be crediting, so if it's anyone in the room, can you just put your hand up? I think it might have been fit low cost stain, but I, yeah.
But I quite like it because it's the one on the left is is is the emissions from UK agriculture by gas, but the one on the right is warming contribution by by agriculture from agriculture when you take into account GWPCR, in which case nitrous oxide is a lot more important. And that's just to to demonstrate it in the same way, the difference between the two metrics. If you've got a stable stable amount of, of, of, of methane emissions, according to GWP 100.
You're, you're, you're still adding, adding to global warming, but if you've got . If you use DWP Star, you're not really adding to global warming. And that's in stark contrast to CO2 where everything that you emit stays there, unless you remove it by photosynthesis.
So we could get into the scenario where where we with shrinking ruminant populations, we were actually being credited for contributing to global cooling. That would be, I don't think anyone could stomach that, could they, a good news story about agriculture. But actually, even that, that's short term.
It would only buy us about 10 years, so it would really buy us 10 years while the fossil fuel industry get their act together. It's not a long term solution. So what does net zero actually look like for agriculture?
Various bodies have come up with their vision. The one in the middle is the graphic produced by the Committee for Climate Change, and, and actually there's quite a few things in there that technically don't really come under agriculture, so forestry, . They see and peatlands that they see a contribution by low carbon farming practises.
They see a contribution from diet change and reducing food waste, and they see this big contribution from energy crops. I don't really want to get into that. I'm not convinced that growing crops purely to stick them in a digester is actually the way out of the climate crisis.
Others probably know more about that than I do. So there's some other views so there's the CCC which I've already mentioned. The NFU have put forward their view of reaching net zero by 2040, 10 years before the legislative target.
They see it as the route as improved efficiency and productivity, increasing farmland carbon storage, but also coupling bioenergy to carbon capture. I think those those are three strands that farmers can relate to. I think that we can all relate to and work towards.
So those are the ones that I'm sort of largely going to talk about today. The little bit in the bottom left is a recent government report called Mission Zero, which which was sort of review carried out. The most notable thing about it was that barely mentioned agriculture.
It was really talking about about decarbonizing the energy sector, but the only mentions that were in there were a need for land use framework, which has also been mentioned land use framework seems to get mentioned in reports, but we never seem to get one. I think it's a scary thing for farmers actually, but I think we need one because we need to prioritise how we use our land at the moment. It just seems to be way too haphazard.
We're building on. You know, fantastic grade farmland we're subsidising farming in marginal areas, we need to have that conversation, but anyway, land use framework and also a little mention of the fact that we might have to have a bit of dietary change and we could grow meat in a lab, and that was it. So, and I thought I'd just bring in what the EU is doing as well, because it's quite interesting.
They seem to have a much bigger focus actually on the biodiversity aspects, which is they want to see more organic production. They want to see a reduction in chemical pesticides, and they want to reduce fertiliser use and and and reduce nutrient losses as well. So, out, so, so we're heading for net zero, which of our farming systems is the right system?
And, and I think I hear a lot of people grappling with this as though it's as though it's a decision that someone up on high is going to get to make. And the reality is that all of these systems probably have a future, whether we like it or not. And certainly at BCVA it's our belief that we need to provide the right incentives and the right the right metrics, the right incentives and the right help to our farmers, and they are going to adapt their farming systems to meet those needs.
And if we provide the right incentives, they will probably make the right decisions and maybe we even need to trust them to do that. So there's there's a place for the intensive dairy that is using a very, very small land footprint in order to produce really, really high quality food. And actually some of our intensive dairies, we're visiting one next week is are doing incredible things for nature as well.
It's not an either or. You can have a biodiverse intensive dairy. Then we've got our extensive grazers who are using grass incredibly efficiently and then we've got our sort of at the moment are probably a little bit more fringe, you know, the sort of real regenerative agriculture that I think we've all got a lot to learn from those people.
Those are the people who are maybe pushing the boundaries currently and teaching the rest of us what is possible. And we're all going to pick up things from what they're doing and draw them into into everyone else's farming practises. So I don't think there's a right system.
I think all of the systems that we have need to adapt and learn and and just change what they're doing. But they're only gonna do that if they're given the right support by government and elsewhere. So the starting point for me is that farmers need to carry out a carbon footprint.
The the the shame of this is that there's a lot of very good carbon calculators out there, but they all do the job slightly differently. So, so they need to pick one and stick with it so that they can follow their progress. Some of them take into account biodiversity and carbon soil carbon captures, you know, they all vary slightly with what they what they do, but there is a target.
There's a UK dairy road map which is this . Collaboration that's got an aim that all dairy farmers should have carried out their carbon audit by about now. I'm not sure they all have yet, but working towards it.
So, so I'm just going to go through the sort of three main streams that the NFU identified and just just talk a little bit about those if I'm not running behind. So the first one would be just boo boosting productivity and efficiency. And you know, as a vet, this is music to my ears, this is what we've been trying to do for the last 30 years anyway, it's totally aligned with what we've been trying to achieve.
So all the things that we've been successfully rolling out on our client farms, health planning, fertility visits, sufficient breeding, nutritional advice, biosecurity, optimising the environment whatever that environment may be controlling endemic disease. This is what we do. Cat's going to talk about this a bit more as well, but we are totally in our comfort zone here, so really strong argument.
This is a lovely slide that that was created by Jude Capper, who did a study into comparing, you know, the carbon footprint of milk from 1944 with 2007, you know, because we all like so in the old days, it was lovely, wasn't it? But you know, cows becomes dairy has become so much more efficient since then. So we're producing more milk from fewer cows.
So from an environmental point of view, that's got to be good, right? And in the UK that was a US that study was a US, but the trends in the UK have been very similar. We've got a falling national herd.
We've just dropped below, I think 1.8 million, but our average yields are increasing, so we're getting more milk out of fewer cows, which from an emissions intensity point of view, just got to be good news. And you know I would argue that health and welfare has improved massively in that time as well.
You might have views about housed cows. There's lots of discussions to be had in there, but it's been done from a healthier herd. Farmland carbon storage is absolutely a massive contribution that our farmers can make in a variety of ways.
I mean, so there's a sort of Welsh approach which is plant a tree everywhere, but there's lots of, you know, that's a bit of a blunt blunt approach. No nobody here. Behind that policy.
Sorry, soil carbon capture is huge. There's a massive variation in the amount of carbon that can be captured in the soil. We need to be measuring that and rewarding farmers for.
But we're not. We don't really have a good way currently of doing that. Obviously woodland, everyone talks about woodland, but also hedgerows, really important, you know, in terms of why we're all here today talking about biodiversity.
You know, I think this is the this is the biggest area of wind for for for UK farmers because they can capture carbon and they can start restoring biodiversity and they can create a good news story in the process, which I think we all need. So there's a lot of less productive areas on every farm that need to be utilised for nature. There is financial support for doing this.
It's incredibly complicated and it's probably inadequate. I mean, the subsidy scheme that's supposed to be paying public money for public good, I think the estimate from the NFU is is the subsidies in the future are going to be about 50% the level that they were. So farmers are being paid half as much for these public goods that we all value so much.
So a lot of them are doing it for the love of it. A lot of the farmers that I see are doing are doing these things that they're not accessing public money to do it, but you do have to have a bit of headspace in order to achieve that. If you're working a 14 hour day and trying to make ends meet, that's not going to happen, but.
Massive potential. Cat's gonna talk about regen ag, so I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna focus on that too much, but just to say this is one of our clients who won, he won a prize because he had the highest carbon content in his soil in the whole country. So yeah, he was having an open open day on the back of that.
Coupling bioenergy to carbon capture. Personally, I just think that this is, this is the way we should be going and it's an absolute no brainer. Unfortunately, it requires a lot of capital investment.
So if we capture the methane from from slurry, convert it to electricity. I use it to heat, you know, use the energy on the farm and export it. It's just a win-win for everybody, but those those systems require a lot of investment, you know, we're into the millions and long paybacks.
So I think there is personally, I think there's a scope there you know for the for the. Supply chain to get involved because if you need to look at your emissions down the supply chain, you can you can help with some of these investments. This was a unit that I visited.
This was actually Switzerland, but a lot of our farms have got these, but I like this picture because you can see the houses in the background. This farm was heating about 25 houses and the local school with the with the energy from that anaerobic digester. They were using all of their own energy and then they were exporting it to the local, the local village, and that was an investment that's a Nestle farm actually.
So Nestle were taking great interest in, so there was a lot of there's potential there for joined up thinking. And and I think, you know, if, if, if we were getting a lot of our electricity from our local dairy farms, we might feel a little bit differently about, about them. If anyone has more, more experience or knowledge about this, by the way, I'd love to talk to you.
I've already mentioned the metrics. I think the metrics were not designed to help agriculture, but there's a few other things in there that I just want to throw out. I'm gonna, this is going to sound like a whinge, but.
How, how is agriculture going to get to net zero? If a farmer decides they're going to plant an area of forestry. That goes under land use change, so it won't get credited to agriculture.
So that won't help with the national inventory. If they feed methane inhibitors to their cows, they couldn't, they could decrease their methane emissions by up to 30%. No one's giving them any credit for that.
No one's going to pay them to do it, and the national inventory won't reflect it either. If they breed green livestock, we know that there's a massive variation in emissions according to genetics. So there's quite a lot of research being done on this now.
If you breed the greenest cow in creation, no one is going to give you any credit for it under the current system. No one's going to pay you more, and no one's gonna say, oh look, agriculture's reduced its emissions. So there's a lot of things that our farms can do, but where's the current incentive for them to do for them to do it?
Carbon calculator thing, I think, you know, we've got a lot of clients who are net zero according to their carbon calculations when they take into account everything that they're doing on their farms. That is not reflected in the national inventory because often those activities are either not taken into account or they're put under another sector. Carbon trading likewise gets really, really complicated.
I was talking to a dairy farmer from the states who actually is catching his methane, turning it into biogas, selling it to you know trucks. He's getting paid for those carbon credits, but as a result, those emissions, he, he's that the credits are going to the, to the transport industry. He's not getting credited for for producing that biogas.
That makes sense. When you trade carbon, you trade emissions. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but I'm just, just putting it out there.
And, and also, you know, soil health and biodiversity assessments. I think these are really important. We need to be doing more of them.
They're not easy to do. There's there is a, you know, a well recognised biodiversity metric recognised by DEFRA. We need to be, we need to be rolling it out more widely and perhaps giving, giving farmers credit when they're bringing about improvements.
That was exciting last night to hear that there's something in the pipeline. But, but the, the short messages and net zero farms are already here. We have them among us, and we should be learning from them.
And we need to be making sure that they're making, making a living. I just threw this in out of naughtiness really, . I don't really mind what anybody eats.
I love the food that we had last night. But if anyone thinks that veganism is going to save the planet, I'm not so sure. I've already talked about the metrics.
You know, if you, if you went vegan for a year, you you'd probably save the equivalent of one trip along across the Atlantic, wouldn't get you home again. But also that's with the current metrics, which I've already put an argument to say that they're quite flawed. I'm not sure that ultra processed foods are the way forward, they're not gonna be good for our health.
There's there's a, there's an uneasy sense of lobbying as well from some of these big companies. I don't think increasing food miles is the way forward either. I mean, you hear these powerful arguments that say that shipping vegan food halfway around the world is is better than sourcing beef from your local farm.
I simply don't believe that, especially not if it's a net zero local farm. Yeah, whenever you look at comparisons, you've always got to look at what they're comparing. I get so bored of comparisons that compare 1 kg of something with 1 kg of something else, or even if you get into protein.
The proteins are not equivalent, so what are you comparing when you're making these these environmental comparisons? And also, What figures are being used, you know, we often get get get judged by global averages. Well, we've got a really, really efficient livestock farming system, but in the global average, you've got the Indian dairy cow who's standing by the side of the road producing, you know, a couple of litres or something.
And that gets thrown in and then our industry gets judged by that. Well, we should be encouraging the efficient and the clean and the and the and the high welfare and and and that's not to say, you know. Livestock are massively important to people in developing countries.
That's not a hammer to beat them with, but I just don't think that we should be being judged by faulty, using faulty averages, . A lot of our farmland is simply not arable, so if we're not going to keep livestock on it, that means that we're going to rewild it. That's that's, that's fine.
That's a complex debate. It's a debate that's already out there, but just be a bit careful, you know, that means we won't be producing food from it. And actually, you know, my family, we've been managing a piece of land for the last 50 years.
We've been rewilding it. It's it's gorse brambles and Himalayan balsam. We're now getting conservation cattle back in to sort it out.
Also, you know, a lot of these figures assume that cows are eating human grade feed. So we talk about soya. Soya is a complex issue.
I haven't got time to talk about it's a big issue, yes. But actually, a lot of the even the grains that cattle are eating are not human grades. They're they're the non-human grade grains and and and they eat a lot of byproducts, and they are grass based in the UK.
So these are all feeds that we are not utilising. So when you look at it in that way, The non-human utilisable feed, they are massively efficient. They are miraculous creatures.
So yeah, finally, how will we fertilise the soil if we're not using animal manures, we're using artificial fertilisers and you only have to go to the east of the country to see some of the degraded soils there and see what mess we get ourselves into if we're not careful. Just a few ideas, I just threw them out there, but it's complicated. I'm not saying there's a simple solution, but.
That that goes in both directions. So I don't think I've got time to talk about food waste, but I did put a few slides in about food waste. You know, one of the solutions is for us to waste less food.
Then then our farmers could produce less food to feed us all and interestingly, in the developed world, that food waste is happening more at the consumer end than at the producer end. Yeah, so just just finally get on to what our farmers need to do. It's quite a long list.
They they need to they need to get to net zero. Whether they're able to do that with our current metrics, I'm not sure, but they need to get to some form of net zero where we know they're not contributing to global warming. They need to reverse declines in biodiversity, and I think that's probably the most, the single most important thing that they need to do currently.
And they need to improve soil health, look after the water, massive, and they need to develop climate resilience because we've got trouble ahead. They've got the potential to provide carbon offsetting for other industries as well. They're about one of the few industries where that's the case, I in forestry really.
There was a comment made yesterday about the NFU focusing on food security and was almost mentioned as a negative. I think they're genuine. Food security is going to be a concern, and we ignore it at our peril.
We also need to look after animal welfare. All of this must happen with animal welfare as as a top priority. There's a lot of rules they need to meet.
They can't find staff anymore and they're trying to make a living, so they've got all that going on. And there's a huge, huge PR job to be done as well, which I think almost they're losing at the moment. Farm, you know, farmers need a social licence in which to operate, otherwise there's a breakdown.
So there's a lot, there's a big job, there's a lot that that farmers needs to do and I'm not I'm not belittling any of that by any means. But personally, I think that the answer lies in a whole variety of farming systems, but at its heart, whatever system farmers are operating, they need to be efficient. There's no people talk about, you know, pasture for life as though that excuses them from being efficient.
It doesn't, they need to be efficient and they need to whatever the system we need more efficient, better farming. And we will achieve that by putting the right incentives and the right metrics in place. And at the heart of that is the vets who, who specialise in evidence-based decision making and giving good advice to our clients.
On that, I'm gonna pass over to Cat, who's gonna be more positive and talk about regeneration. Sorry, this is a bit of a marathon, isn't it? I'll make this one very, very quick.
I just wanted to, I hadn't really talked about vets in my first part, so I just wanted to, to just talk about the role of vets in the second and, and, the, the start was just to to talk about the BCVA looked at this whole issue in our sustainability policy, and, and, . You know the veterinary role we've got a sort of collective role through our associations which has been really active and we want to join up with BVA activity whenever possible and that's our collective power and then our individual power which is through our work as vets I think Andrew's here. He did a lovely piece of Of arithmetic calculating the impact of the impact we have as vets looking after our clients is so much greater than our individual impact.
So I think it was a beef vet was like 30,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent versus an individual as an individual, you're probably only responsible for, you know, 1215, 20, depending on what your lifestyle is. So as vets, we have a huge, huge, influence which we should use. So I'm not actually think that's covered the whole thing about our role in improving efficiency, so I'm not going to really cover that too much except that I think we need to be quantifying it much better and there's a lot of work now that is going into the what if calculators.
What is the sustainability cost of BVD, what is the sustainability cost of worms and sheep and all of that a lot of people are doing really good work in that now. So I'm not going to talk about that because the acting on methane report produced by Health and Welfare did estimate that just controlling the really controllable diseases could bring about a 10% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. So that's there's an immediate and incredibly achievable 10% reduction through the everyday works.
And then you can get additional reductions through improved nutrition and genetic. Improvement Yeah, so there's there's a lot to be done in the in the breeding area. We can improve our genetics as well as our breeding fertility efficiency.
Cats already talked about that that's a subject and also nutrition, and I think nutrition's an area where there's possibly some learnings to be done as well about nitrogen utilisation efficiency. There's been a lot of waste in the past and just utilising home grown feeds more efficiently and getting avoiding soya. There's a lot of work now going into that.
So I'm not gonna talk about that too much, precision farming, using data, using the technology that we learned about yesterday from from MSD these these sorts of things really, really important for improving efficiency. The thing I do want to talk about quickly, responsible use of medicines, it's one of my pet topics and it's a really important area for vets. Obviously, antibiotics, .
Big focus for the profession in the ruminant sector we've been a little bit held back by not having a national figure for antibiotic use, and it's something that we've been working on with the medicine hub, which is a national database which farmers can put their data into on an anonymous basis and then we can produce a national figure. And I think people are often surprised to discover that we don't have that already. We've got estimates of what antibiotic usage in the sector.
We actually think we're doing really, really well, but until we can come up with that definitive figure, no one's going to believe us. So it's really important that we roll out the medicine hub successfully, but obviously we've got lots of practises in place which have been very successfully rolled out to practises, so we're avoiding HPCIA. The use of those has plummeted.
We're trying to learn more about what practises do promote resistance so we can avoid those. We're avoiding prophylaxis. The EU has just recently made prophylaxis legislated against.
We haven't yet in the UK, but there's massive pressure to avoid prophylaxis, and it's carried out in. I mean I'd say our practise, it's not, it's not done. I won't say that it's not done anywhere in the UK, but it's very, very low levels now in the ruminant sector.
Planning prevention, that's a picture of our old clothes dispensary which already alluded to and and we have a system of ledges for our clients. So if a farmer rings up, first of all, they will not get the antibiotic straight away. They have to give us notice.
Then the staff will check the the ledger, which has been put together by the vet who's responsible for the health plan. The health plan will have all the protocols in for the common conditions. It's not on the ledger, then it needs to be cleared by a vet.
We're quite strict on this. And I, I talked to a lot of other practises who will say, well, you're so lucky you can do that in your area. You don't have a competitor down the road who's trying to undermine you, you know, by, by being much slacker actually that's not true.
We, we do. I don't think any of them are here, so I can say that too. But it does take years to change a culture.
It's probably taken us decades. It's not something you can do overnight, but you've got to be honest about what your starting point is and where you're trying to get to, and I think I'm not saying we're perfect, we could definitely do better, but I think that these these systems are quite important for responsible prescribing, and I would argue that that's what we should be thinking about. And then there's residues avoidance as well, which is another massive issue and we do a lot of milkshare training, we do a lot of safe medicine safe use of medicines training for our clients.
It's amazing what they don't know you don't find out until you do a training course with them and ask them a few questions. So that's that's sort of really big, we we produce these reports we've got an amazing lass called who's been with us for . For a long time she's now got published papers to her name because this was we did some of the earliest work on benchmarking, but we produced these reports for our clients on request where we can just look at what the antibiotic use is categories that we're selling, how does it compare with last year.
We've got a lot of information at our fingertips which we use to inform our herd health conversations and it just, you know, we don't charge for this because we get so much charged work out of it on the back of it because it starts a conversation with our clients. I'm just going to do a little plug for the targets taskforce which has been really, really successful in promoting this is entirely a voluntary approach from industry, but they've managed to achieve a 50% reduction in antibiotics since 20. 14 across the livestock, all the livestock sectors, but ruminants, although they were lower use to start with, we need to catch up in the sense that we've got to get the medicine hub operating.
We've got to demonstrate what use is, otherwise it won't count for much. And then on to the sticky topic of powersticides, so you know we have a policy within our practise that it's built into the health planning, so we'll sit down with our clients and we'll work out an integrated power site management plan which is sort of trying to Involve grazing management and monitoring in order to minimise the use of parasiticides, and that's an individual plan for every one of our clients. I always laugh when I hear small animal practises talk about health plans because they don't seem to be what I would call a health plan at all.
But yes, ours is individual and we promote worm vaccination wherever we can. I know Rob had massive success when when he engaged upon this process with his clients good business sense. It's good animal health sense.
It's good for the environment. Obviously monitoring for resistance as well when necessary and carrying out a lot of monitoring. The BCVA has been in a lot of discussion with the VMD about the responsible use of parasitic slides because we have a lot of concerns about it.
You know, we're aware we don't sell very many of these products, you know, the vast majority of them are sold by SQPs, so we can be there trying to put the correct processes in place. But we have no control over what our clients actually purchase, and we can't even monitor what they purchase. So whereas we're producing beautiful reports for them about what antibiotics they've used, we have no idea.
We can only just ask them what they've done when it comes to theticide use. So we think that this is an ongoing piece of work we're doing with the VMD. They're very interested in the impacts of these products in the environment.
They're taking it very seriously. And we're also working on producing CPD that we can roll out for both vets and SQPs so all singing from the same hymn sheet, so we're engaged with and the SP organisations as well. So I think there's a big piece of work to do there.
We think it's really important and I just wanted to mention that. I won't talk too much else because it'll stress Antony out. But I think I think there's a lot because this is this is a fairly new and changing area and quite important.
I think there's a massive piece for training and I think there's going to be some really well is we know that some really high quality training appearing and I think there's going to be more and we need to rise to that challenge and be confident talking about all this stuff. I got time to talk about what our practises, they do. They're probably exhausted.
I think if we have a 15 minute break to coffees and then we can come back. Mike's gonna talk about conservation grazing. And then if you want to we can always do that but this is this is this and then move into the discussion group if we, if we could, but I, I mean, just want to sort of keep that time because it's been quite a, it's been a great session, but you know we need a we need a coffee break't thanks so much.