Soil Association Scotland won the inaugural Food & Farming award at the RSPB Nature of Scotland Awards in 2016 for their Future Farming Scotland programme, helping farmers, growers and crofters to learn and share information about more effective and sustainable ways to farm. This guest blog from the association explains why this work is so important and what their next steps will be.
We’re helping land managers in Scotland to make some positive changes for the future – the future health of their business, and the future health of the environment.
Soil Association Scotland have spent almost eight years working with land managers – a catch-all term we use for farmers, crofters, foresters, estate, and habitat managers. In that time we’ve grown from one member of staff to a whole farming team, and we’ve even won a Nature of Scotland ‘Food & Farming’ award for our work (thanks RSPB Scotland)! One thing that hasn’t changed in eight years is a desire to work with as many people as possible, and to make a practical, hands-on, and business focused case for good land management. And by ‘good’ we mean management that protects and enhances the environment.
What now?
We hold a lot of events, and we usually focus on one particular aspect of land management. This could be soils, crops, livestock, trees, wildlife habitats, or something else. We make sure we use knowledgeable and engaging experts to get a message across about how best to look after these things. Even more importantly we have a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere where everyone gets the opportunity to ask lots of questions, and tell us and the expert about what they think, and what their experiences are. We love it when we get a difficult question! It makes us think a bit more, and challenges the experts.
Using evidence
A really inspiring part of what we do are ‘field labs’ – DIY on-farm experiments that land managers carry out by themselves, with a bit of support from us and a researcher. They give people the opportunity to try something new out – maybe they’ve read something on the internet and want to see if it works where they are, maybe they want to challenge an assumption, or maybe they’ve had a bit of a mad idea and want to give it a go. We help them set up a trial based on scientific principles, gather some data from it, and then think about if what they did made a difference.
We hold a few meetings on the topic to really get to grips with it, and engage others with a similar interest. We have looked at several topics in this way – including using green manures which benefit the soil and are good for insects and natural predators, controlling rushes without chemicals and helping wading birds, and managing grassland to produce healthy and productive livestock and support biodiversity.
What next?
We’re excited to be working on a new project with Scottish Water and RSPB Scotland that will be all about win-wins – for business profitability and the environment. One part of this involves going out to a farm in April with a researcher from SRUC. We will set up a trial that looks at ecological intensification – an exciting concept about how increasing wildlife (in our case pollinators) to increase production (in our case an arable crop). We will be looking at lots more win-wins as we go forward, and telling as many people as we can about them. We might even see you at one of our meetings!