Bigbury is a small parish in South Devon of 1,000 hectares in an AONB attracting an estimated 500,000 visitors a year. There are 8 small family farms in the parish of which one is an organic pasture-fed meat and dairy unit. Challonsncombe Organics converted to pasture fed production in 2012 not because of the ability of this production system to sequester carbon but because the high input system was intuitively wrong to them. At Bigbury-on-Sea, 65% of homes are owned by second home owners which inevitable have a larger carbon footprint and are more likely to have the financial ability to invest in carbon off setting by supporting the expansion of pasture-fed food production in the parish Looking forward to this Fridays talk on Off Setting – to guide our plan for this.
Good opportunity and diverse audience to raise awareness of the extreme differences in the carbon foot print of pasture fed food production (probably close to net zero) and the majority of global meat and dairy production based on cereal feed stocks which is a major cause of global warming due to the need to plough land for annual cereal planting and over reliance on nitrogen fertilisers.
Newly formed group – Bigbury Net Zero – is beginning talks with local farmers, consumers and retailers in the parish to raise awareness of the issues and potential sequestration which could be achieved if we worked together to develop a plan which supported local farmers to make changes that they decide is in their business interests as well as the Planet’s. We want to increase consumer demand locally for the meat and dairy products produced by this one farm so that other local farms consider converting to take up this new market opportunity.
We will start with farm carbon foot prints, mapping organic matter content of fields and mapping leaf area index of our hedgerows. We are looking for opportunities for our farmers to learn from other regenerative farmers nearby and have some links with the Apricot Centre in Totnes.
Any introductions or advice to help us formulate this Road Map to ” Putting the Planet Right with Real Farming” would be most welcome.
