Dr. John Gilliland:

Our chief executive has clearly articulated the need to do these baselines. That being done will make it possible, for the first time, to get a true inventory at an individual farm business level of what carbon is on what farm. That has never been done before. When that is done, the result will be some extraordinary figures. In soil, it can be anything from 50 tonnes to 300 tonnes per hectare. It depends on whether the soil is mineral or organic.

One thing learned from doing that will be that an awful lot of carbon is sitting out on farms and farmers do not get credit for that. We believe there is a need to bring that point to light. What all farmers do is manage the nation's carbon, but that is not recognised now. We ask farmers to produce good quality food and we reward them for doing that. We are now asking them to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and to increase their carbon stocks. That is not recognised now. We must get to a policy and regulatory system, through some kind of public-private partnership, that allows us to determine the carbon content and, in the case of peat soils, to reduce what we lose, and with mineral soils, to determine how we can get more storage. It must also include hedges and trees. Could we, for example, have a campaign to remove electric fences and to put hedges back again? It would involve looking at practical ways that are very visible and that will also deliver for biodiversity. There is a collection of things. We must, though, turn the dial on the narrative from one suggesting that farmers are the worst in the world and pariahs in this regard to one showing them as being the custodians of the nation's carbon. The question is what we can do to get them to store more carbon.