Reducing GHG Emissions

Reduce Greenhouse gas emissions

Climate has direct and indirect impacts on agricultural productivity. The effects of extreme weather events over more recent years are evident, causing disruption to our supply chains and increasing financial pressure to growers.

Coupled with these challenges, new opportunities and innovations are evolving to help us reach the UK target of Net Zero by 2050, or 2040 as set out by the NFU.

Our response to climate change is twofold:

1. Adaptation – growers need to build on farm resilience to cope with the extremes in weather. This can be achieved through improved soil health, genetics and targeting of inputs. Our role is to help growers achieve this and maximise farm resilience.
2. Mitigation – the food sector needs to prevent further contributions to climate change. This can be achieved by reducing the carbon footprint of the products we use and adopting more innovative solutions to improve efficiency. Agriculture also has a unique opportunity to sequester carbon from the atmosphere through good soil management, therefore creating a ‘closed loop’ system to GHG emissions. 

Agriculture contributes to approximately 10% of the UK’s GHG emissions, yet when breaking it down by gas type, food production is the largest emitter of Nitrous Oxide.

The main source of Nitrous Oxide emissions in agriculture are generated from the application of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, making up approximately 65% of an arable system’s emissions.

Our Enhanced Efficiency Fertiliser (EEF) range helps reduce emissions from food production, with a lower manufacturing carbon footprint, and reduced in field emissions.

Our trials have demonstrated the financial and environmental benefit of substituting traditional mineral fertilisers, such as Ammonium nitrate, with products such as Enhanced Urea, which reduces both ammonia and nitrous oxide emissions. 

Our R&D team continue to work closely with fertiliser manufacturers to explore new low impact technologies for manufacturing fertilisers.

The emergence of green ammonia has the potential to reduce the GHG emissions from the manufacturing process. By using renewable energy sources, nitrogen from the atmosphere is combined with hydrogen from water electrolysis to form green ammonia, which can then be used in the production of carbon neutral fertiliser products.

Net Zero iFarms - Relevant Research from Agrii

We are working with growers to help achieve net zero by 2050, by translating research from our Net Zero iFarms into practical advice. Through our digital tool, contour, we aim to enable farmer to calculate crop GHG emissions and establish mitigation strategies by working with existing toolkits on the market.

ADAS Yen Zero

Our work with ADAS since 2021 on the Yen Zero project has started the process of benchmarking crop GHG emissions, providing unique mitigation strategies on how to reduce the GHG intensity of crops. Projects like this are helping develop our understanding, and will in future enable growers to benchmark their emissions.

Case study: Bishop Burton iFarm (pull out)

A recent review of the carbon footprint at Bishop Burton, one of our Net Zero iFarms in East Riding, Yorkshire, has shown a carbon reduction of 2,441 tonnes of CO2e between 2020 and 2022.