Helping farmers thrive on their net zero journeys

We know that today more than ever there are huge challenges facing farmers. They've gone from being required to produce all this food to recognising that today farmers need to be delivering for nature, helping stabilise our climate and delivering healthy food for people and looking after things like our water and our soils as well.

The future of UK agriculture has to be one of long term sustainable land use, both financially but also environmentally.

And as Lloyds are the largest lender to agriculture in the UK, we've got over 46,000 clients.

There are so many different things that we can do to help farmers in this move.

Lloyds identified that there was a real need for some real, deeper understanding with regards to where our farmers were in terms of transition.

My name is Mariella Fleming. I'm at South End Farm, which is a 500 acre farm in West Sussex.

We were approached by the Soil Association Exchange through Lloyds Bank.

We have a partnership with the Soil Association Exchange, and through that we have a whole farm tool which farmers can access directly through their website or through a consultation service.

We had an audit done on our farm and we knew exactly where we stood on the quality of our soil and where we need to be.

We thought it was okay, but we need to do a lot more. So benchmarking is a really good place to start.

Understand your position on your farm. I had this ‘ah-ha’ moment thinking what have we been doing to our crops.

So I just thought, no, we've got to change it to move into a more sustainable regenerative system. It's going to cost money to start off with.

We're not going to yield straightaway but there is so much research coming out that underpins what we're doing.

They have to have the right funding in order to progress. The Soil Association Exchange platform gives farmers direct recommendations, but it also gives them the opportunity to look at grants or funding opportunities, which they can then talk to the bank about.

Lloyds came into the frame and they have helped to scale the exchange platform far faster than we have been able to do without them.

They've put through hundreds of farmers that they lend to. So that we now have this great database of what's going on farms, and we've been able to help and support those farmers, move towards more sustainable farming methods.

We have all the information there, that we can access all the time. You can see how your farm is doing.

You can upload certain things as well. It gives you an idea of where you started, where you are now and what you have got to work on.

You can be walking in the field and making notes as you go along and then upload it, and you have all that to hand for reporting.

That's brilliant. We've had over 800 clients now move through that process and we have a report which has all the findings in there.

The farms report really shows the trends where farms are doing well and less well.

What brilliant looks like

All through my farming career, we've had to meet certain standards, but we've never had the outcomes data that tells us what that's really delivering.

Many corporates are going to have to start disclosing their impacts on nature, but actually having, you know, against soil, climate, animal welfare, social impacts, climate impacts, having the same set of measures that everybody is using will really help that corporate disclosure problem.

What Lloyds has identified is that partnerships are key to supporting farmers through transition.

We are a UK bank, but it cannot just be done by the UK on its own. This is a worldwide priority.

Food production starts with the farmer. But when you look at the supply chain, whether that's funding so banks, whether that's government legislation, supermarkets who are buying product, those who are producing the goods have to be rewarded for this going forward.

We need the support from the government and financial institutions and hopefully eventually the consumer.

We're taking a lot of risk, and we need other actors in the supply chain to get together and to think about how they can help and actually, the response we've seen from Lloyds and from some of the other corporates that those corporates are prepared to really get behind farming and actually deliver the future that society needs.