Why knowledge isn’t enough to change farm practices

Driving (literally 🚛 ) Soil Health: Lessons from Northern Europe

(I'll explain these in a bit more detail below)

❤️ Changing behaviour is about passion first, knowledge second

📋 Is there anything the government can do to encourage that passion?

👨🌾 If not, who or what can?I'm about to embark on my second Nuffield journey. Read on for a summary of what I've learned since I got back from my first trip in Western Brazil 🇧🇷 , and what I'm hoping to find out over the next couple of weeks:

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🚄 After a busy day at the Cereals Event in Hertfordshire yesterday, I caught the last Eurotunnel shuttle, made it to Bruges, and today, I’m diving into the world of soil knowledge exchange in Wageningen, Netherlands.

This marks the second leg of my Nuffield Farming Scholarships Trust journey (generously sponsored by the Yorkshire Agricultural Society) exploring how farmers, agronomists, academics, farming unions, and levy bodies in Northern Europe facilitate knowledge exchange about soils.

Since coming back from Brazil, I've spoken with more than a hundred farmers and cluster facilitators, and it's given me a key insight that I want to dig into during this trip.

Information is essential but not sufficient.

While providing information is a significant part of knowledge exchange, helping farmers understand how they could be looking after their soils better is only the beginning.

There's a the vital step before disseminating information — getting people to care.Without genuine care and passion for soil health, the changes encouraged by programs like the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs's new Sustainable Farming Incentive may not truly stick. For instance Soil Benchmark, through our SFI compliant soil management plans, are now providing detailed information on how to improve soil health to farms covering 4% of all the farmland in England. But to ensure that we drive change on the ground, we need to make sure that our platform also helps motivate farmers to want to implement the bespoke, field-by-field steps our plans suggest.

Information and SFI23 payments are a key plank in driving changes to soil management - but without motivating farmers to care, there will always be a challenges with implementation and just 'ticking the box'.

So as I drive across the Netherlands 🇳🇱, Germany 🇩🇪, and up into Denmark 🇩🇰, I want to find out three main things:

1. What models or organisations successfully motivate farmers to prioritise soil health?
2. Who provides the essential information and support to farmers once they are motivated?
3. How are subsidies and changing regulations in each of these countries feeding into this (compared with how SFI23 and Farming Rules for Water are influencing UK farmers)?

Stay tuned for more updates, If you have any suggestions on key people or places to visit, or if you have insights on soil knowledge exchange, please reach out. Next stop Wageningen University & Research. I can't wait!