Report of AGM and Public Meeting 15 October - Fertiliser and soil fertility

A slightly longer meeting this month to accommodate our AGM. As guest speaker we welcomed Mark Tucker, Senior Manager Food Value Chain Partnerships, Yara International, to talk about soil fertility and fertiliser. Mark’s talk was recorded and is available on our YouTube channel.

Minutes of 2026 Annual General Meeting

Reports available here.

1.      Apologies: Alexina Cassidy, Clare Robertson-Marriott, Clare Slater, Jonathan Harris

2.      Present: Anissa Beale, David Garlick, Harry Mellor, Helen Dyson, James Hadfield, Jane Wood, Jane Rogers, John Hunt, Leonie Beale, Maria Lee, Martin Coombs, Mick Lorkins, Rupert Knowles

3.      Minutes of last AGM. These were shared on screen and unanimously approved.

4.      Chair’s Report. A written report had been shared in advance of the meeting. The Chair summarised this, highlighting CA-WN’s work this year to put on screenings of the Public Emergency Briefing film and thanking Viridian Nutrition and Hilary Haynes for generous donations received.

5.      Treasurer’s Report. A written report had been shared in advance of the meeting. CA-WN’s bank balance had improved from £4,013 at the start of the financial year to £4,784 at year end. This comprised £200 earmarked for a tree-related project, a £1,000 donation and £3,753, the unspent part of a grant supporting CA-WN’s work on reducing household greenhouse gas emissions

6.      Election of Officers.
The Constitution allows for 4 Officer roles, currently:

• Chair - Harry Mellor
• Treasurer - Harry Mellor
• Secretary - Jane Wood
• Membership Secretary - Alexina Cassidy

Officers elected for 2026/27 were:

• Chair – Harry Mellor, nominated Mick Lorkins, seconded Rupert Knowles
• Treasurer – Harry Mellor, nominated Jane Wood, seconded Mick Lorkins
• Secretary – Jane Wood, nominated Harry Mellor, seconded Mick Lorkins
• Membership Secretary – Martin Coombs, nominated Jane Wood, seconded Mick Lorkins

These appointments were unanimously approved.

6.     Election of Steering Committee members
In addition to the Officers, there are currently 6 Steering Committee members. All confirmed at the meeting or had confirmed in advance that they wished to continue in that role.

• Alexina Cassidy
• Clare Robertson-Marriott
• Clare Slater
• Jonathan Harris
• Mick Lorkins
• Rupert Knowles

No new nominations for the steering committee were received.

Public meeting report - Mark Tucker

Background - Yara International
Yara International was founded in Norway in 1905 following the invention of nitrogen fertiliser production using electricity, powered at that time by hydroelectric energy. This was replaced by the Haber-Bosch method using fossil fuels in the 1920s. Yara is the world's biggest nitrogen fertiliser manufacturer, with annual revenue of $15.7 billion, based mainly in Europe and 31% owned by the Norwegian government.
Mark has been with Yara for nearly 25 years, most recently working in food chain partnerships.

Agriculture and sustainability
The UK has experienced droughts and unprecedented high temperatures in 3 of the last 5 years, with 2026 likely to be the lowest output from UK agriculture on record. Normal production is around 15m tons of grain; this year it's probably 10m tonnes. Some potato farmers ran out of water to irrigate and have not bothered harvesting the crop.

Climate is having a dramatic impact at the same time as rising costs are increasing the risks of farming. The cost of producing a crop is huge, and risk of the crop underperforming because of weather is making many farmers move away from farming, resulting in consolidation into fewer larger farms.

Recent DEFRA statistics anticipate that in future 80% of farming output will come from c4% of farms, with 50% of farms delivering collectively 2% of output. In some cases this is down to inefficient farming, but farms are also choosing to focus on environmental schemes or other forms of diversification. The UK could drop from 55-60% self-sufficiency in food today to around 35% in 25 years.

Mark’s role in food chain partnerships at Yara is mainly driven by the sustainability targets of large food companies to reduce emissions in food production. They are not seeing much adoption at the farm level of new technological innovations and are taking control of that and influencing adoption of new sustainable practices.

Fertiliser and emissions
Fertiliser factories produce AdBlue (Diesel exhaust fluid), a product that reduces air pollution from diesel engines, as well as fertiliser.

Fertiliser is sometimes blamed for soil fertility decline, but it has also enabled us to have the global population that we have today. According to some research mineral fertiliser is the most important innovation for global health in human history, enabling billions to be fed. Today fertiliser feeds roughly 50% of the world's population; without it we would grow 50% less food.

However, 1.2% of global emissions come from fertiliser production, and the carbon footprint of Yara as a company is the same as New Zealand. In Europe the main fuel for manufacturing fertiliser is gas, in China it is coal.

There is also the issue of fertiliser leaching from soils, and ammonia emissions, depending on which type of product is used. So fertiliser plays a major role environmentally for water courses, air quality and greenhouse gas emissions.

Regenerative agriculture
Adverts from McCain, Weetabix etc talk about regenerative agriculture, which has become a buzz word in the agricultural sector. It is also quite divisive. Many farmers have been farming this way since Charles Townsend in 1733 developed the Norfolk four-course rotation system involving rotation of turnips, barley, clover and wheat crops, livestock and use of green manures.

During the 1980s the so-called Barley Barons used the latest agrochemical fertilisers and went down the monoculture route, which is now recognised as bad practice.

Regenerative agriculture aims to protect the soil by avoiding ploughing, which has historically been used to bury weeds and prepare the seedbed when farmers didn't have modern herbicides. Chemical weed control enables regenerative agriculture because weeds are a major problem when there’s no ploughing. Regenerative agriculture is all about putting organic matter back into the farm system and will play a key role in building resilience for farmers.

Decline in soil health
Headlines have reported only 100 harvests remaining in our soils but long-running research at Rothamsted Research Station shows that with properly managed nutrients and soil health productive agriculture can go on for over 180 years.

Mark doesn't accept fertiliser is to blame for declining soil health, rather it’s the farming system that should be looked at. Problems result from monoculture that doesn’t focus on soil health. Fertiliser shouldn’t be used excessively, and farmers don’t want to because it is expensive.

A challenge for farmers is the trade-off between short-term and long-term gain; farmers as businesspeople have to make money and current economic challenges create pressure to focus on short-term profit. There is very limited government subsidy available currently.

With regenerative agriculture yields will be down for 7 years before getting back to previous levels, which means losing money.

Using judicious amounts of fertiliser to grow crops builds biomass and organic matter in soils, which means better and more efficient use of the nitrogen that is applied, therefore enabling less to be used. Organic matter and fertiliser should complement each other. Building organic matter is a 10-year project, and some soils will never get above 3% organic matter because it burns that organic matter off as quickly as it is built. Soil biology and soil science is difficult and not every soil on every farm can sequester lots of carbon.

Very often we hear Defra say that if there's no fertiliser, farmers should use manures. But in the last 40 years, our national cow herd has gone down 30%, sheep by 12%, and pig numbers are down 41%, so there is less manure available. Also most of the livestock is in the west of the UK, whereas the east of the country is where the arable farmers need manure. One way to manage that would be to shift to a more mixed farming system including cows in the east. Mark did a calculation as part of a Nuffield study in 2012 and worked out that to replace the fertiliser in Cambridgeshire would need 1.2 million cows.

Anaerobic digestion and water treatment plants are providing more organic material now too, though there is some concern that waste from sewage treatment works could introduce ‘forever chemicals’ on to farmland.

The Allerton project in Leicestershire is a great research farm that manages the environment with its crop production and has probably influenced 70-80% of government policy over the years. They're trying to combine the best of everything in terms of technology, environmental stewardship and so on. They've shown in the last year that occasional ploughing can be done without detrimental effect on organic matter.

Farmers always need to be thinking what is appropriate in this field, this season, this crop, being flexible in terms of how they manage their land. But if we can get to a position of complementary not competing in terms of soil health, that leads to a better discussion in terms of improving nitrogen use efficiency.

New developments
Yara has just opened the world’s biggest carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility in The Netherlands - fertiliser from that factory will have a carbon footprint 40% lower than Yara’s existing products, which already have footprints half those from Russia. Fertiliser from China has a carbon footprint three times the European average when they produce it using coal.

The CCS technology involves permanent storage of CO2 under the Norwegian sea rock. But it doesn't remove reliance on fossil fuels. Another Yara plant in Norway is moving towards that. The main chemical needed to produce fertiliser is ammonia, made by mixing nitrogen with hydrogen. Nitrogen is taken from the air and hydrogen is currently produced from natural gas (methane). The Norway plant produces hydrogen from water using electrolysis powered by renewable energy, which transforms the carbon footprint. It is also very expensive though costs will come down. The plan is for more facilities to come on stream between 2028-2030 to shift 40-50% of global production (25 million tons) to either renewable or CCS methodologies.

Mark spends most of his time managing the relationship with PepsiCo, which owns brands including Walkers Crisps and Quaker Oats and has been a front runner on paying farmers the sustainability value of shifting to lower carbon products. Since 2024, farmers growing potatoes and oats for PepsiCo have been using those lower carbon fertilisers to reduce the carbon footprint of their production systems.

Yara also produces biostimulants for agriculture (e.g. seaweed based products). These are produced in Howden, Yorkshire. Energy use there is very low, making it much more efficient than a typical fertiliser plant.

From 2027 Yara will be operating the first container ship powered by renewable ammonia (Yara Eyde).

Q&A
Is there any way of reducing the microbes breaking down the ammonia and producing nitrous oxide in the soil and helping cut the emissions associated with the use of fertiliser?
It’s often 50-50 in terms of the manufacturing carbon footprint versus the emissions from use of fertiliser.
The simplest way to reduce emissions from soils is to use less fertiliser, but that comes with a yield penalty. There are some chemical inhibitors which slow down the process of the nitrogen cycle after the fertiliser is applied to the soil. They've been shown to reduce the emissions from soils by 40%, by slowing down conversion and therefore minimising N2O release.
There are also biological inhibitors probably 5 to 10 years away. The concern about these is that introducing chemicals to alter the soil biology is firstly more chemicals when we are trying to cut chemical inputs, and also that changing the soil biology may not align with the goal to improve soil health and resilience.
There are potentially biological methods using certain plants that can help with end-to-end emissions but these will take a lot longer in terms of research and development.
Looking five years ahead, Mark’s view is that the product carbon footprint of fertiliser will be much lower than today because of new technologies. That will leave the problem of infield emissions, which Yara needs to help address as it is one of their Scope 3 emissions. 

Regarding manure, numbers of large animals are declining, but chicken is taking off exponentially. Is chicken manure compensating for loss of manure from cows and so on?
To an extent, yes, and it is a powerful manure.
Yara had a project which aimed to convert the 2 billion tons of food waste produced in London into fertiliser. They worked with Veolia as the waste company but could not get anything going. To some extent the cost was inhibitory and contamination was also a problem. However Yara is continuing to work with Veolia to find a way to turn the food waste in London, Paris, and New York into fertiliser. The biggest challenge is that it needs pelletising; it comes very wet, and you need to get to around 7% moisture. The energy required to do that is huge so it comes with a big carbon footprint. Yara has 3 units in Norway, Finland, and Spain producing organic-based fertiliser pellets. Pelletising is needed make transport, storage and end use by farmers manageable in the same way as nitrogen fertiliser.
Coming back to chickens, that needs to happen with the poultry industry as well. Currently there are issues where land in the west of the UK is dominated by excess poultry manure which is not required. It needs to be shipped across to the east of the country, where it can be made best use of.

Are farmers mostly using ammonium nitrate fertiliser nowadays or urea? And am I correct that ammonium nitrate gives off ammonia which is also a greenhouse gas?
Roughly 60% of fertiliser in the UK is ammonium nitrate, and this is very similar across Europe. In the rest of the world, the main fertiliser is urea, mainly because it's the only thing available in, for example, China and India. Ammonium nitrate is usually preferred for the crop and gives extremely low ammonia levels, so is better from an air pollution perspective.
Ammonia isn’t a greenhouse gas but forms particulates, which contribute to asthma and other respiratory problems. With ammonium nitrate about 1% to 2% of the nitrogen applied will be emitted as ammonia, compared to sometimes 50% with urea. Urea is about 20% of the UK market.
The biggest shift in agriculture is towards liquid fertilisers, half urea and half ammonium nitrate. That's because farms are getting bigger and using spray equipment to go wider and wider, which works better with liquid fertiliser.

I've been reading that some farms have gone away from artificial fertiliser to using beans and other crops to fix their nitrogen, and that yields come up but don't really come back to where they would be with artificial fertiliser.
It's very hard to replicate what nitrogen fertiliser does - it is very effective. It’s important to get the rotation right, because the problem with legumes is that the farmer loses money as the yield is poor and variable and they're worth very little in the market. But they do deliver benefits for the following crop.
Yara is doing research with the PGRO (Processors and Growers Research Organisation) in Peterborough, trying to improve the productivity of beans and peas. If we could get more protein through those peas and beans, then it reduces soya imports from other parts of the world, which can involve deforestation.

Picking up on what you said about companies incentivising farmers to implement new technologies, shouldn't there be government policies incentivising farmers? Presumably if it was profitable they would make the changes anyway, without that they will need incentives of some kind. What’s your comment on what government policy is doing or not doing to help farmers.
Some of us will pay a little extra for sustainability, but 99% of people won’t or can't pay an extra penny on a packet of crisps.
The challenge for the big brands is that they're committed to sustainability targets, but can't get anything back in the marketplace. So the brand itself has to take the hit. Similarly the farmer can't get any more for his produce because it’s sustainable.
Yara invests in technology and can't get any more money for fertiliser. Costs can't all sit at the farm gate, because the farmer is in a global market. So far Yara has been successful in keeping farmers farming and doing the best they can with productivity, and has got the food company to pay for that sustainability transition. But that will only be for a short time.
One example this week is that Arla, the biggest milk processor in the UK and Denmark, has announced they will be paying farmers an extra penny for every litre of milk if they adopt lower carbon fertilisers.
It would be nice if the government could connect things up. For example, Yara has an ammonia plant in Hull, mothballed because it isn’t profitable. There’s a green hydrogen plant in the north east – these could be linked up to produce green ammonia as a low-carbon fuel for powering ships and producing fertiliser. It would be good to see pump priming of that sector, which at the moment is so expensive.
The other government policy coming through is the ‘fertiliser tax’, or Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which farmers won’t like. That will start on 1st January 2027, so fertiliser (and other goods) will be taxed at different levels, according to the carbon footprint; putting a value on carbon through tax. It's been operating in Europe for the last 12 months.

Is there a fingerprint on fossil fuel produced fertiliser that would betray its origins?
A Leeds University student did a study of nitrate in soils, and it could be traced back to the fertiliser factory through isotopic chemistry. The study was to find out if the nitrate was coming from manures or fertiliser and showed that it was all coming from manures.
In theory there is import/export data to trace the origin of fertiliser but Russia have been selling it to Brazil or India, which then sells it to Europe. We've had record levels of Russian fertiliser in Europe since the sanctions came in, because they're just not working.
Yara were very dependent on Russian gas and phosphate until the invasion of Ukraine but completely cut off Russian supplies almost overnight. The only thing left is a pipeline from Russia into Yara’s Finland factory. Yara continues to supply and support farmers in Ukraine.

Your initial introduction seemed pessimistic that small farms have had to diversify for a long time and now are able to generate a living without producing food. How many big businesses will be picking up these small farms and looking at them as a commercial proposition with rather short-term views on how to recover their investment?
In the current economic climate it's only going one way, even professional farmers running big farming businesses are starting to question why they're doing it. Those top 10% of farmers deliver a huge part of the productivity of the industry, so if they leave that is a huge problem.
There is significant appetite to invest in land because of its scarcity; that will continue to accelerate, which is concerning in terms of the sort of farming we end up with.

What can we do as a community group to support farmers?
Support purchasing of local produce. Smaller farms with local farm shops are likely to struggle (do check that what they’re selling is grown in the UK). Spending your money on produce as close to the producer as possible is the simplest thing we can all do.
Bigger and bigger farms will end up becoming quite powerful as individual farming businesses. Until now, they've been at the behest of PepsiCo or the supermarkets, but there will be a shift as farmers get big in their own right and can create their own high-value brands. They can either go direct to the consumer through smaller retail and avoid supermarkets, or sell their brand to supermarkets.
Mark is very much against supermarkets selling produce labelled with the name of a fake ‘farm’, to create an illusion of authenticity. That type of misleading marketing needs to be addressed.
Mark recommended a visit to the Allerton project in Loddington, as Alistair Leake there has been instrumental in driving government policy.

I was at the New Scientist Live exhibition over the weekend looking at the most enormous combine harvester. This seems far away from applying to smaller farms, although they do use more technology too. There is such a big gap, a bit like Manchester United versus ordinary football clubs.  
This disparity is probably inevitable. The largest farm in Brazil is 700,000 hectares. Those really big farms will be using that very expensive kit. Then there is an opportunity at the other end, for focus on provenance of food and home production. The challenge is whether people are prepared to pay enough for that to be a viable business. This is quite challenging in the current cost of living crisis. We have got too used to cheap food.

AOB
CA-WN has a face-to-face social in the café at Northampton museum on Saturday 14^th November at 2pm. All welcome

Date of Next Meeting
Thursday 19^th November at 7.45pm, with guest speaker Aiden Humphries from the Nene Rivers Trust talking about the work of the Trust including River Flywatch, which is a water quality testing programme using invertebrates.