Project Overview

Key Activities

DEFRA reports that in 2023, on-farm food production accounted for 70% of land use in the UK, encompassing 209,000 farm holdings. Understanding decarbonisation pathways for food production is essential to planning the infrastructure required to ensure food security while supporting net-zero journeys of food production systems and the resilience of their supply chains.

Our Project, the Future Agricultural Resilience Mapping (FARM), will help consolidate the future energy needs of food production as the sector decarbonises and adapts to a changing climate, while providing actionable insights that benefit food producers and policymakers. Key challenges for FARM will be to understand:

1. Future energy needs for a sector still highly reliant on fossil fuels
2. Energy use upstream and downstream in value chain
3. Policy and regulatory landscape and possible impacts on energy use

It is possible that not all food production activities will impact the network. FARM seeks to understand which food production activities will impact the network and where reinforcement is required. Through SIF, the FARM Project will develop a data-driven tool to inform network planning and policy decisions. The Discovery Project will:

• Assess available data to support current energy demands associated with food production within the SSEN Scotland geography
• Predict the drivers that will impact future energy demand in food production, and test these assumptions with stakeholders
• Validate potential decarbonisation pathways that will be available to farming operations

Expected Benefits

DNO network planning has not historically considered the impact of agricultural decarbonisation. The DESNZ published report, Energy consumption in the UK 1970 to 2023, shows a decrease in liquid-fuels and an increase in electricity usage in the agricultural sector. This trend is expected to continue as electrification plays a critical role, along with sustainable fuel sources, in decarbonising agriculture. Waiting for rural communities and businesses to establish their own Net Zero pathway and for DNOs to respond, risks over- or underinvestment in networks and network development becoming a blocker. DNOs need reliable information on energy usage to inform investments and accommodate future energy demands.

1.      Reinforce the network once

Risks posed and cost incurred by reinforcing the network multiple times will be reduced with a better understanding of the impact from decarbonisation.

2.      Investing only where needed

FARM’s data-driven tool will enable DNOs to understand and validate the complex and varied decarbonisation pathways for food production, alongside balancing emissions reductions. This will result in more efficient network investment and a lower overall cost.

Environmental

1.      Preventing DNOs from being a blocker

There is a risk the DNOs could become a blocker or a driver of sub-optimal choices, if electrification occurs at a faster rate than the DNOs can reinforce the network. This Project will benefit rural communities by enabling DNOs to accurately forecast and reinforce the network at the scale required for decarbonisation.

2.      Reduced CO2 emissions

Food production will have suitable electricity supplies to decarbonise and reduce CO2 emissions. This will support the UK’s transition to net zero and be measured using the number of farms that are sourcing either or both their heat and transportation energy from electrified sources.

Funding

SIF £133,092

Start/End Date

June 2025 to Sept 2025

Progress

FARM was successful in receiving SIF funding in the February rounds of applications.

Discovery phase work will start in June for four months.