Jamie’s Farm is a social impact charity aiming to transform lives of young people through residential therapeutic programmes run on their regenerative farm sites. With this great ethos already in place it comes as no surprise that this organisation also have a commitment to minimise their climate impact. That’s where we have stepped in to asses their CO2 emissions related to the non-agricultural operations across their multiple estates.

Future leap started by conducting a carbon footprint assessment of 4 farm sites spread across the UK. Covering scope 1 and 2 energy use, along with indirect scope 3 emissions. We conducted a thorough audit of their farm in Bath and used the outputs to produce a set of recommendations for progression, modelling the carbon and financial savings where possible. Jamies farm operates a varied estate, however, as is often the case with agricultural operations, the buildings do not benefit from connection to mains gas, so there was a over-reliance on oil boilers as a heating source. Additional complications were present in the form of planning restrictions placed on old and historic farm buildings. It was determined that switching to electrically powered sources of heat such as air-source or ground-source heat pumps was not practically or financially viable, so we modelled the potential impact of increased use of biomass as a heat source. This was a solution already used to positive effect at the Bath farm, and the availability of on-site fuel sources would negate some of the negative sustainability impacts of using wood pellets as fuel. We predicted that fully replacing oil with biomass would reduce the heating related carbon emissions on one site by over 90%.

Future Leap also explored the viability of installing additional solar PV capacity, and looked into potential options for reducing staff-travel based emissions (challenging due to the rural location of the sites, and the necessity for the team conduct visits to schools across the UK).

In order to embed sustainability within the organisation and develop a sustainability conscious culture within the team, Future Leap provided a series of recommendations to help staff development and align the ambition of the leadership with the wider team.