I’m Calum, the Calculator Data Assistant for the Farm Carbon Toolkit (FCT). I can imagine if you don’t work for FCT, you may not know who I am. I tend to work in the background, assisting the passionate and driven people who do great work in helping farmers to meet their low carbon and sustainability goals.
Day to day, my activities and tasks can vary widely, depending on the needs of the Calculator team as well as Izzy, our Data Scientist with whom I also work closely.
I primarily work with the Calculator team which can involve a variety of tasks. One of my main responsibilities is the rigorous testing of the Calculator after every update, and following the addition of new items to the calculator. Flagging errors and helping to resolve issues (if indeed there are any!) ensures a reliable tool and the efficient running of the calculator that farmers and landowners can use seamlessly. Another major part of my role is information-finding. Regularly, the Calculator team receives requests for additional products/items/data entries to be added to the calculator. Personally, I was surprised by how many crop protection products (insecticides/herbicides etc.) that are available to farmers, upwards of 30,000 different products available in the UK alone. So you can imagine, with changing trends and needs of farmers to protect their crops in various ways, we as a Calculator team need to keep up with adding additional products to the calculator.
Outwith helping the smooth running of the calculator, my responsibilities include assisting Izzy, our Data Scientist, with her work. Recently, I’ve been assisting her in updating and maintaining soil sampling datasets using QGIS (a spatial data software) that have been collected by the advisory team. I also assist Izzy by testing apps that she designed herself! One of which is a soil sampling app for use by the FCT Advisory team to record soil sampling points more efficiently. I’m particularly grateful for this piece of work as it takes me away from my desk and gets me walking around, albeit on the streets of Edinburgh rather than the fields.
My day to day can vary depending on the tasks that are required or whether I’m working out of my flat, a cafe or the Melting Pot, the co-working space I go to. I’m kept on my toes with the diversity of work to do. Through this type of work, it might seem easy to disassociate from the real-world challenges faced by farmers in a changing climate when you’re spending your days hidden behind a screen, focused on numbers and code. However, this is what I feel FCT does very well, in connecting us to the issues we are all helping to solve. Between the numbers and spreadsheets, we do well to have numerous meetings, whether it be online, hearing about the projects FCT are involved in such as Farm Net Zero, or in person days where we celebrate the farmers that are doing the most to demonstrate low-carbon, sustainable agriculture.
My first in-person day was last September at our annual field day, where FCT presented the Carbon Farmer of the Year. An opportunity to hear first-hand what farmers are implementing to produce our food in a sustainable and low-carbon manner with the help of our carbon calculator. I always come back from these days feeling invigorated to tackle the next challenge knowing that farmers are using the calculator to benefit their farms and the environment.
