31/05/2026
I read in the farming press this week about a tenant farmer in the Cairngorms who says land that was selling for £500 an acre a few years ago is now changing hands for £5,000 an acre.
That is the sort of increase that pushes ordinary farming families out.
He is being moved off land his family has worked for generations because he cannot compete with the money now coming in. And the people buying it are not buying it to farm it.
They are buying it for carbon.
That is the bit that should make everyone stop and think.
A company can carry on as it was before. Same factories. Same flights. Same supply chains. Same emissions.
Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants trees on it and tells the world it is now carbon neutral.
If it wants to sound even more virtuous, it calls itself carbon negative.
But nothing has really changed.
The emissions have not disappeared. The business has not reduced what it is doing. It has simply bought a piece of land somewhere else and turned it into a badge.
BrewDog is probably the neatest example of how this works.
In 2020, it bought a 9,300 acre Highland estate, helped by public grant money, and promised to plant a million trees. It also claimed it would become the world’s first carbon negative beer business by removing twice as much carbon as it emitted.
By 2023, around half of the 500,000 trees it had planted were dead. Critics also raised concerns that the planting was drying out peat, which could release carbon rather than store it.
Then the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that BrewDog’s carbon negative claims were misleading.
In 2024, the company quietly dropped the badge and criticised the wider carbon credit market, saying many schemes were cheap and their benefits were questionable, possibly even non existent.
And after all that, it sold the estate to a company whose business is selling carbon offsets.
That is the whole thing in one story.
Public money goes in.
Trees die.
The green badge gets worn for a few years.
The farmer is gone.
The land changes hands again.
Then that same land is used to allow someone else, somewhere else, to carry on emitting.
This is not a one off either.
In one recent year, around half of all estates sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than people who were going to farm them. A third of deals for plantable land are now being done off market, away from the local communities who might otherwise have had a chance to bid.
So when people talk about net zero, this is what it can look like on the ground.
A man who produced food is priced out of land his family has worked for generations.
A corporation that produced emissions buys that land, calls itself a force for good and sells the carbon.
The land stops feeding people.
The emissions do not actually fall.
The food was real.
The farmer was real.
The carbon saving is a line on a spreadsheet.
And somehow, in all of this, we are meant to believe the problem is the man with the sheep.
