FEATURE
FARMER FOCUS
ANTONY PEARCE How I decided to join a carbon payment scheme Not a week goes by without another discussion about getting paid for carbon. I know that many farmers are taking a “wait and see” approach and I respect that. Above all, I understand that making a decision to enter this new market feels big and it feels complex. Without good advice on it, or how, to proceed, the natural choice is to do nothing.
today for the next 20, 50 or 100 years. That may be how it works in forestry, but not in soil carbon. Instead, these schemes are offering to generate payments for the new carbon you add to your soil on a year-by-year basis. Contract terms vary, but fundamentally, transactions are organised around this annual flow of new carbon into the soil, not by forward-selling rights to the entire stock of carbon you’ve historically stored in your soil. As it happens, Soil Capital is able to reward both new farming practices and the maintenance of existing ones that achieve these additional flows of carbon into the soil, but the core point is the same – it is annual improvements generating the payments. The decision is not as big as “all your carbon”.
There are options beyond carbon credits for offsetting Discussions on this topic always seem to refer only to “carbon offsetting”. This makes us all think of oil and gas companies, or other heavy emitters, happily polluting the atmosphere and using their profits to clean their conscience and their carbon balance sheet. They formally “offset” their emissions with carbon credits purchased from farmers but they have no relationship with the farmer.
I was in no better position than anyone else six months ago, and I could see that many professional advisors were equally out of their depth, being honest. Nevertheless, I try to do all I can to learn about new opportunities directly myself and so I embarked on a process of systematically engaging the main providers.
This is understandably not such an attractive proposition for many farmers. But it is wrong to think that this is the only way for companies to reward farmers for improving their climate impacts. The companies that buy farmers’ crops now have to consider the carbon emissions from their supply chains – including those at farm-level – as part of their own carbon
In the end, I have signed up with Soil Capital and I have tried to document my key learnings to get to that point in a series of videos on my YouTube channel so that others can benefit from what I discovered. Here are some of the most important takeaways that helped me make a decision!
Carbon payments are based on annual improvements Lots of influential bodies and voices seem to be warning farmers against “selling all your carbon now”. This seems to be based on an important misunderstanding about how carbon payment schemes work – at least in annual arable systems. When you engage in such a scheme, nobody is coming along, measuring the total carbon stock in your soil that you’ve built up over the past and offering you a contract based on you keeping that stock of carbon where it is
84 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
ISSUE 17 | APRIL 2022
