Keeping carbon local on the route to net-zero The Carbon Farm has set up a new trading platform for the carbon based in the Island’s soils. By Caroline Spencer
I
n the coming years Island agriculture has the potential to be transformed by the introduction of regenerative practices. Carbon farmer Glyn Mitchell says that it’s imperative that Jersey now focuses on its soil. Carbon farming is a broad set of agricultural practices that result in increased storage of carbon in the soil, which will help in the fight against climate change. Morel Farm in St Lawrence is the first farm in Jersey to actually farm carbon by using soil regenerative strategies issued by the United Nations’ ‘4 per 1,000’ initiative. This states that if farmers increase soil carbon levels by just 0.04% annually, CO2 in the atmosphere could reduce to safe levels, with added benefits of improved biodiversity and resilience to the inevitable impacts of climate change.
40
At COP26 held in Glasgow in 2021, Jersey signed up to the Paris Climate Change Accord, which binds us to the ‘4 per 1,000’ initiative. The five principles of soil health are: • • • • •
reduced or minimal ploughing; keeping soil covered and protected; keeping a living root in all year; reduced or no synthetic inputs; adaptively grazing animals to build soil health. Regenerative practices like these help restore degraded soils, enhance crop production, and reduce pollution by minimising erosion and nutrient runoff, purifying surface and groundwater, and increasing microbe activity and soil biodiversity.
Glyn, who is operations director at The Carbon Farm, which is at Warwick Farm, said he had been examining all options to improve soil health across Jersey while reducing farm costs. The solution that he and his colleagues at Jersey Hemp kept returning to was to increase soil organic carbon levels in all fields. ‘The most economical and effective way to reduce Jersey’s carbon emission responsibility is to grow it into soil organic carbon,’ Glyn said. ‘The capacity for appropriately managed soils to sequester atmospheric carbon is enormous. Jersey’s soils hold around three times as much carbon as the atmosphere above our Island and over four times as much carbon as vegetation. ‘Soil represents the largest carbon sink over which we have control. There’s plenty of capability in soils in Jersey to offset all of our emissions very quickly. The missing bit was working out a way of transacting CO2 to make soil organic carbon more valuable. Farmers can say they are using the pillars of soil health and sequestering carbon, but there has been no way to prove it, until now.’
