$90/tonne for soil carbon, reports Farm Weekly

Breaking Rural News : AGRIBUSINESS AND GENERAL
$90/tonne for carbon
Australia
Thursday, 29 March 2007

It was champagne all round when Carbon for Life founder, Christine Jones, launched the Australian Soil Carbon Accreditation Scheme in Katanning, WA, last week.

The scheme enables WA farmers to be paid when they increase their soil carbon.

The pilot program is the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.

It will allow WA Northern Agricultural region and south coastal region farmers to register up to four 20ha so-called Defined Sequestration Areas (DSA) on any portion of their properties.

The area will be soil tested each year for an initial three-year period.

Farmers will be paid $90/tonne annually and retrospectively for the increase in their soil carbon.

The soil test involves taking 110cm cores for testing and a 0.15pc increase in soil carbon would be equivalent to adding 23.1t/ha of carbon, earning a healthy $21.19/ha per year.

Farmers are well aware from soil tests that a good organic carbon measure is a sign of healthy soil.

So any measure to increase soil carbon would have two beneficial effects.

The concept of using soil as a carbon sink has not been accepted on an official level, even though it is potentially the largest sink in the world that can be easily accessed by direct human action.

Many traditional forms of agriculture result in a loss of soil carbon, and it would seem that an acceptance of soil as a carbon sink would also require the carbon loss to be included in Australia’s greenhouse calculations.

The scheme is the result of a private arrangement between Carbon for Life and Rio Tinto Coal, which will provide funding for the initial three years of the trial.

Christine Jones said under the current pilot project, one landholder can have up to four DSAs on their property if they would like to experiment with different soil building techniques to a maximum of 80ha.

“It would only require a 1pc increase in soil carbon on 15 million hectares of land to sequester 8GT of carbon dioxide in the soil, which is equivalent to the greenhouse emissions for the entire planet,” Dr Jones said.

“To pay farmers to sequester this carbon at the rate of $25/t of carbon dioxide would cost $200 billion.

“That might sound like a lot of money but in the corporate world, it is peanuts.

“With a mere $200b, we could reverse global warming in a matter of years and markedly improve soil productivity at the same time.

“It’s not about money — it’s about managing money to manage the carbon cycle — for the future of us all.”

* More information: www.amazingcarbon.com

SOURCE: Farm Weekly, WA, March 29.