Carbon Farming "All Hype and Humbug," says Nuffield scholar.

"PUSHBACK" on Nuffield Scholarship?

"IT'S all hype and humbug" is David Drage's thoughts on carbon trading's potential for agriculture, after his three-month world study tour on the subject.' The Weekly Times reported. The Victorian mixed farmer visited the UK, Canada, New Zealand and the US last year on a Nuffield scholarship and brought home the following conclusions
• The capacity of Australian agriculture to help cut global emissions was insignificant. (This statement ignores the Federal Opposition’s claim that soil and vegetation can remove 150million tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere every year by 2020. Some scientists have put it as high as 1000 million tonnes, with the Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales Governments putting out similar reports. While our emissions may be negligible on a global scale, the landmass we have devoted to agriculture – hundreds of millions of hectares - makes us a major player in the global effort to ‘draw down’ CO2 via photosynthesis.)
• David warned farmers who locked themselves into carbon contracts could find themselves forced to repay their contracts. (If carbon markets worked that way, no farmer would get involved. The individual farmer is protected by the “Buffer Pool” or self-insurance system that operates. No farmer is left alone to sell direct. They can’t supply the 25,000 tonnes minimum trading unit. So they combine in pools of millions of units. Most systems put aside some tonnes for protection. The Chicago Climate Exchange requires that each farmer put aside 20% of what they deliver as a hedge. The Carbon Farmers of Australia system requires that for every 1 tonne traded that the grower put aside an additional tonne to cover the potential loss. These tonnes are spread across millions of units in the full range of climate zones and geographic regions. They are there to replace units lost for any reason. The President of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (6 million members world wide) says buyers can rely upon the “Collective Persistence” of the pool that gives protection to the buyer and the grower.)
•"Many international investors I spoke to had no faith in the permanence of agricultural carbon sequestration," he said. (The issue of permanence is also resolved by this pool concept. It's not hard to find people who will bad mouth soil carbon anywhere in the world.)
• "And the science of measuring products like soil carbon is not sufficiently advanced to give them the confidence to invest." (Scientists have been measuring soil carbon for the purposes of scientific study for decades. Who is suggesting that the measurement of soil carbon for trade needs to be more accurate than measurement for science? Only someone with a vested interest in keeping soil carbon off the market or in being paid to chase the min-min light of accuracy beyond the needs of science. There are many such people. "Confidence to invest" is the right issue. Markets have a method of handling uncertainties in quantity or quality. It’s called “The Price Mechanism”. We have seen it working at the Chicago Climate Exchange where the low levels of measurement rigor has kept the price very low. This in turn encouraged the CCX to lift the bar in order to attract more farmers because the price was discouraging them.)
• "Australian agriculture can't offer much to the international efforts to reduce emissions, because we are already a highly efficient industry. (We may be an efficient industry from a cost management viewpoint, but we are not efficient when it comes to Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Opportunities to reduce emissions are everywhere: manure management and methane flaring, precision application of fertilizer, no-till cultivation, covering bare earth, feed supplements for cattle and sheep, biological soil treatments, grazing management, pasture cropping, cover cropping, and many more. Australian farmers have been offered the best emissions deal available to farmers anywhere in the world: Not taxes to cover methane and nitrogen emissions, but incentives to change the way we manage these gases. And we are free to trade our soil carbon.
If you believe that “it’s all hype” there is one fact that you should bear in mind: No one is forcing you to be involved. No farmer will be forced to trade their soil carbon. Or reduce their methane and nitrogen gas emissions.)