Carbon trade a new field for farmers

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It is a very new area and there is still a lot to be worked out but carbon farming and trading holds many benefits for farmers - the majority of which have very little to do with a carbon trading scheme.

About 300 farmers and industry experts were in Orange this week to learn how they can capitalise on the movement towards green farming at the Carbon Farming Expo and Conference.

Australia’s soils have been almost completely stripped of their carbon content - carbon lost from the soil, inevitably ends up in the atmosphere, Carbon Farmers Australia director Louisa Kiely said.

“We became aware of the level of degradation of soils and how much production we’d lost,” Ms Kiely said.

“If we plough or burn the life in the soil dies and the carbon that’s in those bugs goes into the air,

“If you can get carbon increasing you improve your soils, its quality, its structure, its water holding capacity and it repels salinity.”

Photosynthesis is the key.

Trees and plants ability to take carbon from the air is the only known way to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, Ms Kiely said.

The doubters are already being proved wrong, Organic Farmers Australia chairman Andre Leu says.

“A lot of our soil scientists have said you can’t do it with Australian soils but we’ve seen presentations here by farmers that are doing it,” he said.

Pasture cropping and new ploughing techniques allow farmers to keep the soil healthy, increase their yields, decrease pest and insect damage and to become more resilient to drought.

The carbon content of Australia’s soil could be restored within years, he said.

“These things don’t happen overnight. It took hundreds of years to get to this point and it will take five to seven years to turn it around,” Mr Leu said.

With a national carbon trading scheme in its fledgling stage, farmers will soon have the ability to turn their properties into carbon sinks which they can then use to build and trade carbon credits.

When limits are set on the countries 1000 biggest carbon emitters, farmers may find they are able to supplement their income selling carbon credits or offsets to the emitters.

“If they’re not meeting their reduction targets then they will have to buy off-sets off of someone who has credits,” Ms Kiely said.

By Ben Brennan