Climate change affects more than just the Polar bears, low-lying Pacific Islands, or the rainforests of the Amazon; soon, we’ll feel the effects closer to home on UK farms and food production. Even today, farmers battle extreme weather events, accelerating crop diseases, and price uncertainty.
Amidst issues like food insecurity and inflation, there is also growing pressure on the agricultural sector to adopt more sustainable practices, as seen in the recent introduction of the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) subsidy. Agriculture is not just a victim of climate change, as the sector is responsible for 25% of the total greenhouse gas emissions.
Carbon farming could be the road for farmers and agriculture businesses to take to become more sustainable. This is a regenerative agricultural practice that’s aimed at carbon sequestration–the capture of atmospheric carbon dioxide into the soil. Read on to learn all about carbon farming, what it is, how it can help farmers be more sustainable, and how UK farms can financially benefit from carbon farming.
When plants die, all the carbon they stored during photosynthesis is released back into the atmosphere or gets stored in the soil for a long time. Conventional agriculture and farming practices use tilling to release carbon. However, with carbon farming, the aim is to put and keep this carbon in the soil. Although carbon farming is an umbrella term, it could refer to techniques such as minimal or not ploughing fields, rotating crops, and planting cover crops.
Carbon farming has many environmental benefits, as it can:
It also benefits farmers by enhancing crop production, restoring degraded soils, purifying groundwater, and reducing pollution.
The exciting thing about carbon farming and regenerative agriculture is that they can help reverse climate change within our lifetime. Suppose carbon farming were to be implemented on a large scale. In that case, regenerative farming and agriculture could draw more than 100 billion tons of carbon into the soil–equivalent to 367 billion tons of carbon dioxide, more than 200 billion tons of CO2 needed to pull us back from the current climate change tipping point.
Carbon farming simply refers to agriculture methods aimed at sequestering carbon from the atmosphere into the soil, root crops, wood, and leaves. Carbon farming practices may include:
These are just a few examples of carbon farming practices you may want to incorporate on your farm.
Carbon farming doesn’t just help to offset emissions, but it can restore degraded soils, enhance crop production, and reduce pollution by minimising erosion and nutrient runoff. Farmers can also purify surface and groundwater as well as increase microbial activity and soil biodiversity.
These added benefits of carbon farming mean that more food can be produced but with less pollution and emissions. In the long term and on a large scale, it could even reverse the adverse effects of climate change and could be the secret weapon we’re looking for to meet carbon emissions reduction goals.
So far, carbon farming sounds great: You can reduce the effects of climate change while producing more crops. What’s the downside? There are a few things to keep in mind before taking on carbon farming:
Farmers have received the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) until now, which provided financial support based on standardised area payments. However, since Brexit, this scheme has been replaced with ELMS, which rewards farmers for environmental initiatives, such as carbon farming. The basis for the new ELMS is “public money for public goods,” where public goods are things available to all and have no economic market, including:
Farmers engaged in carbon farming can benefit financially from the ELMS, which includes the Sustainable Farming Initiative (SFI), Local Nature Recovery scheme, and Landscape Recovery scheme. SFI offers payments for farmers who deliver both environmental and climate benefits.
If you are interested in carbon farming or other sustainable initiatives for your farm or land venture, get in touch with our team at Granter and we can help you get the claim or funding you need, and also advise you on how to get involved in more sustainable measures that could benefit you financially.