Triple win for smart farmers

The carbon credits scheme may appear as a clever backdoor plan for farmers to reduce emissions, so a government can appease Paris and be re-elected. But I’d say it was one of the most genuine win-win-win solutions to a climate crisis.

I will make this as simple as possible on a very complex scenario and hope the muscle I pulled trying to get my brain around this wasn’t for nought.

I urge farmers with all my might and loudest voice (I am punching at this keyboard, broken a nail in fact) to get onboard and get onboard now to reduce carbon emissions and start carbon sequestration into the soil or into trees.

The opportunities for farmers are triple-barrelled.

But first, here’s the catch. Two actually.

Any agency (effectively mandatory) will want a significant cut but — just like paying taxes — if you’re losing a sizeable fraction of a new income, it means you must be making a lot.

The other catch is if you start sequestering carbon before registering with the government for an audit, all your fine work will be welcomed by the environment but will not be paid for after the fact — you gain credits for how you improve your land, so how do they know the land wasn’t already carbon rich from the start?

That’s about all the bad news there is, except that I’ve lost a second nail.

Now for the good.

You’ll help reduce emissions — let’s save on ink — and you will improve water retention in the soil and raise its general health. Tick.

Secondly, you can and most likely will make money on carbon credits, or else you can bank them, much like we do with water, so long as you then don’t go stuff it up and lose the carbon from the soil.

At some point the big emitters (oil and energy companies) will be required to buy carbon credits to meet national targets.

Chances are those credits are only going to go up in price.

You will have a 25-year responsibility to maintain the carbon level — which stays with the land if it is sold — and, given the hard part will be putting the carbon into the ground, you should be able to maintain this.

The third barrel to my imaginary shotgun is what it will do to the credibility of your actual product.

City consumers, food company shareholders and the environmentally-savvy are starting to demand that their food and fibre is sourced from growers with the smallest carbon footprint possible.

Often a premium is paid; and so the question goes begging: will non-complying farms survive?

The daunting nature of all of this for time-poor and tight-margined farmers is alleviated by the help available from government-endorsed partnering companies (but not government departments).

Hand-holding agencies do all the administration and planning stuff for you.

Then, compliant agronomy, chemical and soil additive companies can supply the plethora of products tailored to your soil to get the microbes and critter numbers up, the nitrogen waste levels down and through a range of other channels and practices the right things growing to get carbon stored, all for the cost of under $100 per hectare.

It’s almost all done for you in terms of preparation and registration.

Then you’ll have highly qualified government auditors test over and over and re-test again after some more testing, with the kind of scrutiny that would make Columbo’s glass eye fall out.

But it’s necessary.

Next week, Country News covers a real ground-breaker in this field, with the ground only just being cracked.

The Goulburn Valley can boast the nation’s first ever grain grower who — starting on some pretty beaten-up land — has put into the soil a ton of carbon, 12.7 in fact, per hectare.

I report on a lot of ‘gonna-do’ and ‘am-about-to-do’ with a spot of ‘whoop-dee-do’, so it’s refreshing and damned exciting that we can report on a ‘have done’.

May it be the start.