Further to yesterday's  'keep on keeping on'  message,   click here  to see the latest in investments worldwide in the Voluntary Market Space.

The fundamentals  have NOT gone away: -

•climate change and the need to do something. 

•Need for business to show they are doing something.

•The biggest polluting countries just coming on line. 

•The ability to market good quality credits - such as soil c credits, for a premium.

I guess because we have 25 years of marketing experience from our previous life, we are not afraid of a niche market  -   remember the beginnings of the Organic market?

Also, there is more to the 'on farm'  carbon story than just the Carbon Farming Initiative and Carbon Credits.   Think  'integrated carbon farming'  .   A carbon farm plan which may include biomass,  biochar, farm forestry  and others.    This is how we will develop the carbon farming conference this year -  examining and developing  ALL the areas,  now we have an understanding that Carbon is a new commodity with various potentials.  Stay tuned!

Did you hear about the drop in EU Carbon Credit prices overnight?  Does it spell disaster,  why even keep on going on this crazy  -  'farmers can save the soils and improve the CO2 problem at the same time, and benefit from productivity gains at the same time?'

Well,   what you expect me to say?   OF COURSE WE  WILL KEEP GOING!  The funny thing about this space is how, no matter what seems to be happening on the low side,  things are happening on up side which have simply kept us going!

 Couple of recent points to keep your spirits up:

•The Coalition, as recently as today,  re-iterates support for soil carbon and the CFI  -  with better time frames Click here for news

•China, quite a large polluter,  is starting to enter the carbon market space - now there's a market! find out more

 The issue is -  Stop now and have no hope of taking part, or keep on going and manage to be 'in the right place at the right time'  when things turn around, which they will - climate change is now an established risk.  ALSO, it will take time for farmers to learn and then implement.  The wheel has started to turn  -  NO  reason to stop it now! 

The cost of Soil Carbon Measurement  (yes, it needs capitals,  its like  the Holy Grail!) has always been one issue holding back the development of a soil carbon meth.   We've never been particularly worried about that cost, as we know that business drivers will drive that down,  the minute we have an approved soil c. measurement protocol   -    we have many great minds out there.

However,  CSIRO has won funding to progress this as well in the second round of the Filling the Research Gap: 

An innovative solution for accurate and affordable estimates of soil carbon—CSIRO.

Funding of $1,227,515 ex GST

This project is developing a proof-of-concept prototype system for measuring soil condition into a field-deployable system. This will assist land managers to effectively measure and detect changes in soil organic carbon stores and will provide reliable data to improve decision making and management.

There are other, more 'trade' focussed projects winning funding now too, and to see the whole round results  click here

Many times in our 'carbon market for farmers and the soil'  journey,   we have been repremanded for suggesting that it even had any value, given that the Soil would have to be traded in the Voluntary Market and 'everyone knows'  the Voluntary Market is the small,  low end of the market.   How could we hope to make it work, don't  you need the 'mandatory market'  with its super - large (low priced)  orders?. Well, we always thought that the Soil holds a key to climate change mitigation - AND there is many other reasons to make sure we 'save our soils'.  The Carbon Market is a tool to make this happen. And soil carbon is 'gourmet carbon' -  the best of the best of stories.

Low and behold - check out the direction of the Voluntary Market. "In parallel with the exodus of market participants from the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, a whopping 80 percent of project developers and investors surveyed for Point Carbon's newly released Carbon 2013 report expressed interest in exploring the voluntary carbon markets as an alternative avenue".  Click here for report

Wow and Wow -   maybe the Voluntary Market will be THE  market -   and we still believe we can make it work.   Once city folk understand the win/win that carbon farming represents, they will be happy to support our farmers.

Still, we wait for the soil carbon methodology under the CFI to arrive.  Slowly, things are moving. Given the urgency of the job ahead, it can't come soon enough.   We'll learn as we go,  and farmers can be the climate heros they deserve to be. 

CFI 'heats up'

Amazingly, having reported the first soil carbon measurement protocol published, we have two more in the pipeline! And also, RCS (Grazing for Profit) will soon be putting up a soil carbon methodology for the CFI - with a new soil carbon measurement protocol in it as well. This leaves the CSIRO one needing to come to light. Yes, innovation will come. Thats what getting started is about. 

This is why we do not agree that investigating the sequestration potential of soil carbon is 'going up a blind alley'.

Yes, we were floored by the Radio National Story on Sunday - The journalist did a great job, but it appeared to be a 'shut the gate' exercise from Dreyfus. Personally, I think he is worried that it is an area that the Opposition could just creep up behind them on - again. And again, the Government may be shown to be wanting.

Do we remember, for instance, how many times it took Thomas Edison to discover how to make an electric light work more efficiently! The scientists themselves now acknowledge the need to look into areas which we asked for right from the beginning (collaborative science with those making the high end of sequestration a reality)!

For our response to the Sunday program, please check it out here. 

To me, it looks like soil carbon may have just become politicised in this highly charged election year. However, the soil remains the largest carbon sink under our control, and if we do not want any perverse outcomes from only allowing trees to be planted , then we have only just found out one small piece of information to be put into the jigsaw puzzle. 

In the meantime, we had a great first webinar last week and are set to continue this week. This Thursday we continue with 'The Carbon Farming Initiative Process', featuring 'The Seven Steps to a Carbon Credit'. Register now to receive the most up to date information from those that know!

We have identified a list of “high performance” soil carbon managers who have demonstrated a potential well beyond the average. These ‘outliers’ present a challenge for the conventional estimation of the potential of Australian soils to sequester carbon. 

If these outliers can do it, it can be done.

The CSIRO’s chief soil carbon scientist Jeff Baldock pointed us in the direction of these outliers. We need a study of high performance individuals and what characteristics they share. We need the equivalent of the Australian Institute of Sport for carbon farmers.

AN outlier is a point that is off the curve. In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. An outlying observation, or outlier, is one that appears to deviate markedly from other members of the sample in which it occurs. (Grubbs, F. E.: 1969, Procedures for detecting outlying observations in samples. Technometrics 11, 1–21.)

“Outliers… are often indicative either of measurement error or that the population has a heavy-tailed distribution. A frequent cause of outliers is a mixture of two distributions, which may be two distinct sub-populations...”

Those two sub-populations: conventional farmers in the hump of the curve and carbon farmers in the tail. (Have we been measuring in the hump and not in the tail?)

And below we have Jeff's formal graph where we can see the 'heavy tail' (c.2011 slide presentation).

The people you are about to meet are all highly respected by their peers for their contribution to their industries. But they all do something that modern science says is impossible. They capture and hold carbon in their soils at three-to-eighteen-times the rate that scientists believe possible.

 
The CSIRO's best soil scientists say the largest increase possible in Australian soils that they have recorded is half a tonne per hectare per year. But David Marsh (left) from Boorowa NSW averaged an increase of more than 3 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year over 10 years. Craig Carter (right) from Willow Tree NSW has added 8 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year over 3 years at his best monitoring sites. David sits on the Board of his local Catchment Management Authority and Craig is a member of the Liverpool Plains Land Management and Sydney University Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources ‘CANEn’ project – Connecting Agriculture, Nutrition and Environment. He was also selected to be featured in former Governor-General Major General Michael Jeffrey's Soils For Life program. (Chairman of Healthy Soils Australia Tom Nicholas is pictured centre)

David Bruer (above) of Temple- Bruer Vineyards at Langhorne Creek (SA) increased average soil carbon levels by 2% in 10 years to 2011 (more than 3 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year ). The project aims to highlight information and tools for managing climate risk on farm. 

Col Seis (above) increased soil carbon by 3 tonnes per hectare per year (from 2% to 4%) on “Winona”, Gulgong, between 1995 and 2005. Between 2008 and 2010 his sequestration rate was close to 9 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year. Col is co-inventor of the practice known as Pasture Cropping.

New England grazier Cam Banks has used cell grazing and a focus on soil health to achieve an increase of 2.6 tonnes of Carbon sequestered/ha/yr between 2007-2011 at “Lakeview” in Uralla NSW (above). Cam is an active member of Landcare.

Martin Royds moved his soil carbon levels at "Jillamatong" near Braidwood NSW from 3% to 7% in 5 years, lifting his tonnage per hectare from an increase of 2 tonnes per year to more than 14 tonnes per year at his best monitor points in that time frame. He was awarded National Carbon Cocky of the Year 2011, sponsored by Ylad Living Soils. Rhonda Daly (seen presenting the award) and her husband Bill are also Carbon Farmers at Young NSW. They have compared a compost mineral blend vs single super, and observed an increase of 0.5% in soil carbon vs 0.07% increase between 2008-2010 - or close to 2.5 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year in a cropping enterprise.

But remember: none of this exists... officially... 

Officially the most soil carbon that can be sequestered in Australian soils is 0.5tonnes/hectare/year. Why is t here a vast gap between the performance predicted by scientific models and the actual performance of many carbon farmers? The farmers' high carbon scores are not considered reliable by scientists because the measurement was not conducted by scientists, according to scientific protocols. These results are described by scientists as 'anecdotal'. But here, in this small sample of farmers, we have a pattern which poses the question: Why?

Could the farmers be fudging the figures? But what motive would a farmer have to skew their carbon scores? No one is offering to pay them for it. No carbon trading scheme pays for past performance. Most of the farmers featured above started measuring their carbon levels 10 years ago, before there was a hint of earning carbon credits.

Also, these farmers have recorded falls in their soil carbon levels as well as increases along the way. Their integrity is not in question.

They may not use the same rigour in their measurement methodology, taking fewer samples than a scientist would take. But is this enough to explain the gap? (Some of the measurement was done by scientists and in all cases the analysis was done at a NATA-accredited laboratory.)

When it comes to 'growing carbon' farmers enjoy an unfair advantage. Each farmer lives inside a live experiment, 24/7, observing how nature responds to various activities. They micromanage their farms, combining techniques and practices, endlessly trialling and making decisions every day. Their experiments are conducted in a single location for application in that location. The farmer is there on the ground every day, absorbing the whole ecological 'event', processing it intuitively, referencing their entire experience with nature, and developing new hypotheses on the run. 

These farmers bring a learning attitude to their work. They read a lot, attend conferences, and most are active members of local natural resource management bodies or groups. 

The farmer is not seeking to answer a single question about an isolated variable in the ecological mix. The farmer wants to learn everything at once. They want to know how to get more and better pasture and crops, better water efficiency, healthier animals and better quality produce. They want more sustainable farming for today and tomorrow when they hand the farm to the next generation. They want more profit, more drought resistance, more production. 

The farmers just want to know what works. They don't have to spend time working out why it work. This can explain the gap in performance: farmers are better carbon farmers because they have a narrower task, more time to spend on it, freedom to change direction when early results indicate.

A formal scientific experiment sets out a methodology for each study which must be strictly observed for the period of the program, usually 3 years . This is because scientists must prove their results to others while farmers only have to prove it to themselves. 

The result of this unfair advantage are the higher soil carbon scores registered by farmers and the refusal by scientists to accept these scores because they are not replicable, as science demands of new facts.

These farmers are "outliers" - not a statistical aberration, but the result of a mixture of two distributions or sub-populations. Each of them have spent the 10,000 hours studying and practicing "required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert - in anything," according to Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. It is on these grounds that we believe these high performance carbon farmers reveal the true potential of Australian soils.

The Carbon Farming Initiative should focus all resources tagged for soil carbon on the challenge of measurement and set farmers free to sequester as much carbon as they can, independent of what the models say we can. This is the only way that the soil carbon credit can act as the catalyst needed to spark the chain reaction among farmers around the world to activate the massive carbon extractive capacity of the soils and vegetation. 

Read more...

1. The 100 Year Rule is not based on science. It is a convention of uncertain origin. It is not based on the period required for a molecule of CO2 to cycle through the atmosphere, as is commonly believed. (See "The 100 Years Rule: Deal Killer or Price Support?")
2. Offsets based on avoided emissions are no more or less secure than offsets based on sequestration. They cannot guarantee that the emissions avoided will remain avoided for 100 years.
3. State Ministers of Lands are unlikely to allow Crown lessees to enter contracts that run longer than the lease itself.
4. There have been very few programs established anywhere in the world with 100 Years ruling them in 2005-2012.
5. There are precedents for a range of periods, based on achieving a range of objectives.
6. Short periods can have long term effects, as farmers tend to renew stewardship covenants. A series of short term agreements can provide long term benefits.
7. More than 95% of buyers of forest-based offsets say the co-benefits of carbon sequestration can add significant value to them .
8. The statement that the carbon credits are merely a ‘bonus’, that the real benefit is higher production, demeans the CFI and the change it could bring and the blockage the 100 Years Rule represents.
9. There are several options to the pure 100 Years Rule, including buffer pools, insurances, government guarantees, ‘banking’ offsets, hedging, etc.
10. There are entrenched attitudes in Australian society that farmers should provide ecosystem services to society for free. If landholders are to be paid, it should be made as hard as possible so farmers will not make ‘money for jam’, hence The 100 Years Rule.

With Climate Change Minister Greg Combet's recent announcement that Australia will be scrapping its carbon tax agreement in favour of linking with the European Union's carbon trading schemes, a lot of farmers may be asking how this change will impact them.

Click here to download a fact sheet explaining how this ETS will work moving forward. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this, which you're welcome to leave in the comments section below. For more information, please contact us.