Carbon farming takes off Credits to be sold on exchange just like Oz

DONNA PAGET/Waikato Times

GREEN PLAN: Piopio farmer Craig Fagan hopes to go carbon positive this year.

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Waikato farmers will soon be able to sell carbon credits on the Chicago Carbon Exchange, following on the heels of their Australian counterparts.

Peter Floyd, managing director of Hamilton-based eCogent, says around 100 dairy, sheep, deer and goat farmers using the company's DairyPoint and StockPoint systems will be able to help combat global warming and trade carbon credits on the exchange once the precise amount of carbon sequestered in their soil had been measured.

Simpler tests have shown some are carbon neutral and others are already carbon positive.

"It's quite a procedure, but we are working on early September," says Peter, who hosted the Farming for Change Conference in Christchurch in February.

At the conference Australian farmers Michael and Louisa Kiely explained how they were successfully using pasture-based carbon farming to earn carbon credits for sale overseas, he says.

"Australian scientists have calculated that a 0.1 per cent increase in soil carbon across 10 per cent of agricultural lands could sequester more than half of that country's annual greenhouse gas emissions. Studies in Northern New South Wales have shown that carbon farming has increased soil carbon at double that rate over the past decade."

Peter says eCogent farmers are showing that properly managed pastures will steadily build up organic matter and effectively lock up atmospheric carbon. "If farmers manage fertilisers, grazing and animals correctly they will grow their soils and sequester considerable amount of carbon dioxide and hold on to nitrogen.

"Good pasture management is not difficult to do. Some farmers in Australia are actively increasing soil depth and quality in this way, and are earning carbon credits. I believe New Zealand farmers could do carbon farming even better."

DairyPoint and StockPoint are tools for farmers to gauge daily profit from every animal on the farm, and calculate profit per kg of feed eaten. In DairyPoint, for example, payout, production per day, pasture cover, cow condition, daily feed costs, nitrogen responses and costs are all taken into account.

Both systems advocate dropping stocking rates by as much as 20 per cent, making the soil more healthy and giving the animals more food. This is achieved by swapping soluble phosphate and nitrogen fertilisers, which Floyd says can be detrimental to plant, animal and human health, for lime or RPR rock, which can lead to establishing permanent pastures with a more diverse range of species.

Through eCogent, farmers are being offered a simple carbon measuring tool developed by Palmerston North-based Landcare Research scientist Graham Shepherd, which guestimates the amount of carbon in the soil through a visual inspection of root depth, thickness and earthworm activity. Some have had their positive results confirmed through lab testing, and Floyd says it will not be long before a test which will measure tonnes of carbon per ha can be done.

"On farms that have been using these strategies for some years the annual fertiliser and animal health bills have gone down dramatically, while profitability has increased.

"We are convinced that growing soils as a carbon sink in New Zealand will be very good for the environment and will greatly benefit farmers by totally eliminating the need for any emissions tax."

Net Work: www.ecogent.biz See Looking at carbon future, page 4