Carbon storage payments could spell disaster for farming

Recent EU proposals have been given a cautious welcome by many groups in agriculture. However, those more involved in EU farm policy have good reason to fear the potential of the much promised area of “carbon farming”.

Firstly, we need to deal with the basics of carbon farming. In short, it is the idea to encourage practices that increase the amount of carbon taken by land or plants through payments.

The most common of these is increasing woodlands or through preventing carbon loss through cultivation of soils. More controversial methods include rewetting of peat soils and, potentially, payments for reducing livestock numbers or abandonment. So far, this sounds like it may have great potential for farmers to benefit, and there are benefits if done right.

The most important question farmers should ask is, as always, where is the money coming from? This is where things begin to look more of a danger for agriculture.

Two concepts

There are two concepts for where the money for carbon farming should come from – within farming or outside farming. If the funding comes from within farming it will require the emissions from farming to carry a fee. That is every kilo of methane from livestock, nitrous oxide from fertiliser and carbon from diesel will have to be priced.

Worse for those farming in the midlands and west, the carbon lost from drained heavy peats will have a standing charge on every acre.

Fossil fuel companies are having a bumper year

Instead, farmers may look at other sectors to pay, rather than have to pay a fine every time you calve a cow, hitch on the plough or buy a bag of CAN. This brings us to a new problem. It might be cheaper to just buy us out.

Fossil fuel companies are having a bumper year. ExxonMobil (one of the largest oil companies in the world) made almost $20bn in July, August and September.

The oil and gas giants regularly post profits that dwarf even the largest of the global meat companies. Anything that negatively affects their profits will be dealt with in the most brutal and cost-effective way.

If the ‘carbon farming’ marketplace opens up and allows them to offset their emissions from their activities by purchasing large areas of farmland and simply abandoning it, they will. It is not limited to private businesses.

Governments all over the world have made legally binding targets to slash their emissions, which they are mostly not making good progress on. Our own Government’s transport and energy sector is among them.

Thankfully, for now, agriculture is protected from this fate by how EU emissions are structured.

Emissions management

In the most basic form, there are two forms of emissions management at EU level. Agriculture is part of what is called an effort sharing regulation (ESR) where emissions and sinks are handled at national level.

There are targeted cuts to the industries covered by ESR (including road transport, buildings and waste, along with farming) but sectors cannot trade between them until after 2030.

After 2030, it is possible that farming could instead be lumped in with energy production, heavy industry like cement and steel and aviation under the EU Emissions Trading System.

Misconception

There is also a common misconception that no form of carbon sequestration is currently accounted for. This is false.

Estimates of soil carbon sequestration are currently calculated by the Irish EPA and reported annually and the emissions resulting from drained peat soils are in fact larger than the amount stored annually by mineral soils.

However, more accuracy is needed with Teagasc and other research partners currently undertaking detailed measurements of soil carbon intake and output.

Early work suggests that the amount sequestered in mineral soils may be underestimated along with the emissions from peat soils slightly overestimated.

However, the final figures will take several years to reach a degree of certainty that they may be used.

The practice of routinely cutting hedges into a box-shape does not leave much room for carbon increase in the hedge

The other concern often raised is that hedgerow and other woody vegetation is not counted.

This is true, but in order to count hedgerows as a carbon sink we would need to know the length and height of each hedge, and be able to demonstrate a total increase in size.

The practice of routinely cutting hedges into a box-shape does not leave much room for carbon increase in the hedge.

Cutting overgrown hedgerows and burning the excess wood also means most of the carbon is returned quickly to the atmosphere. All carbon stored in woodland and commercial forestry is already accounted for in the national accounting of emissions and sinks.

Farmers may be concerned that they do not essentially “own” the carbon taken in by their soil or any forest, but neither do they “own” the emissions from that soil or livestock. Because of the complexity of the soil sinks and practice change, if opened up, fossil fuel interests may see it as easier to buy land and “rewild” it, AKA abandonment, on a scale we have never even imagined before.

Thomas Duffy is a young dairy farmer from Co Cavan, a former Macra president and the current vice-president of CEJA, the European Council of Young Farmers.