Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563 Recently Philippe Bayeve published some commentary on the topic of soil health, under the title Soil health at a crossroads. His concern - should we call it Bayeve’s Lament? - is that there appears to be a proliferation of meanings for the term but no crisp, generally-agreed definition. In the same way, he points out that there are lists of soil health indicators, and no satisfactory universal quantitative assessment.

The reader might notice the different appearance of the blog posts starting from today. We moved to a new theme for posts, because its documentation is more comprehensive. That gives us more flexibility. I hope you find it more convenient.

The Federal Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister, Angus Taylor, recently announced the Low Emissions Technology Statement (LETS) with funding of more than $18B over coming years. It’s a substantial investment that gets us focused and working on solutions, and deserves support. One of the targets of investment is to reduce the cost per ha of the soil carbon method audits. It is proposed that the use of satellite imagery can reduce the cost to 10% of its current cost.

The US capital fund rePlant Capital is providing lower interest loans to farm managers to facilitate the adoption of practices that support soil organic matter, and soil health generally. In a recent Forbes article, the three founders of the rePlant fund talked about their careers in impact investment and how the aspiration to link soil health to loans formed over time. Fundamentally, the farm undertakes to deliver improvements in soil health as well as repaying the loan.

The next round of the Land Restoration Fund, a Queensland program to support the development of a carbon farming industry, is expected to be announced after the state election. There may have been changes to the criteria for application or to the nature of the grants for professional advice about the program and Clean Energy Regulator’s carbon farming methods. We will update you as soon as we get the announcement.