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 purpose of the strategy is to get wider engagement with carbon farming and the soil method in particular. Perhaps recent bushfires and the risk of carbon in vegetation bears on the Department’s thinking. Perhaps its that carbon sequestration in soil is thought to be not only the best solution while we move to a different energy paradigm.
In our experience, the cost of the audits is not the primary hurdle to wider adoption. Most often we are asked if it is indeed possible to increase the levels of soil carbon.
The short answer is yes, but achieving increases in SOC requires knowledge derived from peer-reviewed science. Reliance on common sense may not deliver the hoped-for results.
It is important to note that the questions are raised by well-informed farm owners and advisors. We have had discussions with multi-site vegetable enterprises, with multi-site nut enterprises, large banana producers, and agronomic advisors. Their commitment to soil health is deep.
Perhaps the greatest cost in carbon farming is the investment in different practices. The costs come in various forms, including perhaps new hardware, and reconfiguration of farm layout. There will be different requirements on staff; some may welcome the change but some may resign. Training and retraining will be required. Different advisors may be required.
This investment will pay off in business resilience, productivity and corporate profile. Those benefits may well outweigh the value of ACCUs. The cost will also reduce the financial gain of a CER registered carbon project.
None the less, there is a part of the path between commencing the project and having confidence that carbon is being sequestered as a result of the new management activities where uncertainty is high. As we noted above, this is the greatest impediment to engagement with carbon farming.
The cost of auditing falls a distant third. It may be that for other agricultural industries, there seems to be a clear path to carbon sequestration, and that does not require investment in machinery. In that case, the farm manager may be focused on the cost of auditing.
To us this suggests that the farm manager cannot envisage ways to enhance carbon sequestration and hence the gross income from ACCUs. If the plan is to minimise cultivation only, we suggest caution. It is one thing to reduce losses of soil organic matter, but quite another to add to SOM. It’s best to look for evidence that the reduction in cultivation will add to soil organic matter in the lifetime of a project.
We are advocates for better soil sampling (and provide tools for understanding soil health) because it is an undertaking that should stimulate closer engagement with, and understanding of soil processes. The soil, after all, is the engine creating value on the farm, and in most cases, the biggest capital item.
So the cost of soil sampling should be considered in the context of an investment in better management, leading to more productivity and along the way, more ACCUs.
Its true that the sampling methodology is hard to read. It is however, carefully considered. Since the farm manager must employ an independent entity to conduct the sampling, the complexity is dealt with by people with specialist skills. One possible surprise that could come about would be the realisation that grid sampling of soil is not efficient. The CER required sampling structure might deliver still more benefits over time.
It would help greatly if a simple explanation is provided to project proponents about the sampling process, explaining that the up front costs of the baseline audit are not repeated at each audit. Audits are successively cheaper because the count of samples can go down while still delivering the same confidence level about the measurements.
The cost of auditing will almost certainly come down over time for a host of reasons. Some reasons we may not be able to anticipate immediately, but important ones that we can anticipate come to mind now. The cost and capabilities of spectrometers will come down due to technological improvements in sensing. These improvements in sensing will come from other disciplines, implying that the market for use of them in soil sampling does not have to dramatically increase prior to the cost reduction. In fact there are technological changes of that nature under way now.
With more commercial use, we will more rapidly evolve the algorithms that make the measurements; more data will enable more research on correlations and reference samples.
In addition, auditing in other domains has moved from requiring a standard frequency of independent audit. In the case of the soil method of carbon farming, if the proponent has a good model and the next round of auditing validates the estimates of sequestration that the client is providing, then the independent audit can be less extensive and hence less costly.
In the short term, wider consultation and consideration should be given to how to reduce the impact of the cost of the initial audit. Since the community has an interest in having more data, one option might be to discuss with potential participants whether they would sell the data from their baseline audit to the federal government for use by researchers. The aim would be to take the cost of the initial audit down by perhaps two thirds, while gathering an enormous data set.
It needs to be acknowledged that there will be reservations among the farm managers. The reasons for the reservations, such as concerns about misuse of the data for enforcement, need to be recognised and solved.
The most important priority, however, remains to have a system which has high integrity and which produces a product that the market wants for at least the next 30 years. Diluting its integrity would be counter productive. For that reason, consulting with the market and assessing the trajectory of markets with substantially less integrity should be a priority before changes are made.
What Could We Do to Increase Participation
To assist that we could- provide case studies suited to the (often significant) expertise of farm managers, for a range of industries in order to reduce uncertainty
- provide a plain English explanation of the sampling process and its benefits
- assist several lines of work to foster lower cost but high integrity sampling, and
- provide federal funds for the initial baseline sampling process for each project in exchange for a copy of the data, if we truly consider global climate change the most compelling issue of our times.