HOLISTIC COWBOYS AND CARBON FARMERS - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 228

ter is one nobody wants to talk about. There are reams and reams of learned articles on
soil carbon sequestration - so many that they almost outnumber the customary plethora of
blogs and website rants on the subject. Throughout the USA and Australia in particular,
universities are conducting symposiums on carbon farming and interest groups and com-
panies hold conferences with titles like 'Soil Carbon: The Next Cash Crop'. 2 In the UK
the Nuffield Trust held a Carbon Farming Conference at the showground at Stoneleigh in
2008, while the Permaculture Association has been hosting conferences on Low Carbon
Farming. 3 The Soil Association has been plugging carbon sequestration as one of the main
advantages of organic farming; and at the Oxford Farming Conference in January 2009,
environment secretary Hilary Benn revealed that the government was willing to sponsor a
new low carbon farming award to help promote green best practices. 4

Carbon farming is

sliding into the seat of honour that biodiesel slunk out of in disgrace.
And like biofuels, carbon farming is potentially big business. Article 3.4 of the Kyoto
Protocol allows carbon emissions to be offset by the improvement of agricultural soils,
thereby setting the stage for soil carbon to become a tradable commodity. The USA, at the
time of writing, has yet to sign the Protocol, but it already has a burgeoning carbon farming
offset market: the Chicago Climate Exchange Market (in co-operation with the National
Farmers Union and Iowa Farm Bureau) is paying farmers up to $3 per acre for sequestering
carbon with funds derived from selling carbon credits to industrial companies. 5 A company
trading under the stirring title Carbon Farmers of America pays farmers $6 for every tonne
of carbon they sequester in their soil. The money is raised by selling 'Carbon Sinks' cost-
ing $25 apiece to individuals and businesses. For $2,500 you can buy a 'Family Carbon
Sink Package'; for a mere $175 you can 'turn your vehicle into a carbon sink'; for an un-
specified sum you can certify your company by buying a Business Carbon Sink Package. 6
Amongst scientists, there is widespread, probably universal, agreement that agricultural
soils can sequester carbon in much the same way that tree cover can, and that the potential
for them to do so in some circumstances is not negligible. Beyond that there is uncertainty
and dispute. For every scientific paper showing that a land use change such as converting
pasture to woodland, using minimum tillage on cropland, or excluding livestock from pas-
ture increases the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil, there is another showing that,
in other circumstances, the effect is the opposite. 7 Moreover an increase in soil carbon on
one site, for example by converting it from arable to pasture, may result in a decrease on
another where pasture is converted to arable. An increase in soil carbon may also result
in the release of other greenhouse gases: pasture sequestrates carbon, but grazing animals
release methane. Similarly, adding nitrogen, by planting legumes for example, increases
vegetation and hence the amount of carbon which the soil can potentially assimilate; but it
also releases nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.