HOLISTIC COWBOYS AND CARBON FARMERS - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 248

However productive Polyface may be, it is in a sense only half a farm, and it doesn't help
to analyse the carbon sequestration on one half, without knowing what is happening on the
other. In the case of Polyface if the feed is bought from a responsible organic grower, it
may well be that the carbon sequestration on the two farms added together is positive. But
in another situation it could well be different. There are plenty of stock farmers who bump
up the productivity and (perhaps unwittingly) the organic matter on their farm by buying in
feed from a chemical grain farmer who has stripped the carbon content of his fields close
to the bottom threshold. Stock farmers in Europe might be buying soybeans that have re-
quired the clearing of forest in Brazil. Unless carbon accreditation schemes are equipped
with monitoring systems a lot more sophisticated than simply taking a soil sample once a
year, they could end up rewarding stock farmers who are a small part of a farming cycle
that is on balance adding little carbon to the soil, or even removing it.
When I put these concerns to Christine Jones she did find time to give a one sentence
reply: 'building soil carbon has very little to do with biomass and everything to do with
photosynthetic capacity and soil biology'. This is the crux of her dissatisfaction with the
Roth C Model, and there is plenty of evidence that the carbon introduced into the soil
through transfers of biomass does not stay there very long. But biomass brings with it fer-
tility, and fertility enhances photosynthesis. And farmers know only too well that it is pos-
sible to strip a field of its fertility and transfer it to another.
One carbon farming website 68 has an article on a North American grass farmer called
Martha Holdridge, whose pastures were tested and shown to have risen from 4.1 per cent
organic matter in 2002 to 8.3 per cent in 2007, an impressive rise. The land had been man-
aged without fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides since 1987, so why had organic matter in-
creased so suddenly in the final five years? It couldn't possibly have increased at that rate
over the entire 21 years. Martha Holdridge explained to me in an e-mail that they had cut
hay on the acres in question for 10 or 12 years out of the first 15, and often half of the hay
was hauled away to another farm. It is a basic fact of grass farming that if you take hay or
silage off a field without adding nutrients you deplete it; and if you pasture animals on a
field, especially if you are also feeding them hay or other feed, then you are likely to enrich
it. 69 It is for this reason that (as some farmers have pointed out) a farmer who has been pas-
turing livestock for years and whose soil is already saturated with carbon won't get a cent
from carbon accreditation schemes.
All of this threatens to make a nonsense of any carbon credit scheme that doesn't adopt a
whole systems approach. Christine Jones' Australian scheme allows farmers 'to register up
to four 20 hectare so-called Defined Sequestration Areas on any portion of their property'.
If I was a stock farmer entering such a scheme, with say 80 hectares of established hay
meadows and 80 hectares of pasture, I would register my meadows as sequestration areas,
and leave the pasture out. Once accepted in the scheme, I would convert the registered