- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Sounds really interesting AgrispeedWe're part of a (now two!) projects with the Rural Business School and Rothamstead research - one is a full carbon audit of field work and all accounts (takes a trained person about 2 days!) where everything is measured in and out - even down to car business milage. This is also linked to a project where they are actually annually measuring the soil to a depth of 60cm using GPS grids and any increases, decreases and minerals - I think this may also link into being able to benchmark different plants and ability to capture carbon later. It should also give us a map of any nutrient migration over the next few years. In the last few years we have has some nerds do some sampling at field scale and we have been steadily building carbon - particularly noticeable in fields that were previously in an arable rotation. We are now at a steady 11% average with some fields recording at 20%, but I'm somewhat sceptical of these measurements.
Hopefully over the next couple of years they will be able to correlate the account side with the actual soil measurements. Its all a bit quiet at the moment, but I strongly suspect the reason for them doing this is in preparation to be able to accurately estimate carbon capture for a BPS type replacement. Suits me!
We undertaken have similar trials here, quite surprising when you take into account a quite small amount of vehicle usage can have such a dramatic effect on the footprint of a business, and can undo so much of the good work our soils are doing for us; it's part of our plan to eliminate as much fuel consumption as possible as a result of these findings.
Certainly the idea of putting a machine between the plant and the mouth is a very questionable method of producing meat and milk from an environmental and economic point of view.