New agricultural subsidies being piloted in the UK, which aim to reward the provision of public goods on farmland, are making it more difficult for English farmers carrying out ‘carbon farming’ practices to engage with private investment schemes, say experts.
According to a policy briefing by University of Leeds researchers, the fact that the recently-launched Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) pilot pays farmers to plant cover crops and add soil organic matter prevents them from entering into new voluntary carbon markets for the same practices, due to such an arrangement failing financial feasibility tests.
“This is a problem since the SFI funded practices are those most likely to store carbon, leaving poorly evidenced practices for the market, and public funding is paying for outcomes that markets could pay for,” the authors wrote.
Soil solutions suggested
Studies have shown that the UK will struggle to meet its environmental targets without private funding for changes in agricultural ecosystems, they noted. In the field of soil carbon, they proposed three possible solutions to better use public and private money.
One involves shifting towards payments for soil carbon testing — a barrier to entering private schemes. The researchers cited efforts in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Australia to achieve this. In Scotland, the devolved administration pays farmers directly for having testing carried out, in Northern Ireland this takes the form of payments to companies to do it, while in Australia, payments are made for historical data collection.
A role for Countryside Stewardship Scheme
A second option is to reward early adopters of carbon farming practices through the existing Countryside Stewardship Scheme, by paying for the maintenance of soils with soil organic carbon levels above an agreed average.
Such a move would acknowledge that given the public goods improved soils provide beyond climate mitigation alone, “it is therefore justified to pay public money to keep SOC where it is ‘above and beyond’ comparable farms,” they said. It would also have the advantage of encouraging permanent soil carbon storage, beyond the terms of the contracts offered by private initiatives.
The third route would be for the SFI to fund soil carbon efforts, but below a level required to meet their full costs, which would in theory open the door to co-funding from public and private sources. The authors suggest that SFI payments could cover 85% of costs.
“There is no one solution to enable the operation of soil carbon markets in England. The authors’ recommendation is to consider all three options,” they concluded.
