By Joe Stanley, Head of Training & Partnerships, GWCT Allerton Project, UK
Farmers are on the front line of the climate crisis as our weather becomes increasingly extreme. In the coming decades this reality requires, in many cases, a change of farming practice. The European Regenerative Agriculture Community (ERAC) aims to empower farmers to become agents of climate mitigation while producing more sustainable food. Through training and exchanges, this newly established platform strives to create a community of like-minded individuals and to ease farmers’ transition to regenerative agriculture.
The AgriCaptureCO2 project aims to provide a streamlined service to meet the growing demand for accurate measurement of carbon sequestration from Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF). AgriCapture utilises Earth Obervation (EO) platforms (such as open source Copernicus) to deliver an innovative, flexible and scalable solution for soil carbon capture projects, developing a systematic, robust and flexible platform for quantifying, verifying and promoting soil carbon capture and allowing farmers to become ‘carbon farmers’. This use of EO data is augmented by initial ground truthing of projected soil carbon on a series of use case farms across the continent (in the UK, Poland, Greece and Serbia) and subsequent optimisation of future physical soil testing requirements.
The regenerative agriculture community
To support uptake of the project, AgriCapture establishes a European Regenerative Agriculture Community (ERAC), used to raise awareness of regenerative agriculture as a high-potential approach to meeting climate pledges and to coordinate and empower farmers as agents of climate mitigation while producing more sustainable food. After all, agriculture and forestry are unique in our modern economy in being both a source of and, more importantly, a sink for warming green house gasses (GHGs). A transition to more regenerative agricultural practices is a key element not only in reducing the c.10% of European emissions which result from farming, but also of offsetting emissions from parts of the economy which will remain, for the foreseeable future, net emitters such as energy and transport.
Five key training modules
A key element of ERAC are training materials to help support farmers in the transition from some of the traditional practices of the past half century, which have become heavily dependent on costly applications of synthetic inputs and ever-shorter rotations of monocrops, to a greater focus on farming in harmony with nature in a more ‘biological’ rather then ‘chemical’ approach.
The varied regenerative agriculture practices can be amalgamated into five key modules for training purposes:
- Increasing biological diversity
- Maintaining living roots in the soil
- Soil protection
- Reduced mechanical and chemical disturbance of the soil
- Integration of organic matter
Combinations of the practices within these five principles, such as the use of cover crops, reduced cultivations, better crop residue management, the creation of habitat and the use of precision technology, can be applicable to any farming situation in helping to reduce soil loss, boost soil organic matter and optimise water use. Each farm will have different priorities, and will be able to select those practices most relevant to them.
The materials will be utilised in online and physical training events across the continent, bringing together interested farmers and those in the wider agricultural and environmental supply chain. The focus will be on boosting on-farm productivity and profitability at a time of increasing climate extremes, and building business resilience whilst also building natural capital and soil organic carbon levels – key to the successful exploitation of the developing voluntary carbon credit market.
Additional materials such as videos, blogs and case studies will also be made available on an online AgriCapture CO2 training hub, where experiences can be shared.
