The first soil carbon credits in Australia were issued by the Clean Energy Regulator yesterday to Corporate Carbon for their Grounds Keeping Carbon Project on a farm in Hallora, Victoria which used an invention developed in the Gippsland Region called Soilkee Renovator and mulcher.
Soilkee combines cultivation, mulching, aeration and mixed species seeding to improve grazing systems and build soil carbon effectively. “Biochar would work very well in this system” said inventor Neils Olsen.
Given the World’s oldest scientific biochar field trial at the NSW DPI Wollongbar site on the Far North Coast of N.S.W. has shown “field-aged biochar enhanced the belowground recovery of new root-derived C (13C) by 20%” (Van Zwieten et al, 2017) , farmers that use biochar made to IBI standards should seriously consider registering a project under the Sequestering carbon in soils in grazing systems method of ERF
“These soil carbon credits actually count towards our Paris targets” say Matthew Warnken, Managing Director of Agriprove
Doug Pow, an innovative farmer from Manjimup, Western Australia had an “aha moment” when he was trying to figure out the simplest way to apply biochar to his soil, then it came to him, “we have cows and dung beetles that bury fertiliser all over our farm, I wonder if cows and dung bettles would eat biochar?” Doug said to himself. They did and a paper tabling results was published titled “Feeding Biochar to Cows: An Innovative Solution for Improving Soil Fertility and Farm Productivity” by Joseph et al, 2015
As Regenerative Agriculture, Reforestation and Pyrogenic Carbon Capture & Storage (PyCSS) producing biochar are now being touted as negative emissions technologies (NET’s) by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), this means both the Soilkee & biochar for animal health methods could deliver more soil carbon credits to Australian farmers.
Photo: First ACCU’s issued to Niels & Marja Olsen C/Department of the Environment and Energy