Private sector businesses are increasingly supporting regenerative agricultural practices to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and sequester carbon into soils.
New GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Guidance is about to be published for reporting on GHG emissions and removals from land management, building on the Scope 3 Standard. This is being developed, alongside the planned British Standard Industry standard on Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) for the Voluntary Carbon Markets and will require clarification of the uncertainty associated with measuring soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks at different scales.
This project will generate a dense network of SOC and bulk density measurements on the University of Leeds farm and test different methods to quantify SOC stocks at different scales, comparing current recommended practice to protocols developed by AgriCarbon and James Hutton Institute. This work builds on the iCASP Soil Carbon Project led by Pippa Chapman and Guy Ziv.
There is currently no standard on how to measure SOC stocks. Many parameters will change the value a farmer may get if they try to estimate the SOC at field or farm level. Working with AgriCarbon we will carry out high-intensity sampling of SOC and bulk density across the farm. Different subsetting/averaging of the data and the use of different methods to determine SOC stocks will be examined to see if they result in different SOC stock estimates at farm and field level. Findings will be included in a report for industry bodies with the help of the Sustainable Soil Alliance and the UK Farm Soil Carbon Code.