Smart Carbon Farming

Some agricultural practices deplete soil while depending on it. With a growing population and more than half of agricultural land where soil carbon is below the target, there may not be enough soil to continue to ensure global food production within 50 years.

A joint action plan will be developed, which will include:

• Mapping the current state of existing technology to measure and track carbon storage;
• A market analysis on carbon farming;
• Policy recommendations around carbon farming.

In addition, a set of monitoring solutions will be developed by the technological partners in the consortium, whereby a number of techniques will be tested on pilot farms for the duration of the project. Attention will be paid to the long-term perspective by taking into account practical and economic feasibility.

Finally, the third pillar of the project consists of developing a digital training platform, which will also include the technical knowledge of the project. This platform will consist of;

• A training module;
• Training events;
• A program tailored to agricultural organizations that will consist of an advisory book;
• Physical and digital meetings to bring together different interested parties.
  
  This project will result in:
   
• An overview of the current state of techniques to measure carbon, the current market, as well as existing policies.
• policy recommendations to introduce technical solutions into practice, as well as other recommendations to make carbon farming successful.
• New techniques to track soil carbon in a more accurate 
  way.
• a digital training module accessibel to members.

There will also be a call for 15 pilot farms across the 5 countries, where new measurement techniques will be implemented. The selected companies will also receive free customized advice as a result.

Smart Carbon Farming (SCF) is a European project for the North West Europe (NEW) region, where transnational knowledge sharing as well as fieldwork will be carried out. SCF has 11 partners from 5 NWE countries (BE, NL, FR, DE, IE): 3 technological, 2 knowledge and 6 regional impact organisations for training and knowledge sharing. The partners complement each other in terms of regional context (soil type, technical know-how, farm size) and expertise (with knowledge from business models to whole-farm monitoring), which will allow solutions to be applied anywhere in NWE.