CO2-Land: An innovative Carbon Farming approach
The Association
The “CO2-Land” Association, formed in 2021, is a group of various stakeholders from the agriculture and ecology sector. Most of its’ members are based in the area of Freiburg, a city in southwestern Germany. CO2-Land has set itself the goal of making agriculture in Germany more climate-friendly. The focus here is on promoting healthy and fertile soils, which play a key role in climate protection and climate adaptation in agriculture. The name CO2-Land is based on the ability of agricultural soils to store CO2 in the form of organic matter.
Ecosystem Services
Humus formation through organically bound soil carbon has other elementary cross-sectional functions that have a positive effect on the environment:
Water Protection
Soil Health
Biodiversity
Erosion Prevention
Climate Resilience
The Approach
Agricultural measures such as intercropping and undersowing can store CO2-containing organic material in the soil in the long term. As farmers often have to invest additional time and money to achieve this effect, we have looked for an approach that monetarily rewards farmers for their efforts. Our approach aims to ensure that other stakeholders from business and society pay for their unavoidable emissions and thus provide farmers with a compensation contribution, which they in turn invest in CO2 storage.
Agricultural Measures
Individual measures tailored to each farmer’s requirements are developed together. Nevertheless, there is an approximate catalog of measures that covers large parts of the CO2-saving measures implemented by our partner farmers:
Intercropping Mixtures/Undersowing
Optimised Crop Rotations
Crop Harvest Management
Organic Fertilisation
Soil Additives/Plant Strengthening
Change of use between Arable Land and Grassland
Permanent Crops/Agroforestry
Monitoring
In addition to networking farmers and economic players and advising farmers, monitoring is one of our core competencies and an important service that we offer. This includes, for example, soil sampling, laboratory analysis and data management. We have developed our own CO2 quantification standard in accordance with ISO 16064-2 and will have it accredited in 2023 so that carbon sinks can be ensured in the long term. In this way, other organizations that want to become active in the field of carbon farming can draw on our standard and focus their resources on project implementation. In this way, CO2-Land is also acting as a non-profit organization for the common benefit.
Certification and Payout
Once the measures have been implemented, payments are made to farmers using a mixed approach: part of the sum is paid out annually on a measure basis, i.e. for the implementation of the measures. Another part is paid out based on results, i.e. according to the CO2 actually stored and measured in the soil. Based on existing literature and the experience we have gained over the years, we can constantly refine our expected values. The customer (usually an economic player) receives a voluntary climate certificate for the corresponding amount of CO2 storage financed.