Climate Friendly Food

Soil Carbon Report

This week the Soil Association launched their long awaited report, Soil Carbon and organic farming. This is a serious bit of work, running to hundreds of pages and researched extensively.

The findings are striking - for instance if all UK farmland was converted to organic farming, at least 3.2 million tonnes of carbon would be taken up by the soil each year - the equivalent of taking nearly 1 million cars off the road. A worldwide switch to organic farming could offset 11% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Raising soil carbon levels would also make farming worldwide more resilient to extremes of climate like droughts and floods, leading to greater food security.

Undoubtedly this is a very important piece of work to strengthen the organic farming sector, but also makes an important contribution to international climate change discussions. Carbon sequestration in soil has to be considered as a serious climate change mitigation strategy, and this falls in line with Cimate Friendly Food's policy too.

The full report can be downloaded here.