Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of land management practices on the amount of carbon stored in grassland soil.

In June 2019, the Environment Agency published a State of the Environment: Soil Report, which identified that intensive agriculture, such as ploughing up permanent pasture for arable crops or temporary grassland, usually reduces soil organic matter (including carbon).

We are paying for a range of actions through farming schemes such as Sustainable Farming Incentive to support farm decarbonisation and Countryside Stewardship and Landscape Recovery to store more carbon in the landscape. The schemes will help farmers deliver environmental outcomes on the land they manage while helping their businesses become more productive and sustainable.

Arable soils are known to be more depleted in soil carbon than grasslands, so the potential for future sequestration is lower in grasslands than when compared to arable soils. Sampling to a meter’s depth is preferable so that as much of the soil carbon store as possible may be measured. However, in order to provide a balance between practicality and robust measurements, sampling to a depth of up to 40cm would generally be appropriate as this is the depth to which most land management practices affect the soil profile most significantly.

Robust and accurate carbon audits which are based on or from business-level data can be valuable in benchmarking performance, and help farm businesses plan and action decarbonising measures and enhance management of negative emissions. To help farmers confidently understand the emissions on their land and take advantage of the new financial opportunities this will unlock, we are committed to developing a harmonised approach to measuring carbon on farms. We are also considering how we can best support the implementation of carbon audits through a controlled expansion of the Defra Farming and Countryside Programme sustainable farming advice offer.

We recognise the challenges in improving the robustness and consistency of carbon auditing tools. To help harmonise these tools and how they are used, Defra is currently funding a 'Harmonisation of Carbon Accounting Tools for Agriculture' project to assess differences between a number of market leading carbon calculators, understand the causes of this divergence and how it impacts tool users and how to improve harmonisation.

Defra is also working to provide greater access to the calculations and the models developed as part of the UK’s Agricultural Inventory of Ammonia and GHG Emissions to interested third parties. This will support longer term alignment between the UK’s national GHG accounts and primary data gathered from farms.