Most farm carbon claims are rubbish. Here is why.
There is a great deal of money in telling people you have sequestered carbon on a farm, and very little rigour in most of it. Before this estate sells anybody a nature unit, it seems worth explaining exactly which parts of that market we think are nonsense — including some we could profitably participate in.
The four problems with farm soil carbon.
Measurement. Soil organic carbon varies enormously across a single field, and detecting a real change requires a dense sampling grid, a consistent depth, a bulk-density correction and several years between samples. Most schemes model it instead, from management practice, which means the "measured" sequestration is a prediction of what should have happened.
Permanence. Carbon that took fifteen years of minimum tillage to accumulate can be released by one ploughing. A credit sold as permanent against a stock that can be reversed by a change of tenant is not a permanent credit; it is a promise about the future behaviour of whoever ends up farming it.
Additionality. If a farm was going to plant that hedge anyway — and most of them were, because there is scheme money in it — then paying for it does not cause any additional carbon to be stored. It just moves the claim to whoever paid.
Double counting. The same tonne can appear in a corporate offset claim, a national inventory and a supply-chain insetting claim, and frequently does. The rules on this are improving and are not yet good.
What we will and will not sell.
| Unit | Sold here? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Hedgerow metres, with an annual species count | Yes | The outcome is countable, the work is real, and the buyer gets jam rather than a claim |
| Soil-health plots, with a five-year sampling programme | Yes | Sold as a sampling programme with published results, not as tonnes |
| Pollinator margins, with transect counts | Yes | The counts are done to an established method and published whatever they say |
| Soil carbon credits, in tonnes | No | We cannot measure it well enough to sell it honestly, and neither can most people selling it |
| Tree-planting offsets | No | Additionality is almost impossible to demonstrate on land that was going to be planted anyway |
| Anything a company can use to claim it is net zero | No | That is the entire market, and it is the part we want no share of |
| Biodiversity Net Gain units | Not yet | A real statutory market under the Environment Act 2021, but it requires a thirty-year management agreement and a habitat management plan registered with the local authority. That is a serious commitment and not a web page |
What a nature unit here is.
What we sell
- Units where the outcome can be counted on the ground
- Published results, including the years the numbers go backwards
- Work that is described honestly as work we would probably do anyway
- A price that pays for the counting rather than for a claim
- Produce in kind — jam, honey, a survey report
What we refuse to sell
- Tonnes of carbon, of any description
- Any offset a buyer could use in a net-zero claim
- Any credit that can be resold or retired
- Any modelled figure presented as a measurement
- Any suggestion that ninety pounds meaningfully changes the climate
And the awkward admission.
This farm could probably sell soil carbon credits. The consultants exist, the buyers exist, the methodology documents run to a hundred pages and look extremely convincing, and the money is real.
We have not, because the honest description of the product would be "a modelled estimate of a change we have not measured, in a stock that can be reversed, on land we were already managing this way". Nobody would buy that sentence, which is why nobody writes it.
If the measurement gets good enough — and it might; the sampling costs are falling and the remote sensing is improving fast — this page will change. It will say so when it does.
Credits, questioned.
Marginally, and not measurably at twenty metres. It is doing something quite significant for yellowhammers, which is the claim we actually make.
No. They are not credits, they are not registered on any standard, and they cannot be retired against a claim. If that is what you need, you need a proper scheme and a proper verifier.
Yes. It is a statutory regime with a metric, a register and a thirty-year obligation, and it is considerably more serious than voluntary carbon. If this estate enters it, it will be through a section 106 agreement or a conservation covenant, not through a checkout.
Because the alternative is selling nature units next to a page that quietly implies more than it can defend, and that is how trust in this whole category got destroyed in the first place.
The unit we do sell.
Twenty metres of hedge, counted every February.
