Making up soil

Soils are the largest carbon reservoirs on earth alongside the oceans. Some types of land use, such as the reclamation of moors or the conversion of grassland to arable land, release large amounts of sequestered carbon. Livestock farming also causes greenhouse gases. Yet farmers also can store CO2 from the atmosphere as carbon in and on soils through modified crop rotations, alternative farming methods or careful soil cultivation. Significant amounts of carbon dioxide can, therefore, be removed from the atmosphere over longer periods of time. Experts agree that more use must be made of this potential to achieve national and international climate targets. The European Union is to become climate-neutral by 2050 and the agricultural sector must make its contribution to this.

So far, however, there has been a lack of uniform and transparent measurement methods and standards to determine the efficiency of carbon farming measures. Yet these are a prerequisite for farmers to be paid for their contribution to climate protection in the future and, therefore, have an incentive to use carbon farming as a business model.

What exactly is carbon farming?

Carbon farming refers to the agricultural management of soil carbon with the aim of increasing the amount of stored organic carbon and, therefore, counteracting climate change. Carbon farming includes the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the reduction of emissions from ongoing agricultural processes, and the removal of carbon from the atmosphere by sequestering soil organic carbon in and on agricultural soils.

In 2022, K+S, an important partner in the agricultural sector as a fertilizer producer, therefore, launched a DIN standardization process for carbon storage in soil together with the Landwirtschaftliche Rentenbank and the agritech company Klim. 14 other German companies, associations, as well as political and scientific institutions joined the consortium.

Jessica Berneburg-Wächter, Innovation & Digital Transformation employee at K+S, has taken over the management of the consortium: "Our aim was to steer the numerous individual private-sector initiatives in a common direction, make them comparable and transparent and develop proposed solutions for debate at national and European level."

The result: DIN SPEC 3609, which defines the principles, requirements, and procedures for developing a system for quantifying and evaluating organic carbon build-up in and on agricultural soils. The focus is on the so-called "best practice" between scientific findings and the feasibility and use of monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) applications. These are a crucial quality management tool to ensure the integrity and effectiveness of carbon farming measures.

On June 27, the DIN Institute presented DIN-SPEC 3609 for the first time to a select group of participants from politics, science, and business at the event "Carbon Management - Norms and Standards as a Tool for Climate Protection". The following day, participants had the opportunity to listen to specialist presentations and engage in joint discussions in thematic workshops.

"This national standard is a good basis for data-supported, transparent climate protection programs from corresponding providers that reward farmers for their efforts in climate-friendly soil management." Jessica Berneburg-Wächter is satisfied with the result and provides an outlook on the next steps: "An expansion of the initiative at European level is planned for the end of 2024. As K+S, we also want to actively participate in this, because carbon farming is part of the overarching EU project on carbon removal (CRCF). The topic offers a wide range of future potential for K+S, which needs to be strategically evaluated."