Carbon Storage Potential

Alastair Leake, GWCT Head of Policy, explains more about a project to establish a Hedgerow Carbon Code that benefits carbon storage and biodiversity.

With British agriculture committed to reaching carbon neutrality by 2040, farmers are beginning to work out how carbon accounts can be calculated for their farms. An array of different auditing systems can be used to calculate a farm’s greenhouse gas emissions – farmers just have to plug in the data, including fuel and energy usage, fertilisers, feed and sprays, and the system will calculate the emissions. While food production does require fossil fuel usage, this can be minimised. In the arable sector, for example, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s (GWCT) research at the Allerton Project indicates that fuel use in crop establishment can be cut by 70% through switching to non-plough tillage.