TThe  NZIAHS Canterbury Farmers Forum, held at Lincoln University on October 26 missed the mark, according to soil scientist John Baker, pioneer of the low-disturbance, no tillage revolution for farming in New Zealand.

“What bothered me was that emissions reduction in soil wasn’t even discussed at the event,” Baker said.

“That was absolutely staggering and made me wonder ‘what’s going on with the organisers’ agendas’ that soil could be left out of it.”

It seems as though the government is fixated on planting pine trees to halt emissions but nobody on tractable land wants to do this, he said.

“No farmer who grows crops or livestock wants trees. This is the reaction I am getting and I can understand this but what staggers me is that farmers don’t understand the huge amount of emissions that come from cultivating the soil.

“If you cultivate one hectare of soil you emit about the same amount of carbon equivalents as 1200 cows standing on that hectare belching for a day.”

So everybody is worried about the emissions coming from animals but no one is worrying about the soil- it is the biggest emitter, Baker said.

About 20 per cent of all the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from the world ploughing the soil to feed itself. That’s a heck of a lot!

Baker told field day organisers he wouldn’t come all the way down to Canterbury (from Fielding) for the conference but would submit a written question to the panel. He did this, mentioning that about 9.5 million tonnes of CO2 goes into the atmosphere from one million hectares of cultivated land reseeded in New Zealand each year – but his question never came up.

“This was very disappointing,” he said, as he was listening to the event online.

Talking to other soil scientists they couldn’t believe that the issue was never brought up, Baker said.

“Regenerative agriculture is all about getting the soil biology going – carbon is stored in three places in the world- in the oceans, in the soil and in the animals and plants that grow on the soil.

“If we banned the plough and everyone did low disturbance low tillage – we would mitigate something like 24 per cent of emissions from farming.

“And yet nobody seems to be giving this any traction.”

Baker said he went down to parliament and spent time with James Shaw (when he was in opposition) and told him about the soil issue “but when he got into government as Minister for Climate Change he didn’t want to know.

“This was disheartening.

“So I’m am staggered that if you hold a field day in Canterbury, the heart of ploughing, in Mid-November, why soil doesn’t get mentioned?”

• By Pat Deavoll