 Well, welcome everybody today to Hydrotera's webinar series. It's fantastic to see so many people enrolled for this one. Really appreciate it. And we have a very interesting speaker talking to us today. It's Philip Mulvey from Environmental and Earth Sciences and Carbon Counts to Company Set. Phil's going to talk to us today about soil carbon farming, background measurement, modelling and error. It's obviously a very topical thing in the environmental space at the moment being able to measure it because carbon is worth money. And we need to solve that big problem of how to start trading it. So before getting into the detail of the webinar itself, just a couple of things about our speaker. There's a picture of Phil for you. So a bit about Phil. So I've known Phil for many years. I used to work for Phil and certainly learned a lot from Phil. He's a great mentor and a very good soil scientist. He also does a lot of other things. So Phil is a consultant and he's certainly done a lot of work in contaminated land. He's an EPA auditor, for example. But he's also, unlike many consultants, he's embraced contracting. So he loves being involved in solving problems, not just coming up with a solution but actually implementing them. He's got a passion for research and has been really proactive in the area of soil science in particular, lecturing and getting involved in collaborative research. He's an entrepreneur, he's got many businesses that he's set up. And lately he's become an author and he's written a fantastic book which sits on my bedside table and Phil's insisting that I read it. But there's a picture of the cover and I'd certainly recommend that you have a look at that book. In terms of him, he's proud to say he's a soil scientist except to customs officers as he gets a bit sick of having to clean his boots. But he's had over 35 years of experience practising soil science, particularly in the landscape scale of things. He remains passionate about the subject and the value of the profession, particularly with regard to their role in landscape repair. He's been involved in crazy diversity of projects. It would appear that Phil's got four lives in one. Just a little bit of a sort of synopsis of a few of them. He's built army bases in East Timor. He's supervised the erection of the largest tent in the UK. He's sold meat pies in the US. He's cleaned up two uranium mines, developed townhouses on landfills, rewrote the manual on oil palm development in Sumatra. So that was four acid sulfate soil sort of things. He's evaluated rehabilitation of the desert in Kuwait, participated in the first green city design in the world, evaluated degraded land on the Manaro and he is represented Australia in sailing. He currently has several businesses in environmental soil science, whole of farm management, remediation and civil earthworks and property development in which he has trained numerous scientists, including myself, in the art of commercial scientific problem solving. He's also a father of four and a grandfather, soon to be of four. His family are undecided whether he is a pain in the ass all the time or only part of the time. Now these words were given to me by Phil, so I feel comfortable to say that to you. But it's great to have you here today, Phil. Really appreciate you participating in this. I can say Phil is a really forward-thinking soil scientist and he is what we probably need to help us solve some of these current challenges in this area. Just before we charge into things, we love your questions. As I'm sure a lot of you know, you place your questions in the Q&A section at the top of the screen. Click on that and type away. And at the end, we will leave some time for questions. Phil has a lot of slides to get through today, but he's promised me that he will get them done in time for us to be able to address some of those questions. Why does Hydrotera undertake these webinars? Well, we love sharing knowledge. We like to facilitate education and we like to help lead the industry and I think we're lucky here to have an industry leader in Phil. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Phil and he's going to talk to us about soil carbon farming. Thanks very much for the introduction, Richard. It's a pleasure to be invited by Hydrotera, a company in which we use their equipment, both purchase and hire. So there's a mutual plug back, Richard, so I do appreciate your role in the industry. So that's the next slide, please, Richard. So Richard's given a great overview of myself, somewhat flattering. But the key thing to pick up, which is important to understand in the soil aspect, is that Environmental Sciences owns quite a few soil sampling rigs that we've undertaken soil sampling commercially for over 30 years and that's important when it comes to understanding measurement in soil carbon. But we also do, and as Richard said, environmental orders are involved in repair of degraded land, so having that experience of order is also important. Next slide, please, Richard. Why the excitement about soil carbon? Because sequestering carbon to soil is essential for restoring the climate, way more than the climate, landscape, community, and actually in saving our civilization. There's quite a few books in the last 30 years that have actually talked about the fact that degraded soil and degraded landscape has led to collapse of most of the previous civilizations. Next slide, please, Richard. What is really important about it, it does not just draw CO2 out of the atmosphere, but it also reduces the heat source that causes the earth to heat up. Next slide, please, Richard. Most of you might be familiar with some of these slides, but these are taken from the UNFCCC and the IPCC. In 2017, it was estimated that we'd reduced the 1.5 degrees, we would get to 1.5 degrees global average heating by 2040. And unless we found a way of reducing CO2 in atmosphere, stopping emissions themselves going up was just not enough. So we have to sequester, we have to actually take CO2 out of the atmosphere. And the second best opportunity of doing that apart from oceans is both vegetation and soil. And soil is three times the amount of what you can store into vegetation. So clearly it's a really important aspect of what needs to be done. Next slide, please. The benefits of increased soil carbon just need to be briefly touched on. And some of these are actually dear to hydrogeologists' hearts such as Richard and Hydro-Terra because the off-site impacts of soil carbon through increased infiltration on the farm are significant. You increase baseline river flows. You have less drastic floods. You have less frosts across the district, less hot spells on farm. You have return of a small water cycle with increased effective and total rain in the region. But the benefits to the farm are significant also is you have decreased cost of sales, which indirectly is obviously more profit. So you have better water use efficiency, less chemical usage, less fuel due to softer soil and less chemical application and higher yields in average and dry years. Next slide, please, Richard. So what is soil carbon? It's banded around and people don't fully get what it is. So soil carbon is dead living matter in the soil and it's breakdown products consisting of several overlapping time-dependent pools. Next slide, please. So these three pools of carbon are shown here. The yellow is a labile. It only lasts a short period from hours to maybe a week in the soil. The semi-permanent goes from weeks to several years and is the largest pool and the intractable being the blue is lasts from years to decades and occasionally out to hundreds of years. The balance between mineralization, which is conversion to CO2 in the atmosphere and humification, which is conversion to soil carbon varies in every soil and with rainfall events and management. But ultimately, under natural systems in the landscape, it reaches a balance where there's a certain amount of humification and a certain amount of mineralization occurring all the time. Next slide, please. Under agriculture, we proceeded with soil carbon mining. Next slide. So what that actually means is you run from down one, two, three, is yes, you have cropping and you have livestock, which are putting carbon in, but that is rapidly mineralized as well. But because it's mineralized, there's no humification under the traditional agricultural systems or very little humification, except in the very, very wet years. You end up in a circumstance where the demand to move into the labile pool from the intermediate pool increases because humification is not occurring. So you see in slide number one, that's after about two decades that the intermediate pool has shrunk substantially and the overlap between the pools is reducing. After about five decades, 50 years, you can see that the mineralization has continued and the overlap gets less and the size of all the pools are decreasing with the labile pool slowly becoming more dominant. Understand the labile pool only lasts up for a week or two. So it's part of the decay process that it will be there even during mineralization. And by the seventh decade, you're having a situation where there's almost no overlap in pools and the drawdown from the long-term pools, the intermediates and the intractable, barely occurs because there's almost none available to be mineralized and the labile pool itself is rapidly mineralized, so it remains slightly larger and more dominant than three pools. That's the state that most agriculture exists at the moment. Next slide, please. If you proceed with soil carbon sequestration, the following happens. What happens is you start to increase humification and it might only be one or two percent over mineralization. So graphics one, two and three represent approximately one, 10 and 20 years plus. So how do you increase the humification? Because you can see mineralization is still occurring. It's not that you don't get it. You just got to gradually increase the humification, which is associated with a slightly low oxygen demand in the soil because oxygen is rapidly consumed. So you do this by minimizing background. You have multi-species systems. So your pastures are strongly perennial based and diverse and your cropping systems are sophisticated rotation systems. Use alternate fertilizer regime to salts of acids and salts of acids being our traditional manufactured chemicals drive the pH down. And you use mob grazing or cell grazing concepts. And the aspect of what you do there is you only move the stock back onto the pasture when the plant is living off sunlight, not root energy. And you need to get to the second or third tiller stage of the plant before you bring the mob back on. So by constantly grazing, you actually diminish the roots and diminish the capacity of the plant to recover. Next slide, please. So that's an overview of soil carbon and the roles it plays. Let's now jump down into soil carbon sequestration as a commodity. They're interesting. How come Australia leads the way on offsets? And this is quite an interesting question because all we ever hear from the various media is that Australia is appalling in carbon. And it's true that in terms of the emission reduction race, we're well back in the field. But in terms of the offsets, we're actually the gold medal standard. So let's have a brief look at where we are in stopping emissions because Australia is handicapped by energy. We don't have a nuclear energy in our portfolio. Our GDP is heavily dependent as is our employment and obviously our politics in regard to the fact that two major exports is LPG and coal with the top of those three being iron ore. So two of our top three exports relate to exporting energy that does produce greenhouse emissions. And then finally, which is not often talked about is we're a large country with a small population. And that means all our infrastructure and the cost of infrastructure and laying down cement on roads and pathways and so on produces CO2 emissions at a higher rate than Europe with a much vast, greater population and small amount of roads. So our density in the country means that we must be producing way more emissions and just moving things around. Europe has an inside run in stopping emissions. They have a degree of nuclear power. I think France is 100% nuclear power and green power, but nuclear power is about 80% of it. They import the power up until recently anyway when Germany is now scrambling as is in the UK to reconsider greater dependency on fossil fuels. They're not a resource based country. So the GDP associated with exporting energy dense resources or carbon dense resources is not a debate that needs to be had and there's small countries with very large populations. So they will always be ahead of us in the emissions race. But if you look at the offsets Australia says, right, well, the only way we can actually compensate greatly is to get involved in offsets, which we did from 2007. Very forward thinking by the Labor government was picked up again by the Liberal government and pushed along quite substantively. So both governments is focused on offsets. Now in Europe, offsets weren't even considered to COP26 November last year. So around the rest of the world, USA, Canada, all the world, offsets are only just starting to be considered now and they're looking to the Australian system to do it. It's not reported in Australia that we actually lead the world in our regulated high integrity carbon offsets. Next slide, please. So let's look at the available schemes by the Australian international landholders. In Australia, we have a system that's regulated by the clean energy regulator and overseas there are a series of standards that have different standard agencies such as Vera and gold standard. New Zealand is probably the only other one that picks up offsets and has a regulated scheme. Nowhere else in the world are the regulated schemes that pick up offsets. There's certainly schemes for trading, but they don't consider offsets. Next slide, please. So regulation versus standards is a really interesting thing because regulation tends to be tightly prescribed. You know exactly that a ton of carbon in one area should equal a ton of carbon on another farm, one farm to the other, and supposedly should equal plantation and human-induced revegetation, though there are some differences in the quality of that. Standards, unfortunately, tend to be a set of principles to be followed. They're not actually tightly regulated or prescribed, so it means that they can be changed more rapidly, but under particular, say, Vera 0042, you can have a 100% model system, a model system with some sampling, or a intense sampling system, and they all comply with the principle set down. The outcome of this is the integrity of the standard has to be tested by the purchase of every purchase, where an Accu is at least as known as having the highest integrity worldwide. As I said, ignoring the domestic publicity we've received recently. Next slide, please. Surprising enough, we are being asked frequently by overseas customers to provide an Accu equivalent through Vera registry. So there's a move in the world to have a tightly measured system that's highly prescribed and people understand what it's worth. Next slide, please. So let's look briefly at finding the most applicable offset methodology, offset principles. So the offset principles are set worldwide. Nothing to do with Australia are the following. There must be an additional practice done that wouldn't happen without the revenue from carbon. It needs to be verified, i.e. monitored, reported, and then finally verified by a credible third party, i.e. an auditor. It must have permanence that will not be reversed. It must be measurable according to scientific data through a recognised methodology, and you can't actually increase emissions in order to achieve the sequestration. So you've got to avoid leakage. Next slide, please. I'm sorry, that shrunk up. It shouldn't have happened, but that's okay. Next slide, please. This applies to maximising your carbon opportunities. This applies for all methods. You need to reduce the error associated with assessment. That's all methods. The soil carbon method, understand the controls of carbon sequestration to make sure that you achieve permanency. Reduce emissions associated with all the activities you do and ensure reversal does not occur and permanence is achieved. Next slide, please. Let's look briefly at model versus measurement. It's interesting when you start to look at how models were derived and what models were about. Models look at flux. That's the change in concentration with time. And models were designed initially at 150 mil. They were calibrated on sampling to 150 mil and were verified by sampling again to 150 mil of depth from the surface. Accuracy and variance is not so important. Modelling requires, as a result, minimal verification. And modelling is focused on carbon concentration distribution maps for farmers to use. So they actually are concentration distribution, which is a lot easier to achieve through modelling. Trading carbon, on the other hand, is a minimum depth of 300 mil. Now it's important to understand the two major models in the world, which is the DASET model, which is commercialised through a Comet farm and Roth C model. Both are done to 150 mil for carbon management. They're not done to trade carbon on a mass basis to 300 mil or to a metre. In those instances for trading carbon, accuracy and variance matters hugely. And what you record is the mass of carbon to a depth per legal title. It's not concentration-based. And the model that you get to be confirmed with sufficient precision to actually have a low variance, they're not yet designed for mass or focusing on the flux. Next slide, please. So verification and measurability or at least the variance of measurability is a huge problem for models. Every commodity in the world is traded on measures. So why do we expect carbon to be different? And the appropriate measurement is more profitable than the use of modelling as more carbon at a higher value can be produced for the train. And the one example on that is small countries with minimal variation in soil type under wet environments. So let's look at now how to reduce your error measurement. So error for those involved in sinus in the room is pretty simple. It comes from four things. One is being represented mass. Sorry about the slides marked up on the transfer. Two, precision, three accuracy and four error management. But the latter three, which are in larger script rather than the smaller script of the former are at least a 100th of the importance of representiveness. So representative of farm and sample is just the most important thing to achieve. Next slide, please. So for store carbon, the greatest variance is caused by representiveness. And that means where have to sample and the number of samples you need. And it involves a fairly complicated process that goes through stratifying, creating carbon stock maps and the like. Next slide, please. And this can only be done by machine learning. Understanding the controls of carbon sequestration and soil carbon. Next slide. It's important to consider and understand the fact that in regard to the soil carbon method that you have systems constraints, systems controls and management controls. Next slide. The system constraints are rainfall. Rainfall decides the rate of carbon sequestration. You can't sequest more than the water available to grow plants. Very important thing to understand. The second thing is the maximum amount you can sequest is decided by the charge of the soil, the cation exchange capacity. And the third thing is those two above assumes your management practices optimise the rate. Next slide, please. It's possible in systems controls to play around with effective rainfall and cation exchange capacity, but they tend to be long-term and expensive. So the key thing to focus on next slide is the management controls. So the issue about management controls is you have to promote increased humification over mineralisation, which means you have to have effectively the right balance in pH with somewhere between six and a half and eight. And the reason for that is in Australia a high degree of cation exchange capacity agricultural land is controlled by what's known as pH variable charge. So pH is important. And every time we take organic matter off via stock or crop, we lower the organic matter, which lowers the buffering of pH. And whenever we add acids, salts of acids and fertilisers, we also drop the pH. So we need to ensure that we buffer the system back. The next thing to understand is all human cells have a ratio of carbon, nitrogen, phosphate and sulphur. So to sequester carbon, it's not enough just to go with a bit of water, sprinkle a bit of extra water on the way you go. You actually need to provide the same ratio of the carbon you want to sequester of nitrogen, phosphate and sulphur. And they're best provided. Nitrogen can be by legumes and nitrogen fixing plants of different sorts. But mostly by legumes in our system. Phosphate can be provided by manures, but for Australia, we have way too great a demand in our system of phosphates that can possibly be met by manures and composts. It is possible to move to rock powders and without going into that, there's a lot more required, but it is now available to now use rock powders to provide your phosphate. If you continue to use salts of acid fertilizers, then there has to be a correction of pH. The next most important thing to achieve is to ensure the fungi exceed bacteria. In most of our systems, we have way low counts of fungi, bacteria dominate, and when they dominate, they tend to push mineralisation over humidification. Possibly to minimise macroporosty, which allows fast venting of CO2 and great input of oxygen. We need to maximise infiltration, so we need to avoid bare-ground compaction. The key point is that soil carbon is a crop with a long time period before sale, and retrospectively can degrade. So soil carbon farming, just looking at the things that you're required nationally to achieve, is the most important additionality of the newness factors that's called by the CER. Now, regardless of what you think can stop CO2 equivalent emissions such as an inhibitor of nitrification, these are the only ones allowed by law currently in Australia. Those highlighted are the ones most often used by farmers, and anyone who has already practiced those practices. Because of the ruling internationally that there has to be an additional factor to that currently practised, those practitioners that started early are penalised by the fact they can't claim the carbon unless they make another modification, as noted on this list of 1 to 13. Next slide, please. So leakage. You've got to look very carefully not only at your sequestration, but what are your on-farm emissions, and ensure that you don't go above the baseline. Next slide. So that means accounting for the nitrous oxide, the methane, the carbon dioxide, the fuel, the electricity, all your potential emissions on farm need to be accounted at the baseline at the next measurement or trade of carbon. Next slide, please. Permanence is addressed mostly at the government level. Next slide, please. So we're looking at permanence on reversal, like drought, and change of practice occurring on the farm. And then the permanence is addressed via regulation and using activities that achieve permanence. Next slide. So what the government actually does is to ensure that they address this. Next slide, please, Richard. So what the government does is that they actually give a discount, apply a discount to the carbon you achieve, 5% for risk of reversal, and a permanency discount of 20% that you're not achieving a permanence. If you can demonstrate at the end of your 25 years of permanence is achieved a certain degree, you'll be able to claim a portion of that. Next slide, please. So we're just briefly looking at returns. Returns, obviously, come from carbon trading, but I just want to briefly look at the increased profitability production and extreme event resilience, because some farmers have actually had huge benefits from these and started early on doing that before carbon trading was possible. So here's a farm that we've, two farms we've been monitoring for 15 years. This is one that started the 500 millimeter rainfall zone, which is just getting to the very edge of margin before cropping. And you can see that at the start, when it was 65% water utilization efficiency and the carbon was low, the farmer achieved on an average year only a surplus of 7,000 after the family taking income of 80,000. By the end of the 15th year, which is the third column along, the farmer had gone up to a surplus after tax of 260,000, a huge improvement with the family taking out 146,000. But the water use efficiency was close to maximum, 95%. That's what carbon does. Next slide. If you go to the more common areas of 600 mil cropping lands, those people believe you can't sequest carbon under cropping. But this shows not only you can, but the returns are achieved over 15 years and improvement water use efficiency that comes about from increasing carbon. So again, we've gone from 65% to 95%. And we're seeing the fact that the surplus after tax has gone up from 228,000 to almost 700,000 with the farmer increasing their take home income by 50,000 as well. Surprising enough, land in both Colcan and Ardleton 12 months ago, I haven't checked recently, was valued at much the same price in dollars per hectare. Next slide, please. The other aspect can come up is not just improve profitability, but in return of the small water cycle. This is a photograph of the rabbit proof fence in Western Australia showing that vegetative lands and a lack of, sorry, a reduction in what's called sensible heat has resulted in a huge amount of cloud formation over the green areas, which is pastoral. And the other side of the rabbit fence, which is cropping, you can see the difference quite clearly. So the return of the small water cycle is a key feature that comes out from carbon. Next slide, please. Here's an example from Tweed Heads during the late winter when sugar cane was harvested and a particular additive to increase the degradation of the organic matter of the cane trash resulted in a huge amount of microbial activity keeping the soil and the trash out of the soil slightly warmer resulting in a mist overlying the land. Next slide, please. The business modes, what are they? Because you hear a lot about this different approaches. So what we have for those that are involved, and this is just costing based off the carbon count SaaS platform, is the farmers can do a self-managed approach. There's a co-op approach. There's the project manager approach and the aggregator approach. Most in the market go with the aggregator approach to date where you're looking at the fact that the aggregators take a much larger commission and don't charge a hell of a lot to the farmer of the costs along the way. But the cost to the farmer also include infrastructure costs to alter the farm and their of a variable nature. So if you look at, that's the top end of the scale in terms of taking a significant amount of the profit at the end of the day of the commission on trade, 25 to 40%. If you look at self-managed farmer, the costs on the platform and running all the contractors are in the order of 60 to 100K over the life of the trade. Close to 60 if you're using the platform properly. If you're not using the platform, there's a lot of manual labor. You've got to pay for it's closer to 100. Infrastructure costs are variable, but the commissions in the range of less than 5%. So there's quite a difference depending on which particular business model you choose as a farmer. Next slide, please. In summary, I hope you took some notes, but the key point to remember is that increasing soil carbon is fantastic for landscape, community, as well as climate change. And that results in saving our civilization from further degradation that's occurring. So that's the key point out of it. It's not just about having the opportunity to trade, but it is to improve the local landscape. Next slide, please. Over to you, Richard. Thanks, Phil, but it was excellent. Very comprehensive. Look, we have a lot of quite a few early bird questions. So I'll probably skip along a little bit here. I think a couple of key points. Soil carbon is a crop with a long time period before sale, and it can retrospectively degrade. So that is a concern. And certainly, Phil, I felt that this requirement of it not being reversible versus all the schematics you put up would show that carbon is, in fact, reversible. So it's got me a little bit intrigued about the linkage between those two things. Maybe I'll just follow up very quickly now, Richard. It's not to do with the fact it's reversible or not. As long as you maintain the practice, humification will result in the pools increasing. So the key thing is the practice, not so much that the fact is it's readily reversed with drought or reversed with poor practice. That's the flux rate, the total mass that counts, not necessarily where it sits in the different pools. The second point that I haven't got on here that was interesting was just the relation between effectively planned available water or moisture and the ability to actually sequester carbon. So it doesn't matter how hard we try, if we don't have that moisture there. We're kidding ourselves. Which I thought was pretty important to understand. In terms of measurement, obviously where Hydrotera is focused as a business, the world of sensing is edging closer to having portable sensors to do this, but they don't exist yet. So we're still tied to laboratory analysis. There's certainly opportunities with spatial analysis, with satellite data to be able to look at the effectiveness of the land uses, but you can't bank against it. Is that right, Phil? Yes, there's no doubt there's a strong correlation in using Landsat imagery associated with a vegetation or a red index to predict what's going on and it's a useful assurance measure. But to actually trade, it doesn't have precision or accuracy associated and the variance is quite significant. So even if you take an R-squared of 0.95, that means your variance is somewhere around 15%. So if you keep and ask very few models will get better than R-squared of 0.98, which is where you actually need to go. Okay, so I think we'll get into the early bird questions. Thanks very much to everyone who sent these through. And then I'll move to the ones that are sitting in the Q&A. So what are your thoughts on practice changes that are applicable through the Australian soil carbon protocol or VERA and does this have room for nitrogen reduction and or elimination? Look, most of the practice changes have been through a rigorous scientific review panel. I've sat on two of them to get practices approved. It's unfortunate that there is benefits for changing fertilizer application you can use. That's one particular method. But the methods for using nitrification inhibitors whilst increasing your nitrogen fertilizers, which can result in reduced nitrous oxide emissions, which seems ironic, has not been actually accepted because though there's good scientific research to say that nitrification inhibitors to drastically reduce in most instances, not all, but in most instances, nitrous oxide emissions, that methodology is still under discussion. So it might be a year or two away before that's accepted in any method. Okay. So the next question, do you think satellite based assessments of annualized biomass provide a reasonable proxy for actively occurring soil carbon sequestration? Yes, they do. For the top 150 mil or so, what's going on deeper is a little bit more difficult. So you do actually need some measurement to calibrate your Landsat to pick up what's going on deeper, but it's only a proxy. So it's an assurance tool based on particularly plant-available water or water use efficiency as well. So it becomes a very good assurance tool rather than actually a trading tool. It's important to understand as I try to set out the difference between farm management practice and trading. The two are quite different. So it's very good for farm management, not so good at all for trading. So do the uncertainties of soil carbon distributions in the soil provide problems for benchmarking sufficiently to reliably underpin financial decision-making? Yeah, this is where, what I didn't say at the outset is that we're funded through PhDs to look at a new type of geostatistics that underpins what we do and is actually the basis of the 2018 and 2021 Australian soil carbon method. Though we licensed the easy part of it but held back the more difficult part. So the issue here is that the best way to describe this is uncertainties reduced by unequal area stratification using features of a pedogenic commonality across the landscape. So what that means is if you've got the same geology and the same topography and aspect and the same vegetation, it's logical to expect that the carbon distribution would be smaller if that was considered as one population rather than you've got a series of other common populations and you analyse them all as one population adding up the means and adding up the variances. When you compare to look at the whole farm as a single population, the variance is going to be much, much greater. So that is the approach taken by the new type of geostatistics and yes, it does produce a variance, no doubt about it, but that variance means that you take the lower the variance on the second measurement you do and the upper point of the baseline or the first measurement that you do and that's the amount you trade. So that can be traded with surety. So yes, it is a sufficiently reliable system for financial decision making. It's not soil carbon distribution that we are making our financial decision on at all. It is actually soil carbon mass. Still subject to a frank problem. Not quite. We're not concerned about distribution from a trading point of view. We're simply concerned about the total measurement of mass sorry, of mass and its variance and we only trade the component we're certain of. So this is the problem with models is the variance is so much greater that there's almost well, there is nothing left to trade effectively. And so that's that is the issue related to soil carbon is you can only actually trade the difference between the upper and lower variances of the first and second measurement. Okay. In terms of not on the list just a little sneaky question I suppose. You mentioned earlier about the ratio between fungi and microbes in the soil and how if it's microbially dominant that effectively we're getting a lot of mineralisation therefore loss of the carbon out of the system is that fact it in at all in these assessments of the actual carbon number or doesn't that matter as such. When the soils dominated by bacteria chances for humification are less than when the dominated when the microbial population is dominated by fungi. Our fungi dominance you're not going to greatly increase humification but you don't need to measure microbes to do that you can actually simply do standard penetrometer tests or standard soil texture tests or even just start to get to know your soil to see that the carbon is increasing. So it's not necessary to do a lot of microbial investigation to do it. The method the soil carbon 13 methods or assume they will impact microbial of the soil biome with time and result in humification occurring. So the measurement itself is based on two lots of measurement the difference and you trade the difference after considering the variance. So you don't actually have to confirm that humification is occurring because you only trade the carbon that has been sequestered. So how viable in central Australian cattle stations? Well moisture is much lower. So rainfall is much much lower. Sequestration can occur with change in practice but it's very slow and the amount you can sequester is not that high but because the area is so great it's certainly viable to undertake and we got quite few properties that we're doing at the moment soil carbon sequestration in central Australia but there's no point doing you know frequent unless you're in the wet years at the moment there's no great point in doing frequent process or frequent measurement typically should be leaving it to five years rather than three years. Can the financial benefits of carbon farming be better distributed? Yes probably but at the moment so few farmers have started because of the costs of starting it's a question of not so much the financial benefits better distributed but can the costs be more evenly distributed to reach uptake because the financial benefits are significant off-farm as we've just talked about so the off-farm benefits relate not only to climate but to very localised impacts of return of the small water cycle less intense floods less intense hot spells etc. Why estimate soil carbon when you can measure it? I'm with you on this but there is a reason we actually do we run models to work out where to sample based on those models and once we use that, that reduces the cost of sampling. You can also have 5000 samples in a given area and produce a worse answer than 300 samples or even 100 samples because if the 5000 samples aren't done in relation to improving your population statistics you can end up with still quite a significant variance. So it's not so much measuring or grid basis it's more a matter of measuring on the basis of stratification so the variation in the landscape and to help derive that you do actually run with an estimate of occurrence of soil carbon across the landscape and that requires modelling initially so yes we do estimate the distribution of soil carbon on that basis work out which of those soil carbon ranges are going to have the smallest variance and then split up the number of strata accordingly. So the reason you estimate soil carbon is to reduce the variance associated with measurement. How how the soil carbon farming is practised and a minimum size so what's the minimum scale to undertake soil carbon farming Well that's a really interesting question the minimum size is not always a matter of what carbon trading is worth that sugarcane farms 90 acres and in the last three years it's flooded significantly in Tweed heads every year he is the only farmer below 2 metres AHD so in the lower flood plain that's got a crop off at almost full potential every year and that is a result of soil carbon so the measurement of soil carbon and understanding where to improve it on his farm even though the farm only has a 20 centimetre variation across his whole farm that information has resulted in the fact that he has probably achieved another $360 to $400,000 in the last three years through carbon management so it depends why you're doing soil carbon management if you're doing it just to sell then it's a combination of how much you can increase your soil carbon versus land size to overcome the costs of it to get the quantity of carbon needed but that should not always be the main reason for doing it so that same farm in Tweed heads had soil carbon that varied from 1.9% to 8% so if he was able to lift the mean up to somewhere around 6% or 7% gross mean of about 2.5% then he's got an increase in order of 4% carbon which would be unheard of in the dry areas where you'd be lucky to get 1% carbon increase so therefore the small size of the farm and the opportunity to trade is in his case quite viable at scale but the main benefit came from him was not the carbon value but the actual improved yield he got because of his flood resilience okay why does soil organic matter why did soil organic matter not exceed 3.5% to 40 years of organic farming people confuse organic farming with sustainable farming every civilization prior to about 1940 that collapsed due to agricultural misuse were all organic so let's not get overly confused with the concepts between organic and the use of manufactured chemicals in farming organic farming is often not sustainable because they are continuing to mine the organic carbon from the soil without having practices necessary to return it so just because you're organic doesn't mean you're sustainable many organic farms are but more undertakes sustainable practices so it is important to understand the two don't equate and in many civilizations all agricultural civilizations and all civilizations failed in the past because of agricultural misuse in the landscape organic farming is no different if it doesn't consider the sustainability fact that it has to maintain or increase organic carbon so I have no problem that even after 40 years it was only 3% because the focus wasn't on increasing humification the focus was on not using manufactured chemicals and the objectives are quite different and the outcomes are quite different makes sense next question spectrometry for soil carbon measures what is the current status of such utilisation in the field look at at least 7 commercialisation projects going in Australia at the moment on this there's probably another 30 or 40 worldwide there's a variety of tools that use a variety of spectra but mostly mid-range infrared some use variable light spectras and comparisons some use lasered mid-range infrared so there is a variety that occurs at the moment those some of the spectrometry is getting up with r squared values 0.85 or higher they have to be calibrated for every field and the methodology required by the government requires 30% lab analysis for calibration single researcher has yet commercialised though there is one overseas called Yardstick which is getting close has commercialised infield spectrometer that can be driven to a metre and do readings of both bulk density and carbon either on the way down or on the way back that is the ultimate goal it's not available yet it will certainly be routinely available I think within three to five years so spectrometry association with soil carbon is strong it's not yet rigorous enough to survive in the field the sensors themselves both the emitter and the recorder don't survive world vibrations there's a lot of people working on this going into it there's quite a few different commercialisation research institutes involved it will be cracked and be commercially viable and be cheaper than the labs within two or three years maybe five but at the moment it's not cheaper than physically sending out a person taking a sample and sending it to the lab but it's coming do you think it's not a question here it's easier to monitor the land use change than it is to try and come up with this fixed number for carbon in the soil wouldn't we be better off pushing for direct measures at that sort of management level this is the approach in the US, the previous approach in Canada and the approach in New Zealand the problem is that farmers are so variable in their practice and they might say this is the following practice we're doing and you can run some assurance through Landsat that it's very hard to actually trade into the market with confidence an individual farm at the government level you can trade a portfolio that's going to have below and above the mean and you can do it on that basis that's what New Zealand Government has approached today as a portfolio level but if you're trading in an open market in fact let me put it another way to you Richard would you you're with a couple of mates, you play poker and you're sitting across from the pub in a foreign country in a room on the first floor and you've got a set of binoculars and you've got to order some beer so you take your binoculars you can see there's three different sizes you don't know what they are it's hard to estimate what they are and you don't know the language except you know what brown liquid so you want to order for beer but you've got to be careful what you get so you could get ginger beer you could get full strength beer you could get low alcohol beer you could get no alcohol beer and you could get a media skirm or a pint and they could be half full or completely full it's hard to estimate even with your binoculars because it's people moving backwards and forwards and so forth so there you are standing remote with your binoculars looking out and you're going well I can run the chance that based on the statistics I get from the Bureau of Media from the the government statistics that the so many pubs produce X amount of ginger beer Y amount of full strength and Z so I can run an average and just take a punt or or I can order a standard glass with a standard measure of alcohol and be told that if I buy this beer it's actually got 5% alcohol at a pint level 600 ml and I know exactly what I'm getting so most people buy in fact everyone buys commodities on measures but governments use models to estimate what populations are doing so as an individual buyer are you going to run with a model Richard when you order your beer or are you going to buy by a measure well it depends on the accuracy of the measure and you say you are looking at the variance I'd probably buy a beer based on my binoculars but that's probably not the answer you were thinking of why do you get drunk so often but anyway move right along hey yourself next question how we estimate carbon in soil of closed mine sites and incorporate it to successfully to successful rehabilitation and re-vegetation I think can we I think can we use this to get some revenue for rehabilitation look you can the buffers owns but because mines are regulated to rehabilitate it's not a newness factor so even though getting organic carbon into tailings onto waste rock is actually absolutely essential to making an artificial topsoil by composting to stopping weed invasion it's required by the license and therefore is not an additional factor that depends on the income from carbon sales to do it so therefore under international regulations the mine closure rehab is not eligible but the buffer zones are eligible right we're now over to the Q&A sessions we're a little bit over time are you okay with us going a bit longer Phil I know I'm not too sure if anyone's still there Richard so that's probably the first thing to check there's 93 people still left Phil they're just probably asleep and forgot to switch off I'm happy to take questions Richard does biochar fit into the equation yeah biochar is really interesting as is periodic burning for charring in the pastoral zone once every five to eight years or so biochar after six months attack in the soil by fungi becomes charged and it's one of the few ways you can increase the cc of a soil albeit for shorter duration then mineral increase but it's one of the few areas you can you can increase the charge so it is definitely a benefit to use but currently methodologies don't yet consider that as a worthwhile means of increased sequestration but we're hoping with time will be considered providing you take away the embedded carbon as associated with the charring so yes it is a stimulant to further sequestration in low charged pH variable soils there you go Locke thanks for the presentation Phil are you advocating measurement only schedule one as opposed to model and measure approach schedule two I'm not both schedule one and schedule two we do and we do successfully for clients because Australian system does have measurements in it schedule two requires calibration of the model with at least three measurement events before you can rely on the model alone am advocating is most amount of carbon using modeling to work out where to measure and then following with measurements and then modeling again to work out where to measure the second time round gives you the smallest variance and therefore the most carbon to trade other than calibrating a model and then just moving forward on the model so it's still a personal choice because the people think that the cost of measurements is substantially less so certainly more than the cost of modeling it turns out that's not the case and the reason being the economics sampling so if you send a sampler out to sample three samples to validate a model it costs the same as sending a sampler out to do 70 samples to 30 centimetres or 40 samples to a metre which is about what you need for a thousand hectare farm on a properly derived sampling program so in terms of the average farm close to the average size farm in Australia the cost of sending a person out to sample is the same whether you model or whether you measure the only difference at the moment is the lab costs and they will come down as spectometry starts to become more widely available I'm not necessarily abocating one over the other they're both approved methodologies but I suspect that the return actually means that when you're relying on your trade solely on measurement as the final arbitrator you may well use modeling to work out where to sample but if you're relying on two measurements then the market will value that more highly and the variance will be less so you'll have a higher integrity more carbon to trade but this will be decided in the future so I'm interested to see what happens seems a little bit of a flaw if you say every five years you go into your soil tests and you've done always good work as a farmer and you've effectively been sequestering carbon for say four of those five years and your numbers plummet and you come along into your soil tests wouldn't it be better or wouldn't it be fairer and more practicable to be rewarding the management practices that held onto that carbon for the four of the five years No, no yes and no the answer is that a well managed system won't result in a plummeting of carbon doing a drought it might be a slight reversal but it's steady during the drought where most of the neighbouring farms that aren't undertaking those practices will end up with a lot of macroperosity they won't carry their moisture into the drought for 12 to 18 months they will lose it very quickly within a couple of months so they'll have to destock and they'll end up with a degraded landscape with as you've indicated carbon plummeting if you've undertaken appropriate practice you'll find that the levels of carbon that reduce on the environment those drought based situations are way way less in the adjoining farms they won't necessarily plummet they might just stabilise or cut back 5 to 10% so the previous four years will have given you the carry-through and so if you're in a situation that if you sample on the fifth year you can sample between the three and fifth year under the government's methodology so if you sample at the fifth year and you've had two years of drought before that you won't get 100% penalty of the three years that you've sequestered carbon but you will have some and the international requirement is to actually have demonstrated measurable sequestration and so the fact is that if you've gone backwards for the two of the five years and that's the measured amount that's the way it is but I can assure you that if you hit the drought at the fourth and fifth year you'll be way more as a farmer financially better off than the farmers that haven't done it at all Sir next question do you know how many tonnes have already been traded due to Australian farmers under this national protocol and what would that represent among land management trades in the world carbon market well Australia by far in terms of farm has the greatest number of trades in the world we started early and we continued I haven't checked the soil carbon so there's a variety of methods but let's just look at the soil carbon methodology a few months ago and I haven't checked most recently there was 350 registrations of projects now it's a bit confusing because not every project's a whole farm and some projects can be several farms so there is some degree of confusion in there but if you were to take the fact there's about 140,000 farmers in Australia with tax deductions and let's assume about 85,000 of those are full commercial farms where substantively if not all their income comes from the farm and if you look at that roughly say 350 to 400 that are now registered we're at the point of half a percent of the commercial farms in Australia so we're still at the point of just moving out of the innovators into the early adopters but we're still early days yet Is there a register it's available to the public anyone can jump into the CER the clean energy regulator they can look up the carbon offset register which has got over 1400 projects or 1500 projects total register at the moment they can then sort the carbon on that register and you should come up with 350 to 400 and the rest will be HIR and plantation mostly and Savannah burning so they're the four dominant ones plantation less so and then there will also things like landfill gas and so on which is 20 or so so you can actually go in and do a sort and look at set technologies Australian users and so carbon was literally two years ago was numb and now it's 20% of registrations can we also apply legumes at degraded soils at mine sites as part of land rehabilitation or is this only for agricultural farm management legumes are essential and most mines do apply particularly native legumes in their rehab screens to get to ecosystem balance you do need to get rapidly to nitrification surprising enough Australian systems actually dominated by ants and not worms so particularly most mines are in the desert country the ants particularly wild ants are great sequesters of nitrogen as well so you do get in our system both ants and legumes but also acacia and cacherinas nitrogen fixing so as long as you've got multi-storeyed systems looking to sequester nitrogen the grasses and the non-nitrogen fixing shrubs benefit from those so you might use a little bit of nitrogen to get started but after that you would leave it to the dynamics of your nitrogen fixes to help those that don't have it so the reason why weeds are able to criminalize quicker and the reason why after fires acacias get going quicker is they actually have nitrogen fixation on the roots and that's why they get going in what is basically a fairly poor soil the short answer is yes I shouldn't give you short answers not long answers we'll have a couple more questions maybe we'll finish up at 130 I think oh sorry we'll maybe give it five more minutes so what are the effects of soil temperature on carbon sequestration and respiration this is not a yes no question soil temperature results in faster respiration and faster degradation so in the tropics where you've got a lot of rain for you'd expect a lot of sequestration but often you end up with what's known as lead or leach soil where the organic acids get washed down and leach soil of nutrients and most of the organic matter stays in the top 150 mil so effectively you're dealing with a system is operating on a mineral mineralizing so quickly that shouldn't be for humification mineralization is important we don't want to stop or mineralization because that ends up with peat but we do want humification to have some degree in the soil somewhere around 5% of total organic matter that appears in the soil 95 gets degradated but if 5% keeps getting humified you end up increasing the soil organic matter so it's associated with it the other thing is increasing heat results from bare ground so if you don't have organic matter in the soil and plants above the soil you're not a vapo transpiring water which keeps which results in solo energy not going to heating the land if the solar energy goes to heating the land then you get more infrared being released in the afternoon evening and more heat being released back bounced off the blanket caused by the greenhouse gases back to earth so more heat on bad ground is a bad thing so bare ground is a bad thing because it rapidly has a twofold effect on climate change rapidly lifting the heat of the local area increased heat i.e. the tropics over vegetated ground is quite good in effect that it results in vast amounts of clouds forming and you get rain pushed in land a long way such as the Congo and the Amazon where you get rain up to 2,500km from the coast and 95% of that rain doesn't come from the ocean it's just recycled locally so that's a good thing but the penetration of organic matter in depth doesn't greatly happen because the turn over is so high at these warmer temperatures that you're getting some organic gases washed to the ground water producing tannin and leaching the soil but the vast majority of nutrients is taken into the system and so that means organic matter doesn't really fumify and those systems tends to be concentrated on generalization so it is a balance and understanding that balance is something that the farmer and the land managers and the park managers need to consider and achieve and how they manage their landscapes with both fire as a tool and agricultural management is another tool there you go Nick that's a pretty comprehensive answer next question do you think that carbon sequestration can reach a saturated state so to say therefore has capacity limits it would be reasonable to assume that carbon credit incentives will taper off relative to this reduction over time as soil sequestration moves towards its peak at a particular site as such do you think there is ability for current legislation to adapt to this change to maintain the level of credit incentives for stakeholders that's an excellent question I suspect in the first period of 25 years we won't hit saturation because it's taken us over 100 years to get where we've got particularly the first 50 or 60 years to degrade the carbon there's a thing called hysteresis which means we may not be able to go back at the same rate we came down at so in the first 25 years I don't think it's a problem in the subsequent 25 years it might have hit the maxima but the main driver for the farmer is you actually have so much improved long-term profitability and drought resilience associated with that soil carbon being there that really is worth maintaining the second thing to note is it's possible to create small uplifts in your soil carbon by the additive of cation exchange capacity to be able to create more opportunities for storing carbon there is an opportunity to push carbon down with depth at the moment we're looking at one metre but some researchers are looking at depths down to 10 metres I'm not sure if that's particularly viable yet there is no doubt there is interest in moving carbon beyond the 150mm zone beyond the 300mm zone down into the one metre zone and that will take longer than 25 years so this is still a very new space the opportunities of sequesting exist at least for 25 years before maxima start to be hit but then the opportunities are moving down the profile and other practices I think will come into being but the bottom line is it's in the farmers interest to maintain the increased humification because of the benefits in improved profit it gives okay next question as a lapsed environmental microbiologist how can you promote fungi in soil relative to bacteria so how do you promote fungi verses bacteria okay that's what I put in brackets biodynamic solution 500 or at least an adapted version of that many of our systems are so degraded you do actually have to bio enhance some way or other otherwise it takes quite a long time to increase so I'm all for an oculom or 11 probably 11 is a better way of putting it than an oculom so one method that's done and I've studied the science behind this and people always laugh but Steiner came up with the idea of burying a cow horn and putting into the cow horn some manure and leaving it in the ground for about 6 months get up into a tub of water the water can be straw soaked beforehand and there's benefit of doing that so straw soaked for 2 weeks putting the cow horn in stirring it and then within 24 hours spraying it back over the same padded the horn came from everyone used to laugh at that because basically and I'll take it a sense of ridiculous it's pulled out in the full moon you dance naked around the full moon and I'll say the story went which is not the case you've got a wooden paddle and you stirred 3 times in one direction and 3 times in the other so there was a little bit of razzmatazz but the science behind it is quite interesting so what you're doing is you're taking a piece of chitin which contains polymorphatic and heterocyclic compounds as well as quite complicated alkenes and alkins which is a way of saying quite a difficult chemical structure you put a bit of stimulant into it, a bit of manure and you dip it into the paddock at which you want to lift it the other way you can microbes can break down heterocyclics and particularly polyaromatics is to work together as communities so it's known as co-metabolising so to co-metabolise to talk to each other and fungi do the first bit which is to oxidise the heterocyclics and the pHs so they basically put a radical onto it which allows a group of bacteria to put a hydroxyl group in a bunch of bacteria to cleave the ring or to break the double bond and then start breaking it down but they do all that whilst they're used to the local bacterial phages and fungal phages that exist so these are viruses that attack them and can kill them so they're adapted to those local conditions that exist but they grow up in a favoured area to about 10 to the 8th which is a huge amount of microbial population you then take that microbial stimulant which is the teas are actually terpenes terpenes are a microbial stimulant you mix it for less 24 hours or less because fungi can't exist without oxygen and then you spray it out in the paddock and you put it out at around 10 to the 4 on the paddock so that means that you've now grown up, you've got a series of organisms from the paddock, you've trained them to work together on difficult environments you let the straw six months you let the paddock go to straw chop the straw immediately the day before you spray so you've now put on a whole bunch of community of microbes that work together that can survive the local conditions that can break down complex organic matter and they go like all hell providing that the balance in the water is balanced that's the MPS so that Steiner concept of brewing a cow horn it's actually got great science behind it so that's one way you do it there's lots of other ways there's a test known as the underpan test where you bury a pair of underpants and you dig them up periodically and see how quickly they break down and the quicker they break down the more fungi you've got in your system so there's lots of easy ways of looking at it but the way to get it sometimes is you actually have to introduce a lever back over the landscape sometimes nature needs a bit of a help anyway I hope that answers the question probably boring for everyone else I went into the detail of it but I love the fact that a system such as Steiner which works at the system level when you look at the individual components of biodynamics and break them down you can see how things work the philosophy of Steiner may not appeal to you the success of the system the science of it does work once you back through some of the gobbly goop that sits around it okay so thanks for that question Rob you probably want to try some of them in the privacy of your own home before taking them out commercially I would suggest one interesting thing that I've come across was RMIT was working on a sensor that was based on measuring the difference in the the resistance to electrical flow across a it was like a cellulose which degraded proportionally to the biological activities that were in the soil so in a sense a bit like underpan test but with I guess a bit more precision to it through applying that approach so there are these various studies going on into that sort of thing next question and I think we'll give it three more minutes is Phil able to tell us more about the ACU equivalent credit what did that mean equivalent in integrity or value or an internationally traceable ACU right Vera is a register and it creates a stand and so Vera 0042 is the standard associated with soil carbon we have chosen to offer to the market as a result of numerous requests the Australian system of measure model measure with the integrity of the Australian system for those who want to trade internationally via Vera 0042 so what it means is you use an international register but you're using the Australian method in Argentina or Australia or USA or Canada or France because people understand what that means and it follows a high integrity and it allows it to be traded at a own process internationally problem with Vera 42 or any of the standards as I said initially is exactly how the carbons measured can be highly variable as long as you can play with the principles of the standard so by offering an acuee through Vera people know that they're getting the Australian system but it might have been out of Argentina or it might be in America and on that basis they know it's a high integrity carbon trade okay next question could an independent farmer make a reasonable profit by increasing carbon and some of their less used lower quality paddocks claiming the offset certificates or are they better off focusing on improving their yields as a result of increased carbon I can answer that question by saying if there's $100, $50, $20 on the footpath do you only pick up $100 and walk away so the answer is if you're going to the effort to make a change in your production system and introduce it progressively over a period of time it makes sense to register the whole farm and go paddock and paddock at a time the cost and measurements of a few paddocks compared to a whole farm is not yes it's a slight increase but it's not hugely different the cost of running a project on a few paddocks to a whole farm is almost no different at all once you discount the measurement issue being able to include the lower performing paddocks into part of your farm management system rather than keep it separate does make it a lot easier in terms of overall farm in that they can be included is a basis and the other thing to consider is if it's a rotational system that you're using on your sorry it's a pastoral based system for your livestock is that it makes sense to go to move your stock from your best performing area within three days to your low performing area because you can move phosphate around your landscape by the fact that it takes three days for a ruminant to shit out poo and if it eats high phosphate grass or highly nutritious grass or that's high in grain nutrients and your poor performing land is low in micronutrients or low in phosphate they shit out that to improve the paddock so you can consider your farm as a total system in which you can consider the benefits of moving in some way the nutrients and micronutrients that are higher in one paddock to a paddock that's lower so it's a kind of different thought but it's a thought of looking at considering your farm as a system in whole as the poor performers as well as the high performers and then set the system up so that the high performers can help the poor performers so I'm not greatly for splitting a farm up into a series of projects because I think that makes it hard to manage the farm, it makes it hard for succession, it makes it hard for sale so my view would be to consider the farm as one project and not other views that just happens to be mine we're nearly done we've got three questions left when ours will finish them off is anyone still there Richard? there's 60 people left I think this is an absolute world record on the number of questions answered in one of our webinars thanks for answering them now here's one more for you Phil mentioned you get a proportion for 20% permanence deduction back after 25 years when you prove it is still there what proportion is this? I can't answer that question because I don't yet know regulators are keeping some things up their sleeves and that's one of them they've moved that report the 2018 method was 50% the 2021 method is 25% with the 5% for the reversal the 2021 method dropped to 25% and 20% being that key component for permanence so I can't answer that question that government is changing that as systems and farmer understanding and uptake improves so by the time we get to 2025 it might be as low as 15% I don't know and you might be able to claim the bit that the government has already held back but certainly in the last three years it's dropped my heart okay Giuseppe is very appreciative and would like to learn more that doesn't make me answer Phil next one with what you just said why can't an increase in soil organic matter of an increase in soil organic carbon then moved across the sample source soil organic matter is made up somewhere between 0.4 and 0.55% soil carbon depending on a few other things such as chars and so forth so there's no reason to talk but you can't run a walkley black that measures soil matter and compare it to a leco method that measures soil carbon and but the estimates you get of soil organic matter by on the run methods across the top of the soil or by remote sensing still has a problem of having a high variance an R squared factor between the actual number and what the on the run meter is reading so the problem is not that your organic matter can't be correlated with organic carbon it's what is the sensor being remote across the top of the paddock or in the ground is actually reading so yes there is a direct correlation for property between organic matter and organic carbon and for every soil type on the property so you can break it down to that you can get a high degree of accuracy but by the time you've gone to doing all that the costs of calibrating at that level may as well have measured so I hope that answers the question but understand that organic matter is typically given a value of 0.45 soil organic carbon interesting you know just to reflect on what you know the way the world's dealt with this before like lysimeters in agriculture and really understanding the processes and quantifying from those processes what happens and then extrapolating that out across broader areas given where we're at now with technology to be able to sort of spatially extrapolate assisted by spatial measurements from space I would have thought that's going to be better than the variance you're going to have with all this soil carbon sampling and testing you're doing do you have a view on that look Richard I am quite comfortable with it within 25 to 30 years our databases will be big enough to rapidly calibrate sensor technologies models that require very little sampling it's not there yet and the databases we have are so minute the knowledge we have moving down from 150 mil to 300 mil is not not strong and the models and the sample to calibrate those models aren't there yet USDA are about to release a series of the dascent model now calibrated to 300 centimetres on very limited number of farm activities so 300 millimetres I mean so at this point in time the database we have is too small to be able to use modelling to trade with a low variance but the market will decide there's no doubt people will trade using modelling and they'll get paid a low amount and the market at some point will decide the two are approximately equal and at that point the cost of measurements won't warrant the improvement in trade so this in the end will be a market decided issue guided by the databases and the quality of the models derived from those databases we have and the moment the databases are too small too poor not based on the science of flux rates which we're still grappling with at the moment macroporosity for instance and the impact of that production of macroporosity in soil so all those things are quite difficult and there's thousands of people worldwide working on this the databases are starting to build up and once they're there the market will decide but at the moment it's a long way off It'll be interesting to see how that all settles in terms of two more questions and then we're going to call it a day very important question what was your book shown at the start called it was called groundbreaking soil security and climate change it's a second edition is about to come out which might just be called groundbreaking it should be available in book shops in about two months the e-book is still available online but hardcover's not I have a couple of hundred of the first editions still left that I was taking around to ag shows and the like if they drop you an email Richards with their address and you let me know I can send them the details or they can go to the website which is just called groundbreaking soil security and climate change so they go to that it'll bring up the website and they can read a bit about the book and get links to the difference e-book retailers or they can get the details and I'll just drop them an email and get their details and send them a book at appropriate re-numeration Richard so just for everyone who's still here there's a recording of this webinar that has Phil's contact details on the last page of this so if you're wanting to chat to him more or get his book that would probably be a good way to get started last question this is a good question do you think globally soils have the capacity to hold all anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and reverse climate change like some people claim the short answer is no there's a long answer and that's why I published the book the reason no is that there are two factors involved with two substantive factors involved in climate change one is the blanket and the other is the heat source the blanket is the greenhouse gases the heat source is how the earth deals with incoming solar radiation and it deals fundamentally if you eliminate most of the side issues and what's bounced back into the space so all the solar radiation that hits the earth 95% of it gets converted to two things one is latent heat and the other is sensible heat latent heat is evapotranspiration sensible heat is heating the land and when the land gets hot in the evening it irradiates infrared now solar radiation can pass through greenhouse gases or the clouds and the greenhouse gas layer but infrared a greater portion of it gets reflected back to the earth and that's what causes the earth to heat but keeps bouncing back so the IPCC is focused on the blanket and you're going to see the history of that written in the book and why and they've ignored the heat source and all the models have ignored the heat source up until 2014 when they looked at the heat source on the inter-seasonal variability but didn't look at what was the impact in changing the heat source there was some modelling done by CSI in 2009 that looked at what happens if they kept CO2 at the same lands around southern Queensland continue to heat up and the answer was it would so reducing CO2 by sequestration won't account for all the CO2 that's gone up but even if it did it's not reversed climate change because we haven't addressed the heat source now fundamentally sequesting carbon to soil has the benefit of doing both not only does it remove CO2 it actually addresses the heat source by converting some of the sensible heat back to latent heat i.e. evaporate transpiration so I mean that's a Dorothy Dix book if ever there was one but that issue is foremost is that we need to do three things as a civilisation we need to reduce our emissions we need to get CO2 and other gases out of the atmosphere as much as possible but we also have to address the heat source and if we don't then we will continue to result in climate change or be at a slower rate if we only stop emissions so that's a kind of pessimistic view to finish but saving the landscape via soil carbon does actually have a huge impact on converting sensible heat back to latent heat very good Phil we're going to call it a day there you have one firm customer here for a book so we'll forward that on more after this but many things for your time and I think it's a measure of your knowledge that we've still got over 50 people online listening and really appreciate your time today no worries thanks Richard and thanks to the audience for listening we'll wrap it on a bit alright