Professor David Rowlings addresses the soil carbon summit as Ben Sawley from Agrimix watches on.

ALMOST a month after the Federal Government made its largest ever issuance of soil carbon credits to Queensland producers, the soil carbon industry has come together to discuss the way forward for the burgeoning sector.

Today’s Soil Carbon Summit was the first of the three-day Nature Based Solutions conference at the Brisbane Convention Centre – with the two credit earning aggregators, Carbon Link and AgriProve, making presentations, along with technology providers and scientists.

About 200 were in attendance and when asked for a show of hands about half of them said they were primary producers.

While soil carbon farming has recently seen its biggest development since it began with three projects issued credits, a cautious optimism was evident among the delegates as the industry prepares to make its projects stand up to scrutiny.

‘Permanence’ was one of the big issues on the agenda, with those projects now needing to demonstrate that they can keep the carbon in the soil for at least 25 years.

Qld University of Technology professor David Rowlings said transparency was key to making sure there was confidence in the issuance of soil carbon credits.

“The soil carbon industry is going to be collecting a lot of data and what you are going to be collecting in the future will outweigh what we are going to be collecting as scientists,” Prof Rowlings said.

“My plea is to make that available to us as a scientific community, put it under peer-review and make it open and transparent so we can have confidence in what is going on and that international partners can do the same.”

The conference also covered some of the technological advances of remote monitoring soil carbon and data collection.

It is set to hear from the Australian Governments special representative for agriculture Su McCluskey, along with producers, scientists and the Clean Energy Regulator.

• Beef Central will have more with Prof Rowlings and others at the conference in the coming days.

Faces at the conference

Stockyard Beef’s Lachie Hart and Marcus Doumany taking a look at the Nature Based Solutions conference.

Naoya Takeda from Queensland University of Technology and Ganesh Bhattarai.

Sam Farrier and James Telford from Carbon Asset Solutions a new carbon trading system entering Australia.

Paul Rogers and Susan Vail from Salisbury Plains Grazing in North Queensland came to the conference to investigate the possibilities of carbon.

Christine Ward and Suzette Bagnell from Carbon Farmers of Australia who organised the conference.

Md Noor E Alam from the University of New England, Briana Carney, Camilla Cowley and Annabel Sides from the New South Wales Local Land Services