Founders Highlight Series: Carbon Farming Foundation

For this month’s Founders Series, we interviewed the co-founder and CEO of the Carbon Farming Foundation (CFF), Lachy Ritchie. The CFF exists to make it as easy as possible for farming businesses to tap into the carbon farming opportunity and accelerate towards carbon neutrality. This enables farmers to enter the carbon market and promote more sustainable production practices. 

“Under our transparent and flexible delivery model, we give farmers the freedom and the flexibility to pick and choose from our menu of services that are best suited to their project goals, scale, and budget. The more work the farmer puts in, the lower the cost.” 

During this segment, we talk about carbon credits, their carbon farming model and the current data being collected on carbon capture.

1.What is the story behind the Carbon Farming Foundation?

The CFF was founded in 2020 by philanthropist Norman Pater and Myself. Norman and I share the belief that revegetating landscapes and implementing regenerative agriculture practices is critical for the world to reduce net-carbon emissions, enhance biodiversity and improve landscape health.

As managers of 57% of Australia's land mass, we see farmers as the key to moving our nation and the world towards net-zero emissions. That is why the CFF aims to make it as easy as possible for farming businesses to tap into the carbon farming opportunity and accelerate towards carbon neutrality. By doing this we hope to rapidly accelerate the uptake of carbon farming across Australia. We want to see healthier landscapes and more money in farmers’ pockets because they should be rewarded for playing a key part in this net-zero transition.

2.As carbon credits grow in demand, what benefits do you think we will start to see for farmers taking ownership of their carbon offsets?

There are countless benefits that come from getting carbon flowing through an existing farm system. It is a massive opportunity for a farming business to enhance the resilience and productivity of soils, crops, and paddocks. The issuance of carbon credits via a high-integrity accreditation program can then unlock a new revenue stream.

At the CFF we think that, like any other crop, landowners should have 100% ownership of their carbon crops. We feel that farmers should have alternatives to models where they do not control the trading of their carbon credits or where third parties take a huge percentage share of the credits. Farmers should reap the rewards of carbon farming and have the freedom to hold their carbon credits as an asset, trade them, or use them to be carbon neutral.

Carbon farming goes hand-in-hand with a farming business seeking carbon neutral certification. Alongside the obvious financial benefits of selling excess carbon credits, a carbon project can also help landowners to measure and show their stakeholders how many tonnes of CO2e they are storing in their landscape as carbon offsets. 

As the world strives toward net-zero emissions, it’s becoming increasingly important for businesses to demonstrate quantitative and qualitative data to prove their environmental credentials, such as through a formal carbon neutral certification program. This can ensure market access to markets with high environmental stewardship requirements (such as Europe) or to potentially earn a price premium for certified carbon neutral produce.

3.How does your Carbon Farming model work and how has the uptake from farmers been?

At CFF, we think carbon should and can be grown, managed, and sold, just like any other agricultural crop. Farmers just need the right tools in their arsenal to feel confident to successfully build carbon in their farming system. Under our flexible and transparent delivery model, we provide a suite of services, solutions, and resources that farmers can use to ensure their project is ticking all the right boxes.

Under this model, the farmer is responsible for the implementation and management of the carbon project whilst the CFF are remote specialists who stick to compliance, technical and process advice. The farmer handles the project whilst we handle the red tape and compliance. 

Our model gives the farmer the flexibility to choose their level of involvement in a carbon project. The more work the farmer puts in, the lower the costs. And as they have 100% control over their carbon crops, farmers keep 100% of the carbon credits.

The uptake of our model has been pretty exciting. Providing ownership of their carbon is a big selling point for landholders, especially in the case of achieving carbon neutrality. Our client list includes Cobram Estate Olives, ProTen, Wide Open Agriculture, Weelhamby Farm, Bettergrow, Plantation Pine Products as well as many more in the works! We have live projects in most states of Australia, including soil carbon, plantation forestry and biodiverse reforestation methods.

4.What data is being collected to measure carbon outputs through the DIY Carbon software?

It is currently difficult and expensive for a landowner to explore the financial viability of running a Carbon project on their land. The aim of our DIY Carbon software is to make it much easier and cheaper for landowners to assess the carbon yield potential and financial feasibility of carbon projects across their landholding, according to different project types (such as reforestation, plantation forestry or soil carbon).

Let dive into one of the current features. With just a few clicks of a button, the software provides a high-level estimate of the tonnes of CO2e farmers will store in their landscape, in addition to cost scenarios and earnings from planting trees on their property.

To develop this feature, we took the Emissions Reduction Fund’s FullCAM application and built it into a much more user-friendly interface. Without getting too caught up in the tech side of things, we’ve matched the exact way the ERF calculates carbon abatement when farmers plant trees on their property. This means that the CO2e yields that DIY Carbon calculates match the same carbon measurements as the ERF. 

Soil carbon projects generally don’t use the FullCAM model (because the most used method is measurement-based). In this case, we provide tools to help landowners to estimate a low, medium, and high carbon yield for a local region.

Then the software walks a landowner through a simple Q&A process to determine all the other assumptions around how they want to run their carbon project. The result is that our feasibility calculator generates profitability scenarios and cashflow modelling for a landowner to consider.

The net result is that financial feasibility assessments can be done in a matter of minutes.

5. Finally, as a relatively new not-for-profit, what has been your greatest challenge so far?

One of our biggest challenges is managing the growth of our team to meet market demand for our services. We are constantly on the lookout for passionate and talented people to join us in this important mission, but we are in a very tight talent market in Australia right now. We want our services to be available to as many landowners as possible, so are investing heavily in technology that reduces the staff hours needed per carbon project. We also provide tools and resources to help landowners to learn how to run the projects themselves.

Convincing landowners on-mass to adopt carbon farming is a slow process. We estimate that it takes the average “fence-sitting-farmer" at least 3 years to learn about carbon farming and to feel comfortable getting started with a project. There is a huge amount of misinformation and distrust within the industry. We are investing a lot of time and money into learning resources via www.carbonfarming.org.au to try to make things more transparent for farmers. But this is a huge job.

There are also some major challenges around supply-chain capability within the rapidly growing carbon sector. Being able to source seed, seedlings, and suitably skilled contractors (for example tree planting crews) is also a big bottleneck for the industry as a whole.

We are doing everything we can to address these challenges and would love to hear from groups interested in partnering with us or providing catalytic funding for strategic interventions. As a registered charity we are 100% mission-oriented and dedicated to pushing the industry forward, so are always keen to team up with others on the same path.