Frequently asked questions.

The duration of the programme is 5 years. By subscribing to Soil Capital Carbon, you commit to an initial GHG assessment at the time of registration (“baseline assessment”), and then a GHG assessment each year for the following 5 years. During the 5 years of the programme, 80% of your certificates can be sold immediately. The remaining 20% will be held in the buffer and can only be sold 10 years later (years 10 to 15) when we have been able to verify that you have retained the carbon added to your soil during the programme. This verification is done via satellite and no longer involves GHG assessments or data sharing.

During the programme, all farmers must:
- Carry out a baseline analysis using mySoilCapital;
- Carry out an annual assessment of the farm’s GHG balance using mySoilCapital;
- Implement relevant practices as best as possible;
- Keep a complete record of inputs (invoices), operations and yields;
- Cooperate with auditors if you are selected amongst the small sample of all participating farmers for an annual audit (including to check records such as pesticide inventories and official farm area and crop rotation declarations).

The retention period is the period following the 5-year programme. This is the period during which the farmer must, at a minimum, maintain carbon stored in the soil during the programme.
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During the retention period, all farmers must:
- Provide the results of a laboratory soil analysis carried out at the end of the five-year programme;
- Maintain the carbon stored in your soils for 10 years (key risk factors will be monitored by satellite).

Farmers must be able to present the following:
- All invoices for purchased inputs and purchased operations (i.e. those carried out by third-party contractors);
- Data on the farm area cultivated and crops in the rotation, in line with official declarations;
- The declaration of stocks of pesticides purchased but not used and stored, in accordance with legislation on the use of pesticides, for the season in question;
- Data from any farm management software used to record operational and input use data for the farm;
- Where applicable, operational and input use data reported to organic certification bodies;
- Official accounting details for the farm;
- All audit costs are covered by Soil Capital; you will not be charged anything.

The price for a typical farm is £980 excluding VAT for the baseline assessment and £980 excluding VAT for each annual diagnosis, so a total of £5,880 excluding VAT for the complete programme. Please note that the costs of any soil analyses (one at the beginning of the programme if you have not done so for more than 5 years, and another at the end of the programme) are not included in the programme. All other costs related to certification, possible audits and the sale of certificates are included in the price and no additional costs will be charged during the programme.

Yes. From a programme perspective, the area you farm cannot increase during the programme period. So, if you know that your area under cultivation changes slightly each year, you must enter the area that will remain under your control for the duration of the programme.

If you rent out a small part of your land each year, you can continue to register that land if you commit to providing the required operational data each year so that we can calculate the impact of your tenant’s practices.

Yes. Direct drilling, or no-till, is not a hard requirement to store carbon. There are other factors (such as organic fertilisation, cover cropping, minimum tillage, etc.) that improve the carbon balance in the soil in the model that we use.

Yes. However, the scientific conclusions of the IPCC (on which the carbon quantification model we use is based) consider that certain practices, i.e. minimum tillage, no-till, organic fertilisation and cover cropping, stop accumulating carbon in soils after 20 years, under the following conditions:
- Systematic use (i.e. every year)
- On more than 50% of the total area of your farm.
- If your farm meets these conditions, our programme is not optimal for you, as some of your practices will not continue to generate carbon certificates.

Soil Capital Carbon has been designed for farms with mineral soils – specifically, mineral soils with an organic matter below 10%. If your farm area includes peat soils or those with an organic matter higher than 10%, you can still enrol. However, we will exclude those fields from the farm area enrolled in the programme. We advise that the remaining area should be at least 100ha to ensure the programme benefits you financially.

To register, all farmers must:
- Provide the geographical boundaries of the farm’s fields via our mySoilCapital platform;
- Perform a baseline assessment of the farm’s GHG balance with mySoilCapital using data from the last completed season;
- Accept the terms and conditions of the programme. For tenants with less than five years left on their lease, an assignment of interest form must also be signed by the landowner;
- Provide the results of a laboratory soil analysis of your farm’s soil organic matter carried out within the previous five years.

No. If the two farming entities are managed in the same way (same machines, crops, management practices, etc.), you only have to pay for one programme because Soil Capital Carbon considers them as one farm.

No. Carbon payments are not cumulative.

Yes, although you cannot sell your carbon certificates for one crop twice, we can accept sunflower or oilseed rape crops that are already part of a GHG Bonus programme (e.g. BAS GES in France) into Soil Capital Carbon.

Yes. If the certification scheme is not a carbon payment scheme, it is compatible with the Soil Capital Carbon scheme.

We are in the process of evaluating whether it makes financial sense for farmers to enrol in the SFI 2022 Standard as well as Soil Capital Carbon, knowing that we would generate carbon payments for you relating only to the farming practices not required by the SFI for you to earn your SFI payments. Please contact us directly to discuss the specifics of your farm.

Soil Capital Carbon allows a farmer to sell carbon certificates and not carbon credits.

The certificates we issue are in fact bought by two types of company.

On the one hand, there are agribusinesses buying crops in the UK, France and Belgium that want to evidence reductions in the emissions of their supply chain.

On the other hand, there are companies not linked to farming that use the certificates to contribute to the decarbonisation of their region, but without using them in their carbon accounting. The difference between purchasing a carbon certificate or a carbon credit for these companies lies mainly in the possibility or not to offset their emissions and declare carbon neutrality. Carbon certificates do not allow a company to offset its emissions and declare itself carbon neutral, whereas carbon credits do.

- You will be paid a minimum of £23 per carbon certificate. This is the minimum price that Soil Capital commits to sell certificates at. In fact, we make a floor price commitment of €27.50 per certificate, which is £23 at a GBP-EUR exchange rate of 1.2; future prices are subject to the prevailing exchange rate at that time.

- This price can increase during the course of the programme if the price of carbon certificates rises, as is forecast. Certificates are sold annually and we guarantee farmers the same fixed ratio of the final sales price for the entire duration of your commitment, based on the average price at the time of the sale of certificates each year.

We retain this percentage for 10 years in the buffer. The buffer serves as a mechanism to compensate for potential carbon losses (release) during the programme and to give reassurance on the permanence of carbon storage that your certificates represent to buyers. Each time a loss is confirmed during an audit, a corresponding number of certificates will be removed (cancelled) from the buffer to compensate for the loss. Certificates that are placed in the buffer will not be sold until the end of the 10^th season after these certificates were generated.

Companies (both food and non-food companies) that want to support more responsible agriculture. Companies with no supply chain link to farmers cannot use these certificates to offset their emissions; such companies cannot claim carbon neutrality through this mechanism. Our preference is to sell certificates to food companies; by buying your certificates, companies that also buy your crops can demonstrate that their supply chain emissions have been reduced.

No. The carbon certificates generated during the programme will be exclusively for sale via Soil Capital. Farmers are not allowed to sell or transfer carbon certificates to third parties but can refer potential buyers to Soil Capital.

We declare a ‘loss event’ when a release of carbon from the farm’s soils occurs. This will need to:
- be caused by practices not used in the previous season (e.g. more intensive land preparation), except in the context of a transition to certified organic production;
- be the result of management decisions and not weather events;
- account for more than 5% of the emission reductions and sequestration achieved by you in the programme at that time.

If a loss event occurs:
- Farmers will not have to return money already received;
- Instead, a “buffer” is set up from the first year: 20% of generated certificates are placed in this buffer each year and cannot be sold;
- In the event of a “loss event”, certificates from the buffer will be used to cover the carbon release;
- The farmer will have to contribute the same number of certificates to the buffer again in future years before carbon payments resume;
- If no losses are incurred, after 10 years the certificates in the buffer are sold and farmers will receive their payments.

- A representative technical itinerary per crop for the most recent completed harvest from the last two years.
- The following information is required: type of operation and equipment used, inputs (types and quantities) applied and other management practices like the use of cover crops.
- If this information is already in a farm management software, it will facilitate data entry.

- You are invited to use existing files needed for the BPS so that our platform automatically identifies your farm boundaries and crops in your rotation.
- We also use your farm’s location to automatically identify certain soil characteristics using third-party maps.
- We are working on various integrations with Farm Management Softwares, but in the meantime if the data we require is already in a Farm Management Software that you use, this will greatly accelerate the process.

Yes. We need one recent analysis of soil organic matter upon enrolment (done within the 5 years prior to your enrolment in the programme) in order to verify the information you give us about soil conditions and one new analysis at the end of the programme (year 5) in order for the scientific community that constantly works on the quantification model that we use (the Cool Farm Tool) to further improve it.

Organic fertilisation, reduced or no tillage, legumes in the crop rotation, cover cropping, reduced fuel use and reduced use of synthetic inputs.

No. Permanent grasslands are excluded from the areas considered for the carbon calculation in the arable methodology because the areas linked to livestock farming must be part of a specific carbon calculation for livestock farming. Livestock farming has its own carbon methodology and we intend to integrate it into the programme in the future. However, temporary grasslands are considered in the current arable methodology (as crops) and are a source of carbon sequestration. Permanent grass margins are considered as permanent grassland.

Hedgerows, orchards, woodland and forests are not counted for two reasons:
- Our calculation methodology does not currently allow us to quantify the sequestration benefit of hedgerows
- We must avoid double payments (since there are often subsidies for the installation of hedges, for example).

On the other hand, we do account for in-field trees planted using agroforestry techniques.

No. To date the performance (i.e. the biomass) of cover corps is not included in the GHG balance, only the fact that they have been implemented.

Biogas units are not directly accounted for in the GHG balance because our programme focuses on emissions from on-field practices and those associated with the inputs used for them. However, the use of digestates as an input is accounted for and has a positive influence on the GHG balance.

Yes. These crops are often perceived as requiring more intensive tillage, although some people manage to get good yields with minimum tillage. In any case, tillage is not the only lever to store carbon. Having crops that typically require more intensive tillage in your rotation does not block your participation in the programme, nor your ability to generate carbon certificates.

- The £980 mySoilCapital fee is used to cover the farm analysis costs (including development of the mySoilCapital tool, data collection and encoding, verification and delivery of the analysis).
- We and any partner that has provided you with transition support, also receive a commission on the sale of certificates to cover the costs of sales, maintaining the programme and audit costs. This fixed percentage – Soil Capital’s is in the single digits – allows us to align our interest with that of the farmer but we are insistent that the farmer always takes the clear majority (70%) of the final sales price.