AgForC: Carbon accounting in agroforestry to meet net zero

This project aims to help UK farmers, particularly those from marginalised communities, improve their ability to monitor and report carbon storage in agroforestry systems, which combine trees, hedges, crops, and livestock on the same land. It will develop a model called AgForC to estimate the carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere and stored in soil, trees, and hedges. This model will be integrated into the Cool Farm Tool, a platform that helps farmers manage their environmental impact. By making AgForC freely available, the project aims to support farmers in understanding and maximising the carbon benefits of agroforestry.

Project lead: Casey Ryan (University of Edinburgh) and  Claire Armstrong (University of Edinburgh)

Project collaborators: Megan McKerchar (Cool Farm Alliance), Pete Redshaw (Cirevo)

Findings

• It will be feasible to implement an agroforestry soil carbon module in the Cool Farm Tool, which can represent many of the most common UK agroforestry types, and some international ones.
• Some knowledge gaps remain to be filled, but most of the required data are already collected by agroforesters or are available in the literature.
• There is a need to standardise the definitions of agroforestry types and management practices to make the tool easy to use.

Suggestions for further research

There are few long term measurements of soil carbon stocks under agroforestry, making it hard to validate these models.