Modern agriculture has led to the degradation of inherent soil organic matter (SOM) and release of CO2 into the atmosphere. Contrastingly, in recent years it has been proposed that there is a potential not only to reduce agricultural CO2 emissions but also to transform farms into carbon capturing systems, contributing to climate mitigation. Carbon farming (i.e., SOM accrual through agriculture), is an attractive solution, as it has many agronomic advantages and can potentially contribute to crop resilience towards climate change. But, is carbon farming for climate mitigation a plausible reality or just fantasy? Despite years of research, there are still open questions regarding carbon farming such as: How will climate change impact SOM accrual achieved by carbon farming? Is there a limit to SOM storage in soil? How to quantify SOM changes and indices of its stability in agricultural systems? What is the scale of compensation? Are carbon credits a viable solution? These questions point to gaps in our understanding of SOM dynamics and its transformation to agricultural practice and policy.
In this session, we aim to raise the discussion on carbon farming and promote knowledge interchange towards enhancement of SOM accrual. We invite contributions that focus on agricultural systems including experimental studies on novel agro-technical strategies to accrue SOM, crop and soil biome modifications for enhanced SOM accrual, advances in methods to estimate SOM stocks, research on SOM dynamics as well as life cycle analysis, meta-analysis and modelling. For this matter, we relate to all farming systems, including field crops, orchards, greenhouses and grazing systems. Moreover, critical approaches on carbon farming and climate justice are invited.