A young farmer with significant overseas experience and diplomas under his belt is now helping other farmers understand carbon farming. Jules Webley (26) has a diploma in agriculture, a diploma in farm management and a diploma in business from Lincoln University and is finishing research for his masters while working for Arrowtown's Compass Agribusiness Management.
His research looks at the Emissions Trading Scheme and carbon forestry in New Zealand.
Webley says carbon forestry is driving the biggest land use change in New Zealand since Europeans arrived.
When he left high school, Webley moved to Australia to pursue a professional rugby league career and spent time working on a cattle station in the Northern Territory. Now his overseas experience stretches as far as teaching new agricultural practices in the rural Philippines.
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If one thing stood out about his travels, it would be that Kiwis were the best at pastoral farming, he said.
"We're well advanced and produce a lot from a little. It made me quite proud ... we're like the All Blacks of farming. Sometimes when you're in New Zealand, you don't feel like that, you feel like you're under pressure, or under the pump."
The Emissions Trading Scheme was set up by the government so companies such as airlines or petrol stations, which emitted carbon dioxide or equivalent gases, could offset their impact by purchasing carbon credits from people who were sequestering carbon.
Webley said that, due to price progression over recent years, it was an opportune time for farmers to explore using their land for carbon forestry.
"The price two years ago was $25 per tonne of carbon, it's now trading at about $75.
"We're forecasting the peak to be about 2030, where it's going to be $120 to $130.
"It's also coinciding with if you're to plant trees today, by year about year eight is when peak growth is, so you're coinciding peak growth, to peak sequestration with peak price."
Particularly, he said , if farmers had unproductive land, this was a way for them to take advantage of that opportunity.
But he also said there were downsides to carbon forestry.
"[Sheep and beef farmers are] seeing it as a big threat, because it's such a profitable thing now for landowners, that lot of land around the country has been sold and just planted outright in pine trees.
"It's driving off all the families that were living on these farms and the kids in the rural communities. It's also reducing jobs and the ability for export earnings for New Zealand because the planting of these pine trees doesn't generate any foreign exchange or export income."
Originally, the Emissions Trading Scheme was meant to disincentivise fossil fuels or the use of activities that increase emissions by adding an expense to business.
"Planting pine trees to sequester is a short-term fix in that it takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and stores it in a tree.
"It's not stopping emitters' behaviour, it's just sort of postponing it until enough technology like electric cars and things can be developed to really change because people aren't stopping flying or driving, they're just paying more for it."
