EIP-AGRI Focus Group Moving from source to sink in arable farming: Final report

Agriculture can significantly contribute to climate change mitigation by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and by storing carbon in plants and soils. Globally, soil contains about three times as much organic carbon as plants and twice as much as the atmosphere. However, arable soils, especially in the most intense cropping regions have lost much of their soil carbon. Even though the knowledge on management practices to store carbon in soils is widespread among farmers, they need more information on the time and resources that are needed to adopt these practices and the impact they will have in carbon storage. The Focus Group on “Moving from source to sink in arable farming” identified management practices that capture carbon in agricultural soils in the long term while improving soil quality. This final report describes the main results and proposals on this topic.