Objectives of the service
The objective of the planned offering is to provide a commercial service for monitoring, reporting and verification of Carbon Farming.
Carbon Farming means all activities agriculture can undertake for sustainable reduction and sequestration of CO2 from the atmosphere. One challenge in Carbon Farming is to independently assess and verify the actions taken as well as their impact on carbon sequestration.
The EO4CarbonFarming MRV Tool includes functionalities to monitor the carbon in plant and soil, to report on required measures like crop rotation and catch crop planting, and to verify them. Additionally, their impact can be evaluated. This enables performance assessment of sustainability measures and more resilient farming practices. Reliable determination of field carbon stocks is key to monitoring the climate impacts of carbon farming and to developing business models.
Users and their needs
There are two main customer groups. Customers with performance-based remuneration for sustainability services, such as carbon certifiers, governmental agencies, NGOs and the agri and food industry, but also agricultural service companies.
Both groups have in common that they need reliable and cost-efficient reporting and verification for the sustainability measures that have been performed by the farmer. The first group additionally needs an independent assessment of the success of the carbon sequestration measures, while the second group needs an objective data source for their service offers and monitoring during the crop growth cycle as input for their decision support. All of these needs can be fulfilled with the EO4CarbonFarming MRV Tool.
The offering will initially target customers in Germany and Austria and can be expanded in the future.
Service/ system concept
At the center of the service is Vista’s MRV-tool, gathering and processing information from different sources. Satellite data are integrated with field data and the sophisticated crop growth model PROMET. There are two ways for the MRV-tool to receive data: either fully automated via API or in a less automated way e.g. via email. The tool delivers the outputs via API or visualized in the “EO4CF Cockpit”.
The MRV-tool delivers the outputs:
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soil organic carbon
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carbon stock in soil and plant
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catch crop detection
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proof of crop rotation
Space Added Value
High-resolution satellite imagery is essential to the service and will be integrated with GNSS-located in-situ data.
For the calculation of soil organic carbon content maps, Earth Observation data are used as input, giving a new degree of detail in comparison to soil sampling. Showing the variability of the soil organic carbon content within fields allows to monitor the success of specific sustainability measures e.g. to build up humus in specific parts of the field.
For the monitoring of crops during the growing season, optical satellite data analysis with a radiative transfer model to derive variables like leaf area, chlorophyll content and fraction of brown leaves is planned. Additionally, coherence and backscatter of radar data will be analysed to derive harvest dates, soil moisture and soil management information.
Current Status
The user needs and requirements were successfully captured via several workshops and interviews with users in Germany. The focus for this was mainly on the user segments carbon farming sponsorships and ag industry, but users from the sectors of governmental institutions as well as ag consulting and farmers were also taken into account.
The overall system architecture as well as the individual components of the system were successfully designed. Agreements for the provision of in-situ data for the pilot demonstration have been made. In order to provide a trial version of the proposed solution to end users, first results of soil organic carbon maps were produced.
The development of the service is now complete, with testing and technical features verification successfully conducted both for unit tests and system integration tests. The MRV algorithms, API and GUI functionality are now available for pilot demonstration.
From October 2024, the pilot phase of the project is running, delivering up-to-date information to the pilot users during the cover crop season. Soil organic carbon content maps for pilot sites are being produced as well. The business analysis is being updated, especially concerning the commercialisation phase. User and customer engagement is being expanded to make the service offer more widely known. And while the pilot phase progresses, results from the pilot trials can be utilized as selling material for new potential customers to commit to the proposed solution. Once the pilot phase is completed, the project will reach its last stage where the pilot trial will be evaluated and final updates for the Business Plan will be submitted to lead to the Final Review milestone.
