b"VIEWPOINTSA Greener Future for AgWhat is the carbon economy and is it really viable for ag?Editors note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. JOY AGNEW is the vice president of applied research at Olds College. She has been at the school for the past two and half years and in that time she has worked to help build the Smart Farm into a hub for knowledge transfer and information for Alberta farmers. Before Olds College she worked at the Prairie Machinery Institute and the University of Saskatchewan where she received her bachelor of science and PhD degrees. Her work currently focuses on agriculture technology and agriculture technology integration.Alberta Seed Guide (ASG): What is the carbon economy?JOY AGNEW (JA): Good question. I don't know if I have a definition for that. But it's a movement towards, or I guess the understanding that adopting practices or changing our practices or adopting technologies is important to reduce the overall carbon footprint of our lives. It requires some sort of incentivization. And so the establishment of carbon taxes and carbon offsets or carbon credits, I think that core definition of the carbon economy. Now, the question is whether those taxes and offsets and credits are really the most effective mechanism for all sectors. And that's sort of the argument I was making during a recent presentation I gave at Ag Smart, was that those mechanisms might work for certain sectors, like the energy or the mining sector, but I don't know if they are the right solution for ag, and I unfortunately, don't have a good solution. Joy Agnew, vice president ofBut I'm very adamant about the fact that carbon credits and carbon offsets, the way applied research at Olds College they're currently designed, in terms of the quantification and verification protocols that are required to establish them, are going to be extremely, extremely challenging for ag. So there needs to be some some thought put into that. ASG: Why do carbon credits and carbon offsets not work? JA: Honestly, ag has a huge role to play in in reducing the overall carbon footprint, our total carbon emissions, because of the potential for carbon sequestration in the soil, or taking carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it back into the soil. Theres huge potential there. So there needs to be a way to understand that and measure that, quantify it and incentivize practices that help boost that soil carbon sequestration potential. But the current protocols, in order to actually qualify for a carbon credit, the practice has to be incremental, or it has to be over and above what's currently being adopted, it has to be permanent. And then the amount of carbon, either reduced or sequestered has to be verified. And the current process for that verification piece requires extremely scientifically robust data on exactly how much carbon is removed or sequestered, based on that practice. But with ag and these practices in ag being so varied, and spatially and temporally variable, the process to get robust data when it's that variable will require 100s, if not 26seed.ab.ca"