Carbon Farming: An Expository, Inter-Disciplinary Survey

Abstract

Carbon farming is the collection of agricultural best practices specifically designed to maximize the capture and long-term storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide in soils and plant biomass, while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions from cultivation practices. Carbon farming can be viewed as a promising pathway to simultaneously address climate change mitigation, soil degradation, and farmer welfare. For example, if the entire agricultural cropland in India practices carbon farming, this will spectacularly offset about 50% of emissions from the country’s annual transport-sector emissions. However, practical deployment of carbon farming is constrained by scientific challenges, inherent complexity, and fragmented understanding across disciplines. As a result, in India, for example, fewer than 1% of farmers participate in carbon credit programs. This inter-disciplilinary, expository survey offers the first unified treatment of carbon farming for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. The survey integrates insights from agronomy, soil science, climate science, measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV), economics, carbon markets, and policy design. We begin by establishing the conceptual foundations of soil organic carbon dynamics and agricultural carbon sequestration, and compare carbon farming with the paradigms of sustainable, regenerative, and organic agriculture. We then present a comprehensive landscape analysis of carbon-farming best practices, including both generic and crop-specific interventions, and systematically examine their co-benefits and trade-offs. The paper offers a rigorous review of MRV frameworks, emerging digital MRV technologies, and the carbon-credit project life cycle, followed by a structured analysis of voluntary and compliance carbon markets. Drawing on six representative case studies, we synthesize implementation models, successes, and failure modes. Building on this integrated analysis, we highlight key scientific, economic, institutional, and adoption challenges, and propose potential remedies to make carbon farming a credible, scalable, and attractive proposition for global agriculture. We finally highlight the important role that artificial intelligence, game theory, and computation can play in improving various dimensions of carbon farming.