Enabling soil carbon farming: presentation of a robust, affordable, and scalable method for soil carbon stock assessment

Abstract The main hurdle in instrumentalizing agricultural soils to sequester atmospheric carbon is the development of methods measure soil stocks which are robust, scalable, and widely applicable. Our objective develop an approach that can help overcome these hurdles. In this paper, we present Wageningen Soil Carbon STOck pRotocol (SoilCASTOR). SoilCASTOR uses a novel fusing satellite data, direct proximal sensing-based measurements, machine learning yield stock estimates. method has been tested applied USA on fields with land use. Results show estimates precise repeatable could be rapidly scalable. precision farm C below 5% enabling detection organic changes desired for 4 per 1000 initiative. assessment done robustly as few 0.5 sample hectare farms varying from 20 150 hectares. These findings enable structural implementation farming.