The EU CRCF and what it means for carbon farming in Ireland

By Mike English, Founder & CTO, IMPT

An Irish agricultural credit no longer needs to invent its own rulebook. The EU now has an official standard to certify against.

An EU standard now exists to certify against

At Union level, the Carbon Removal Certification Framework (CRCF), adopted in 2026, is the first EU-wide standard covering carbon farming and carbon removals, and agricultural soil carbon is in scope. That matters because it means an Irish credit need not invent its own rulebook or ask buyers to trust a private badge — it can certify against an official standard, which is exactly what corporate buyers now look for.

A shrinking sector that happens to be our lowest-emission farming

Irish tillage covers roughly 331,000 hectares (2026 BISS figures) and is falling by about 2% a year. It is the most carbon-efficient farming system we have, and the decline is a loss on both counts — for the growers whose margins no longer justify the rotation, and for the country's capacity to hold and remove carbon on productive land. The agronomy of the alternative is not in dispute. Teagasc has long promoted conservation or minimum tillage: shallow cultivation of 50–100mm, retaining at least 30% of crop residue on the surface, in place of the plough. What is missing is a financial reason for a grower to make the change and hold it, year after year.

How an Irish Tillage Credit would work

The chain is short, and each link has to hold:

1. The practice. The grower moves from ploughing to minimum or no-till, grows cover crops over winter, retains residue, and reduces nitrogen where the agronomy allows. It is the combination that sequesters carbon; no single element does it alone.
2. The measurement. The additional soil carbon is quantified against an agreed protocol. Each verified tonne of CO₂ becomes one credit.
3. The certification. The credit is certified against the EU CRCF and an Irish protocol, establishing that it is real, additional and durable.
4. The sale. The credit is sold to companies seeking genuine, local, traceable removals rather than distant offsets of uncertain quality.
5. The payment. The value returns to the grower, per hectare, for each year of the contract.

Integrity — the conditions that make it real

A credit that buyers do not believe is worth nothing, so the safeguards are the product, not the paperwork:

• Measurement, reporting and verification — Teagasc soil-sampling combined with remote-sensing checks on residue cover and cultivation depth, calibrated to the EU CRCF methodology, each credit carrying a stated uncertainty range rather than a single flattering figure.
• Additionality — payment only for practice beyond current common practice and any regulatory baseline, not for what would have happened anyway.
• Permanence and reversal — a minimum five-year commitment, a buffer pool of credits held back against reversals, and a contractual clawback if a participant ploughs the sequestered carbon back out.
• Leakage — monitoring at farm and regional level so carbon “saved” here is not simply displaced into more intensive cultivation elsewhere.

How this connects to what IMPT already does

IMPT is a hotel-booking platform that funds one tonne of verified carbon offset on every booking, with access to more than eight million hotels and apartments across 195 countries. It runs a one-partner-per-territory model in which each partner earns a share of IMPT's booking margin and every booking carries that tonne of offset. In other words, IMPT already puts corporate and consumer money behind verified carbon — the same demand-side that an Irish Tillage Credit would need. An officially-backed domestic removal credit for tillage is a natural extension of that thinking: local, traceable and measured, rather than a distant offset of uncertain quality.

Questions & answers

What is the EU CRCF?

The Carbon Removal Certification Framework, adopted by the EU in 2026, is the first Union-wide voluntary standard for carbon removals and carbon farming. Agricultural soil carbon is in scope, giving national schemes an official certification backbone.

Why does certifying against the CRCF matter?

Because corporate buyers increasingly require credits backed by an official standard rather than a private badge. Certifying an Irish tillage credit against the CRCF makes it credible, comparable and easier to sell.