A carbon credit for Irish tillage: what it would pay, and how it would work
Irish tillage covers about 331,000 hectares and is contracting by roughly 2% a year. It is the lowest-emission farming we do, and it is the ground we are losing. Here is one mechanism that could change that.
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:
- 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.
- The measurement. The additional soil carbon is quantified against an agreed protocol. Each verified tonne of CO₂ becomes one credit.
- The certification. The credit is certified against the EU CRCF and an Irish protocol, establishing that it is real, additional and durable.
- The sale. The credit is sold to companies seeking genuine, local, traceable removals rather than distant offsets of uncertain quality.
- The payment. The value returns to the grower, per hectare, for each year of the contract.
The Catalonia precedent
Catalonia's regional government, through its Climate Change Office (OCCC), has run a government-backed voluntary “climate credit” system since 2015. It certifies credits from nature-based activity within the region — explicitly including agriculture and soil management — and sells them to companies meeting voluntary climate and corporate-responsibility commitments, with the funding directed into rural areas. IMPT has direct experience of that framework: a business connected to IMPT was certified into it in July 2026. The lesson worth passing on is not about the science, which is well established, but about the market: building corporate demand is the slow part, and it is the part an Irish scheme would have to plan for from the outset.
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.
The economics, per hectare
The value of a credit per hectare is the sequestration rate multiplied by the carbon price. Both need to be stated honestly. Teagasc work indicates minimum tillage on its own sequesters roughly 0.3–0.7 tonnes of CO₂ per hectare per year; reaching the upper end, or beyond, requires the full package of cover crops, residue retention and reduced nitrogen. The 2.86 t/ha/yr figure quoted in some international meta-analyses derives from other climates and cropping systems and is not replicable in Irish conditions; it appears below only as a ceiling, not an expectation. Agricultural credits currently trade at roughly €45–68/t, with European regenerative-agriculture projects around €49–60/t and some EU agricultural land-management projects higher again; €50/t is used here as a mid-range working figure, not a fixed price.
| Carbon sequestered (t CO₂/ha/yr) | @ €40/t | @ €50/t | @ €60/t | @ €70/t | @ €80/t |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.3 — min-till, low end | €12 | €15 | €18 | €21 | €24 |
| 0.5 — realistic core | €20 | €25 | €30 | €35 | €40 |
| 0.7 — min-till, upper | €28 | €35 | €42 | €49 | €56 |
| 1.0 — full package | €40 | €50 | €60 | €70 | €80 |
| 1.5 — strong, fully stacked | €60 | €75 | €90 | €105 | €120 |
| 2.86 — international ceiling (not for Irish planning) | €114 | €143 | €172 | €200 | €229 |
A realistic planning figure is €25–40 per hectare per year for a genuine minimum-till and cover-crop system at a €50 price, with €60–120 achievable only where practice is strong, soils respond and the price holds. Over a five-year contract the realistic band is €150–300 per hectare, before savings.
On top of the credit, reducing cultivation is generally reported to save on the order of €20–60 per hectare a year in diesel, labour and machinery wear — cash regardless of whether the credit sells. For a 60-hectare grower that is roughly €1,800–3,600 a year from the credit and a similar amount again in savings; for 120 hectares, about double. Measurement, certification and administration take a share, so a realistic expectation is that the farmer retains 60–80% of the credit value, with smaller holdings aggregated through co-ops to keep the per-hectare cost of verification manageable.
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.
The likely objections, answered honestly
- The payment is small next to input costs. It is a layer on top of the cultivation savings, not a replacement for margin, and should not be sold as if it will transform a farm's accounts.
- Soil carbon is lost the moment you plough again. Correct — which is why the commitment is multi-year with a buffer and clawback.
- There may be no buyer. This is the real constraint, not the agronomy. Catalonia's experience shows demand lags supply in the early years, and a market would have to be built.
- Only large farms will qualify. Only if it is designed that way; low minimum areas and co-op aggregation can keep smaller growers in.
How it would be established
No new legislation is required. The credit would be anchored in the EU CRCF and run through existing institutions: Teagasc for the technical standard and measurement protocol; the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine for scheme governance and payment, piloted under the existing Tillage Expansion and Sustainability Scheme; Bord Bia / Origin Green to accredit the scheme and recruit corporate buyers; and the Environmental Protection Agency to keep it aligned with the national inventory. The sensible start is a pilot of a few hundred hectares, with real measurement and real payments, before anything is scaled.
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
How much carbon does minimum tillage sequester in Ireland?
Teagasc work indicates minimum tillage on its own sequesters roughly 0.3–0.7 tonnes of CO₂ per hectare per year, reaching the upper end only with cover crops, residue retention and reduced nitrogen. The 2.86 t/ha figure from some international studies is not replicable in Irish conditions.
Is there a buyer for an Irish tillage credit today?
No committed market exists yet. This is the real constraint, not the agronomy. Bord Bia's Origin Green would have to build corporate demand, and Catalonia's experience shows demand lags supply in the early years.
What would a grower have to commit to?
A minimum five-year commitment holding the reduced-cultivation practice, with a buffer pool and a contractual clawback if the sequestered carbon is ploughed back out. Permanence rules are what make the credit durable and saleable.