Unfortunately, due to the complexity of monitoring compliance with low carbon techniques used by hundreds of small rice farmers, many of the claims being made for carbon reduction for low carbon rice are simply not true. The average age of Thai rice farmers is 61 and many are second or third generation farmers, so even after extensive training they will often revert to their traditional ways of farming, ignoring the controls of water levels and fertiliser use required to achieve the claimed CO2e reductions of around 40%.
As the monitoring of low carbon farming requires the measurement of sub-soil water levels and the control of fertiliser use, solutions based on satellite imagery are not effective and regular audits are cost prohibitive.
TEAM Public Health working with our UK Partner SCI Ltd, have developed a practical, low cost way for daily monitoring of on-farm practices using a simple to use mobile phone App.
The data collected from the dual-language App used by the farmers is uploaded to secure cloud storage and used to calculate the real reductions in CO2e emissions from multiple farms.
Our local team run practical workshops to demonstrate the correct farming techniques and how to download and use the App, and sample audits ensure the data is reliable.
Our costs per Rai or per Tonne are less than half the cost of the annual harvest, so the benefits from any cost premiums or from carbon trading can be passed on to the farmers.
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