Armidale-based FarmLab is reducing the cost for soil carbon measurement

Soil is a "huge" carbon sink, he said.

It's one of the main mechanisms to take carbon out of the atmosphere, and put it in the ground, he said.

It will play a role in Australia meeting the ambitious targets on climate made in agreements with Paris.

The challenge is that it's expensive to measure soil carbon, and the struggle to reach a decent price has prevented farmers from getting involved.

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The Armidale-based laboratory is the recipient of part of $8.4 million for projects focused on reducing the cost for soil carbon measurement across agriculture.

FarmLab coordinates soil sampling and provides tools for farmers to better measure their land.

"And now we can really scale up that process across Australian ag," he said.

Carbon offset schemes means carbon can be monetised, and trades for about $30 a tonne. But it's not unusual for costs of sampling to reach $20 per hectare, which over a standard project size of 1,000ha, is significant for the farmer.

The market for it is in the billions, Mr Duncan said.

"But we haven't had the tools and the technology out there to be able to measure it at a low cost," he said.

The grants are designed to reduce the amount and cost of sampling through better estimation of soil carbon using satellite imagery, or advanced modelling techniques FarmLab is pioneering with partners.

Soil sampling may still be required, but a reduction in sampling will bring down overall project costs and help many more farmers gain access to carbon measurement.

"We're developing these models to reduce the amount of samples," he said.

"Instead of taking 30 samples from across a farm, [people] only have to take five or ten.

"That comes with a significantly reduced cost for the farmer as well, but it's still an accurate picture."

The laboratory said it takes a "regional, local" approach.

The grants will put tools into the hands of contractors and simple service providers in the local community.

"They'll be the ones doing the soil sampling, collecting the data under these grants to feed back in and help farmers in the long run."

Having their base in Armidale has "driven" the business.

"There's a lot of regenerative farmers on farms that care about carbon around here," he said.

Mr Duncan hypothesised that if farmers had better soil data, they'd better manage soil carbon.

The reason it wasn't being managed, is because they didn't know exactly what was beneath them, he said.

He started building tools to collect samples from the ground and digitise them with the barcode system.

Farmers are at the front line of action on climate change, minister for climate change Chris Bowen said.

They will help reduce emissions by storing more carbon in soils to improve farm productivity and protect against drought and erosion, he said.

About 1500 farmers across Australia use FarmLab, and a significant amount are in and around New England.

Eight innovative projects share $28 million in grants under the first development and demonstration grant round of the government's $50 million National Soil Carbon Innovation Challenge.

The grants go towards accelerating the development of reliable, low-cost technologies for measuring soil organic carbon.

FarmLab with the University of Queensland won $4.3 million to develop high resolution maps.

FarmLab with SensorC won $2.3 million to test the on farm application of a novel soil probe.

And Farmlab with Cloud Agronomics won $1.8 million to enable prediction of soil organic carbon.

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