Embrapa and Bayer unveil simplified soil carbon model for tropical farms

Researchers from Embrapa Digital Agriculture and Bayer Crop Science have introduced ProCarbon-Soil, a simplified model for tracking soil carbon dynamics on tropical farms, in a paper published in the Soil Science Society of America Journal.

Led by Embrapa researcher Luís G. Barioni, the model was calibrated using data from more than 1,900 farms across Brazil, drawing on over 300,000 soil samples collected through Bayer’s Climate FieldView digital platform. The team designed ProCarbon-Soil to reproduce carbon stock trajectories comparable to those of established multicompartmental models such as Century, but with far fewer parameters, thereby reducing the risk of overfitting when applied to real-world farm data.

Tropical soils pose particular challenges for carbon accounting because organic matter turnover rates differ sharply from those in temperate conditions, which most existing models were built around. By validating the model against Brazil’s extensive farm-level dataset, the researchers aim to give carbon-credit verifiers and farm advisers a more reliable baseline for estimating how cropping and grazing practices affect soil carbon stocks over time.

The model is intended to support carbon farming trading systems, giving programs a practical tool for planning and monitoring soil carbon inventories without the heavy data requirements of more complex simulation models. It was presented at the G20 Meeting of Agricultural Chief Scientists in Brasília.