Continental‐Scale Evidence of Farm Management Impacts on Soil Carbon

ABSTRACT There are high expectations that agricultural practices can mitigate climate change and improve soil health by increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks. However, existing large scale SOC monitoring treats agricultural management as a black box, meaning that observed patterns and trends cannot inform on the option space of agricultural practices to improve or deteriorate SOC stocks. Here, we combine for the first time management data from large scale systematic farm surveys ( n = 248,362 farms) and representative soil monitoring data ( n = 8834 locations) to quantify the impact of agricultural practices on three SOC metrics across all pedoclimatic zones of Europe (EU + UK): stocks, stocks relative to pedoclimatic benchmarks, and yearly change in SOC concentration. Our findings show that in arable and tree crops, but not in grasslands, management intensity is a significant contributor to SOC loss, with impact varying by soil and climate region. However, we also observed that several practices (e.g., high share of manure, organic management, and a high proportion of leys in crop rotation) demonstrated potential for increasing SOC stocks. Under a scenario where all agricultural land in Europe would be managed as that of the 10% most optimally managed farms in terms of SOC benefit, SOC stocks would increase by 1.58 Pg C across Europe (95% CI: 1.27–1.89 Pg C). Whereas under a scenario where farms are managed as the 10% least optimally managed farms, SOC would decrease by −0.92 Pg C (−1.15 to −0.68 Pg C). However, it is important to note that these estimates reflect steady‐state SOC stocks only (i.e., they do not represent the transient build‐up or loss over time, or interactions with a changing climate). This paper thus quantifies how agricultural practices influence patterns in SOC stocks at the continental scale, identifying leverage points for site‐specific policies to improve SOC stocks.