Firstly, learn to love your farm data and digitise it. You can upload data to Sandy through your farm management system, like Gatekeeper or Muddy Boots, through Excel spreadsheets, or manually. Sandy accurately measures the environmental performance of your farm – covering carbon, biodiversity, and water protection.

With your carbon footprint, Sandy helps you plan improvements. To be eligible for carbon credits, you have to decrease your carbon footprint, but you don’t need to reach net zero to get started.

The baseline summarises exactly where your current farm practices have placed you on annual emissions. It is important because any reductions from this starting point will generate credits. Setting the baseline will include mapping your field boundaries to provide accurate information on what land you have and its current condition. Historical management information is important to determine your baseline and Sandy ensures your reporting is realistic and credible.

Consider the options Sandy provides you to improve your farm’s environmental performance and develop a plan going forward. For example, if switching from conventional to sustainable farming, what actions are required? If you want to aim for net zero in a given timeframe, what actions should you take.

Make your own plan or use Sandy to recommend the optimal path for your enterprise. Sandy shows you the cost, efficiency and yield projections of the chosen plan.

Based on the practices and timescales you choose, see what this plan would achieve in carbon credits, your yield and income. Certain businesses perform so well with their environmental work that they can increase the value of carbon credits through co-benefits, which recognise biodiversity gains or water protection work on your land. An additional market is emerging for individuals and companies to purchase tokens as well, rather like a voucher scheme, for consumers to enjoy the natural environment that is being nurtured.

Once you have accurate data, evidence of your carbon and biodiversity actions and a forward plan, you can begin preparing contractual arrangements with Trinity NCM and exploring your NCM dashboard. This provides all the key metrics you need to evaluate your performance and move forward.

There are different contract terms depending on whether you are the farm owner or tenant, whether you are forward contracting or spot trading.

Once the contract is agreed, you can begin to implement the practices you planned within the timescales you chose. A carbon footprint is carried out each year to continue measuring your net carbon balance and confirm the carbon credits are being generated. Third party auditors will look at your evidence, then verify and confirm your credits.

There are three ways to sell your carbon credits:

• Sell on the open NCM marketplace by setting a minimum price and waiting for the bids to come in;

• Sell to corporate investors, a pre-qualified buyer, who tend to set the price and criteria themselves, or

• Use the credits to sell or barter with businesses you already have a relationship with such as processors, retailers or other land managers.