Farmer = common noun ’a person who cultivates crops or raises animals’; No farmers - No food - No future.A phrase that gets thrown around a lot in farming circles; they even have t-shirts with it printed on the back, and those sun-visor window stickers for the tractor cab, but when you think about it there really is no truer set of words in the entire world. So true that everybody should be wearing the t- shirt. From the everyday person on the street to the people with extreme views who do nothing but rant anti-farming propaganda, because whether you’re eating a well-balanced healthy diet, living on takeaway food or even if you follow a plant-based diet, without the farmers you won’t have any food and if you grow it all yourself then that makes you a farmer by definition.With the climate change emergency, the definition of farmer over this generation will expand and change more than at any time since farming began more than 12,000 years ago when our hunter-gatherer ancestors started settling and cultivating the land. The basics will always stay. People will always need food, but many other aspects of farming are now being added into the job description. Sequestering carbon, mitigating flood risk, planting new hedgerows and producing green energy, to name a few; and if you hadn’t already guessed it, here it is: farmers are the solution, not part of the problem.When we talk about carbon auditing of Manx farms the first question is always: ’Why?’Followed by: ’What will farmers do with the information?’Why is fairly easy, no-one accurately knows how the Isle of Man is doing. It’s that simple. BEST GUESSES The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the ETHER reports that are available use officially recognised standard figures - educated ’best guesses’. It’s not about being good or bad or even about being the best, it’s just about understanding our baseline. Then we can put together a plan and work out how all the extra work is going to be paid for. Manx NFU envisage some funding will come from the private sector in the form of farmers selling carbon credits to pay them for the carbon they sequester and some will inevitably come from the government’s climate change fund because, believe it or not, sequestering carbon and producing food at the same time can be expensive.So, what will farmers do with the information? They won’t be changing much in ways of production, it will be fine tuning but will also be spending more time enhancing our hedgerows and managing trees while planting more of both in land that’s not suitable for food production. The biggest benefits will be from enhancing our soil health which will be done using science and benchmarking.Not only will the island benefit from higher levels of carbon sequestration with improved soil health but also the farmer as they will get better yields meaning they can produce more food.The Manx NFU will be releasing our first set of full figures soon and we will be displaying as much information as we can at this year’s agricultural shows and at the Isle of Man Food and Drink Festival in the autumn.