Carbon farming is in "murky waters" for many who were considering adapting their practices to be net zero on their properties by 2030 according to Farmers for Climate Action SA state coordinator Ellen Litchfield.
Despite reports the Carbon trading market looked to beef up trust with release of Chubb review there are differing opinions.
Farmers for Climate Action outreach officer and broadacre farmer Peter Holding, Harden, NSW, said he was not convinced the integrity was high enough to warrant carbon farming.
"This is the major issue, like in all markets, if the integrity falls away then the market loses credibility and can fall apart," he said.
"It's important that we don't go down this track, but I think there's too big of a rush to go to offsets, rather than transition at the moment.
"The big problem is going to be how farmers transition their machinery and what they will do about diesel use and nitrogen fertiliser use.
"Agriculture will be fine in the livestock side of things, I'm just a little worried about the cropping, because the costs of transitioning machinery, fuel sources and fertilisers is going to be pretty an interesting proposition in the next 10 years."
He said the safeguard mechanism - which is currently open for feedback regarding the proposed policy design until February 24, set a level of carbon emissions at which the big industries had to operate below.
"Personally I'd like to see them encouraged to invest in renewable energy," he said.
"That way it might move them out of being fossil fuel producers or fossil energy producers and become renewable energy producers, but it also means that they wouldn't see the answer as being offsetting, which is what they do at the moment.
"Unfortunately, some of the offsets aren't going to work.
"They're not going to store the carbon they think they're going to and even if they do work, because they're biological - changing a farming method or a grazing method or planting trees - they're not going to last and they need to be permanent.
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"There's no way anybody can determine what's going to happen on a patch of land in the next 100, 200, or 300 years, so the risk profile is not where it should be."
Mr Holding said the safeguard mechanism was going to affect the agricultural industry pretty badly.
"They are buying up farms, and they are already doing this in WA at the moment, which is tending to empty out the rural population because they are doing human induced revegetation programs," he said.
"That means stopping cropping or stopping grazing or whatever they plan to change in the revegetation grow.
"The problems with that is, a lot of the country they're buying is not in high rainfall country at this point in time, so the vegetation isn't going to grow all that much and the carbon stored isn't going to be a great deal so when they hit a drought, it's going to disappear again.
"It's allowing them to continue with business as normal, I don't believe it's going to generate the carbon credits that they think it's going to generate, and thirdly it takes the population out of regional areas."
He said the practice was "land banking" with land values going up.
"These companies are supposedly buying carbon credits, but they're actually buying land, which might appreciate anyway and lower the cost of investments," he said.
"They're getting off very lightly and not doing anything really about lowering their emissions."
Mr Holding said there wasn't much available to measure carbon.
"That's not to say these things won't become important in the future when we transition away from fossil fuels, when we get to a point where we're not adding to the problem any longer," he said.
"The only way of drawing down the excess that will then be in the atmosphere is by these sorts of programs, but it's not until we get to that point that we should start using them because it's just giving you an excuse to continue to emit."
Mrs Litchfield said the issue with carbon farming was that it works well to reward farmers for the ecosystem services they are providing but the market needed to have integrity if it was to last.
"We can't be rewarded if the large emitters aren't required to decrease their emissions at all," she said.
"And we don't want to be then put in a competition with them because agriculture, especially in SA is the second largest emitter.
"We need to be using our credits as well, which I think is really important to offset our emissions within the agricultural industry.
"The lack of clear policy pathways to adopt carbon farming in SA is a big barrier for a lot of farmers and especially pastoralists that could stand to benefit from being rewarded for the carbon they are sequestering and other ecosystem services.
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She said the Chubb review into carbon farming and the integrity of the Australian carbon credit units had caused murky waters around carbon farming, which had hindered people's uptake.
Both Mrs Litchfield and Mr Holding said more clarity was needed for offered carbon prices and that the price paid should align with a global market relative to emissions.
"The governments proposed ceiling price of $75 would further hinder the development of an appropriate price for high quality carbon credits which in the EU are currently already 85 Euros and will continue to rise as more industries try to decrease emissions," she said.