For as long as there has been agriculture, farmers have debated with other farmers how things are going.

Prices and weather drive those conversations, but now if the EU is right there might soon be a new topic of conversation. That will be about carbon – not the carbon footprint of livestock, but carbon credits that can be traded.

This would never have been thought of an enterprise in the past, but it is now a possibility. Because it is about climate change mitigation and carbon reduction it is an idea whose moment has come. Now the challenge is to turn positive thinking by politicians into an income stream for farmers.

To date carbon has not been a friend of farmers. The green lobby has refused to recognise the enormous contribution permanent grassland and forestry make to carbon sequestration. This is a vital by-product of agriculture and better for the environment than flying fruit and vegetables around the world to supermarket shelves, because pressure groups have declared meat as bad for the planet. This is not the case, but virtue signalling by politicians, from local councils to national politics, knows no bounds.

Efforts to attach a carbon label to products is a new industry, but we already know that in farming this produces bizarre and unscientific outcomes. Because a suckler cow has to carry the entire carbon footprint of its calf, the final product of that system will have a higher carbon measure than the product of an indoors bull beef finishing enterprise.

There is nothing wrong with either system, but the wider contribution of the suckler enterprise to the environment is lost by trying to boil complex scientific measures down to a single figure. Retailers know this, but they can also see marketing value in this approach at a time when climate change is in the headlines every day.

This is largely failed thinking, but farmers might gain if it becomes the norm. It would show the real cost of plant-based diets, not least the carbon footprint from producing meat substitutes under industrialised systems.

However what the EU has in mind is different and more radical, and it has been backed by farm ministers. It is part of the Green Deal concept to make the EU carbon neutral by 2050, which is also the post-Brexit objective of the UK government. The EU thinking is to develop mechanisms that would allow farmers to be paid for enterprises that lock up or sequester atmospheric carbon. At the moment those are around forestry and permanent grassland, but the thinking will develop if there is an income stream because that will give scientists the incentive to develop new ideas.

The obvious way this would work would be for farmers to sell carbon credit to businesses that need these to comply with environmental regulations. This could be directly, which is unlikely, or through some form of EU-administered scheme. This thinking has been welcomed, in principle, by the farming lobby but criticised by green groups as not radical enough to deliver the changes they want to see in agriculture.

This looks to be a good idea and one that recognises that agriculture is much more a part of the solution than the source of the problem. In a global context, like many things related to climate change mitigation, it is hard to see how this would deliver benefits. Carbon would still be produced by those buying the credits. It also reduces the pressure on them to change and they will pass on to consumers the cost of buying the credits.

It is not however the role of farmers to argue for or against the case for carbon credits. They could be given the opportunity to convert something they do as part of their business into an income steam. That is a gift horse where there is no need to peer too closely into its mouth.

This radical EU thinking has also been rubber-stamped by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It says that over the rest of this century carbon sequestration in agriculture could offset 4% of human-driven carbon increases. This would represent 10% of what is needed under the Paris climate change accord. This finally must prove to the green lobby that farmers are not only part of the solution, but a key and essential part of what is needed to tackle a global problem.