I've spoken several times about slimebag arguments, those that conceal rather than reveal, that tell part of a story and intentionally omit critical segments since they refute the thrust of the argument. Arguments for organic agriculture are high on the list.

Why are our soils losing carbon? One reason could be that higher temperatures increase the levels of microbial activity and respiration, another could be modern farming practices such as intensive grazing, the use of inorganic fertilisers, or breeds with shallower root systems.

Whatever the reason, Gundula Azeez, who used to be the SA's policy manager, has been looking into organic farming practices and has concluded that they could hold the answer to this problem. She found that in 34 different studies of soil carbon levels, 31 showed organic farm soils to have higher carbon levels than non-organic. Now, this isn't at all surprising, given that the use of organic fertilisers such as compost or green manure is the absolute centre of organic farming: you're basically directly putting carbon back into the soil.

But does her claim that organic farms can offset 5-30% of their carbon emissions as a result of this sequestration actually stand up to scrutiny? Here's where the arguments started, because Professor Pete Smith, Royal Society Wolfson professor of soils and global change, believes firstly that this figure is just wildly optimistic.

But secondly he contends that the problem can't be resolved by spreading organic fertilisers everywhere, because, basically, there just isn't enough. Many organic farms import some of their green manures (I spoke to one farmer who said he just begs, borrows and steals whatever he can get hold of) from other farms or parks: Smith contends that if you're putting it on one farm, you're not putting it on another.

The only way to improve the whole system is to grow more biomass. Shifting it from one place to another reduces benefits since it takes energy and thus emissions to do the work.

Smith's point was contended by Peter Segger, who has been experimenting with soil carbon levels at his Blaencamel farm in Wales for 20 years now. He points out that more than 80% of Europe's organic waste is currently incinerated: if we were composting that instead of burning it, a great rip in the carbon cycle could be repaired, and a cloud of carbon dioxide emissions saved in a second.

It depends on how clean the wastes are. Many such wastes that get lumped into the arguments of slimebag advocates are toxic. The poisons are low level but they accumulate year after year when applied to soil. The ashes from incinerators can be valuable soil amendments too, but they have some of the same drawbacks.

And Thomas Hartuung put forward his own work at Barritskov, a farm in Denmark where they plan to sequester 3,000 tonnes of carbon a year for the next century. We even trooped outside to the car park to watch a demonstration of a biochar stove, the system whereby biomass is burnt in a contained space, and turns into a sort of fine charcoal rather than ash, which you then bury. You get the heat, but the carbon is not released into the atmosphere. Instead it goes into the soil; this is a really elegant piece of cycle mending.

The difference for char is that it decomposes far more slowly and so can more truly be considered as sequestered carbon, and it has other beneficial properties for soil.

However, none of this is about organic agriculture. Any ag system can do any of these things and many do so. These are conventional, traditional ag practices. Organic systems are about taboos, things that you can't do, not things that you can do.

I do all of those things as well as things that organic believers consider sinful. I consider it better than organic - beyond organic as we sometimes hear it called. My soils improve because of "intensive grazing, the use of inorganic fertilisers, or breeds with shallower root systems." But it takes knowledge of natural systems to do the right thing at the right time and get large benefits. The total amount of forage produced is much higher than is achieved by organic believers, and almost all of it cycles into the soil as fresh, home made manure and nitrogen rich urine evenly spread on the sward. It's better than compost, better than imported manure. When I do import organic matter it is in the form of baled forage which is fed out on pasture just as if it grew there so that all of the benefits of the imported fertility are applied directly to the target.

When you think it through you realize that if all growers were careful about their organic matter then there would be no compost or manure available for organic growers to artificially amend their soils. It would almost all go right back to the field it came from, or never leave the field in the first place. The only way to truly improve soils in the whole system is to grow more biomass in all places. The exception to this is biochar since it must be processed to transform organic matter into a durable form. One of the more interesting processing systems converts the gases given off by that processing into fertilizer and dopes the char with that manufactured nitrogen. It accomplishes multiple purposes when applied to soil.