Carbon Farming Strategies for Climate Mitigation: A Comprehensive Review of Cropland and Grazing Systems

Carbon farming has emerged as a flagship nature-based climate solution that seeks to increase soil organic carbon stocks and reduce agricultural greenhouse-gas emissions while sustaining food production. This review synthesizes global evidence on soil-based carbon farming strategies in cropland and grazing systems, with an emphasis on their technical potential, biophysical trade-offs, monitoring and market architectures, and social and equity implications. We first situate carbon farming within the broader agenda of climate-smart soils and natural climate solutions, highlighting recent estimates of global mitigation potential and the conditions under which soil carbon sequestration contributes meaningfully to net emission reductions. We then critically examine key management options in croplands—conservation tillage, residue retention, cover crops, diversified rotations, organic amendments, and water–nutrient co-management—and in grazing systems, including rotational grazing, productivity-enhancing interventions, and silvopastoral practices. Across systems, the evidence shows that carbon farming can deliver co-benefits for soil health, yield stability, biodiversity, and water regulation, but that gains are heterogeneous, reversible, and sensitive to climate and baseline management. The review next explores greenhouse-gas balances, focusing on nitrous oxide and methane responses that can erode or even offset soil carbon gains, and assesses emerging monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) frameworks underpinning soil carbon crediting. We discuss the performance and limitations of early carbon farming schemes and markets, interrogating issues of additionality, permanence, leakage, and justice. Drawing on recent scholarship, we show that carbon farming is deeply shaped by institutions, power, information asymmetries, and farmer risk perceptions, with particular risks of exclusion for smallholders and pastoralists in the Global South. Finally, we outline research and policy priorities to align carbon farming with robust climate mitigation, food security, and just rural transitions. Overall, carbon farming is best viewed not as a stand-alone climate fix, but as a complementary strategy that must be embedded in broader decarbonisation and adaptation pathways.