This message has hardly caused shockwaves among farmers, one group of Australians well accustomed to adapting and meeting the challenges of climate changes and land and water management.

Farmers are now being seen as the front runners in the global race against time and nature. And there is a growing consensus among these "revolutionaries" that governments and scientists need to get their heads out of the sand and into the soil.

Agricultural scientist, Dr Christine Jones, claimed that increasing the amount of carbon in soil by 0.5pc over just two per cent of Australian farm land would sequester all of Australia's national carbon dioxide emissions.

However, the carbon sequestration capability of soil and of the agriculture industry in general, has been largely unexplored by the scientific community.

Consequently, Dr Jones’s findings have received a varied response from government, industry, and particularly from scientists.

The spring issue of the CSIRO’s plant industry newsletter claimed: "Not only is it difficult to increase the amount of carbon stored in cropped soils - even with no-till and when large amounts of stubble are retained - it is also very difficult to quantify any change in the amount of carbon stored, a necessary requirement under the carbon-trading rules of the Kyoto Protocol."

Not surprisingly, Dr Jones is at odds with the CSIRO. With financial backing from a Singaporean philanthropist, Dr Jones has established the Australian Soil Carbon Accreditation Scheme.

The scheme is run on a voluntary basis and pays farmers $25 per tonne of carbon stored using the land management strategies developed by Dr Jones and a group of farmers in central NSW.

"The world's soil holds around three times as much carbon as the atmosphere and over four times as much carbon as the vegetation," Dr Jones said.

"Building soil carbon requires only green plants and soil microbes, and a significant number of grain growers are already doing this.

"We established the scheme to prove carbon can be stored in a stable form, for long periods of time, to prove it is easy to increase and to prove it can be measured."

The CSIRO newsletter also claimed in order to store carbon stably in soil, "you need considerable amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur in addition to that needed for crops."

Dr Jones said these claims were misleading and pointed to work she had done investigating the possibilities of planting broadacre crops into perennial grasses as evidence.

The grasses and crops absorbed carbon using sunlight during the photosynthesis process and served as a living host of mycorrhizal fungi. The fungi then took the carbon from the roots of the grass and crops and store it in humus, a gel-like substance, below the soil surface.

Dr Jones said nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and zinc are continuously recycled through the dynamic biological soil, microbial, plant ecosystem.

What's more, Dr Jones said, once the biological system was established it would actually replace the need for synthetic fertilisers, costly to both farmers' tight budgets and the environment.

And, she claimed, the positives didn’t stop there.

Dr Jones said storing carbon in humus improved soil structure, improved plant nutrition, increased soil water-holding capacity, improved production and effectively ameliorated the symptoms of dry land salinity.

Furthermore, she said the practice was not necessarily restricted to cropping; it could also be adopted by graziers or incorporated into mixed farming.

"A farmer could plant crops in the grasses for half of the year and graze them during the other," she said.

So, what's the catch?

The fungi, which store the carbon and provide the nutrients to the plants and grasses, are inhibited by bare soil, pesticides, phosphorus fertiliser and intensive tillage.

The upside was that farmers were increasingly moving to low-till or no till farming to save on fuel costs, so the only difference in land management would be having perennial grasses covering crops year-round to insure the fungi’s survival and life in the soil.

AgForce president, John Cotter, supported the research done by Dr Jones and her colleagues and said the lack of verifiable agricultural science had long been a hindrance to producers.

"That direction is exactly where we need to be going," Mr Cotter said of Dr Jones's work.

"The agricultural industry is one of the leading up-takers of technology in Australia. We're leading the way in technology and we'll lead the way with this (climate change).

"At the moment there's adequate opportunities to measure our emissions but very little to measure our sequestration and the cycle in which our whole industry operates."

A way forward in further developing the research conducted by sustainable farming groups might soon be available with the help of policy makers.

Dr Jones has given evidence to three hearings on the potential of carbon sinks conducted by the Senate Standing Committee for Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport including a field trip to a farm at Warren, in the NSW Central West, using the perennial grasses strategy.

The committee's interim report released last month extended the date for tabling its final report to December with members saying they needed more time to "conduct further investigations into soil carbon sequestration".

Nationals leader, Warren Truss, said the economical, environmental and political ramifications of such investigations were immense.

"A recent poll showed that 88pc of Australians wanted an emissions trading scheme (ETS) in Australia, and 60pc of people wanted it even if nobody else in the world was doing it," he said.

"But a parallel survey found only eight per cent of Australians knew what an ETS was, so you've got three quarters of all Australians wanting something that they don't know what it is.

"I think if we can talk through some of these other issues before we've done silly things just because they are politically popular, or people think they want it, we can probably avoid the pain but actually deliver some outcomes."

And with the policy makers now well informed of the possibility of agriculture providing carbon neutrality in Australia, questions were being asked as to whether the potential economic consequences of the current Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme make it a responsible course of action.

Mr Truss said it was vital that the Rudd Government remembered the primary objective of the legislation when considering their options.

"An ETS should not be designed to collect tax revenue; it's there to reduce carbon emissions," he said.

There was yet another consideration in this complex puzzle - the potential health benefits associated with having less processed, naturally produced foods alone are significant (think lower cases of heart disease, cancer, diabetes).

With the global population forecast to balloon to nine billion in the coming decades and with 30 countries already experiencing food riots, the World Food and Agriculture Organisation said the possibility of a world food security crisis is real.

If Dr Jones and her colleagues are right, a solution to two major global issues might just lie in the hands, and under the feet, of farmers.