A North Queensland soil researcher says farming holds the greatest potential to remove carbon from the atmosphere and reverse climate change.

Simon Mattsson has just won the Rising Star award at the National Carbon Farming Conference, a major part of his research is looking at the way crops absorb carbon from the air and store it in the soil.

He said the world was still a long way from fully understanding how soil management can help in the fight against climate change.

“The sky is the limit,” Mr Mattsson said.

“Plants have this inbuilt ability to be able to take carbon from the air and fix it in our soils.

“So agriculture thereby has the ability, if you want to go that far, to actually reverse climate change.”

Mr Mattsson is a cane grower in Marian, west of Mackay, but has travelled around the world researching soil health, after winning a prestigious Nuffield Scholarship.

While people are largely aware of the potential for renewable energy and other technology to fight climate change, Mr Mattsson said it was unfortunate they were unaware of the immense potential held by farming for the same purpose.

He is currently experimenting with an example on his own property; a commercially sunflower crop, inter-mixed with his latest sugar cane crop.

At this stage, the cane is about 30 centimetres tall and the lush sunflowers are about one metre tall and almost ready to flower.

It is not new for growers to use sunflowers to boost soil health, but Mr Mattsson believes this is the first commercial crop of sunflowers grown among a cane crop.