WHAT is carbon storage? How do I know how much I'm storing? What does it look like? How will I record it? How will I trade it? Who with? What's its value?
If you're wondering why a columnist is asking these questions on the women's page of a farming newspaper, then think about this.
Who had to learn to do the GST accounting on farms?
Who learnt how to use and upgrade their software and computers and other information technology so they could comply with the demands of Business Activity Statements (BAS)?
Bookkeepers on farms, that's who, and most of them are women.
Carbon accounting is the next addition to the farm accounting system and women on farms who traditionally "do" the books will be better equipped to manage it if they know about it.
Under current proposals, agriculture won't be included in Australia's emissions trading scheme until 2015, when some form of emissions and stored carbon recording and compliance will need to be in place.
Get ready, girls.
You won't be asked how to construct such a system, but you will be asked to comply with it.
Unless of course, you get in there and start mucking with politicians and high-end business types.
Like Jennie Hawkins is.
The former dental therapist turned farmer, of Finley in southern NSW, was one of two women of 16 Nuffield Scholarship recipients this year.
"My kids laugh when I call myself a farmer," Jennie says, which suggests something about the number of hours she doesn't spend on the tractor.
She's using the scholarship opportunity to study emissions trading and methods for calculating greenhouse-gas emissions and storage on farm.
Aged 48 and a mother-of-four, she ignored the scholarship's age criteria - "generally between 28 to 40" - and applied anyway.
It's amusing to think that while awaiting her interview, passers-by inquired of her husband, who was sitting next to her, what he planned to use his scholarship for.
Jennie wants to learn how to measure and record on-farm greenhouse-gas emissions and carbon, and about the emissions trading game, because she believes she can use that knowledge to refocus and empower her family's farm business.
She and husband Jack run a 960ha mixed irrigation enterprise and grow rice, canola and winter cereals, and produce prime lambs and feedlot beef cattle.
Some believe emissions trading will merely give the rich a way to buy their way out of reducing emissions - a ticket to pollute, if you like.
Others say it might resuscitate farming to some degree, if only those flatulating animals can be brought under control.
Jennie's not waiting around to argue the point.
"This is tied up with climate change, and rural people get their backs up about climate change and say things like, 'it's just a drought' or 'it's always been the same', but at the end of the day there's a lot of emotional energy churned up about that," she says.
"Don't get bogged down in the debate, participate in the legislative process in the evolution of the rules.
"Turn that emotional energy into finding out about it.
"It's knowledge and we mustn't be intimidated by the language."
Get Jennie's number.
You might need it when you're doing the books in 10 years.
CORRECTION: Last week I said the bloke nominating for election in our council ward was a shoo-in because the job was a virtual handover from our outgoing female councillor.
Wrong.
There are two other blokes competing for the role!
