Copenhagen, Denmark's ancient fairytale city, is the final stages of preparing to accept up to 15,000 climate experts, bureaucrats and journalists to follow the negotiations to help strike a post-Kyoto climate change agreement.

If the big deal is reached, it will set in place the framework and funding arrangements to reduce greenhouse emissions throughout the world.

There is perhaps no better country to prove what a reduced-emissions life could really be like, and is a proven front-runner in the use of renewable energy and the absolute minimisation of waste.

In the past 20 years, a renewable energy revolution has swept through Denmark, which is now a world leader in the production and use of bio, wind and solar energy alternatives.

What's more, very little of it would be possible without farmers, who have been pivotal in the drive to generate power from nature.

In an exclusive interview with Denmark's Minister for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Eva Kjer Hansen, told Rural Press that her country's farmers were proving how successful the integration of renewable energy and traditional farming could be.

But she said next month's COP 15 meeting needed to overhaul current accounting rules for agriculture and better recognise the role of farming in reducing the world's emissions – not creating them.

She said this is crucial if agriculture is to be "part of the climate solution" as it is proving it can be, she said.

She said Danish farmers have incredibly large environmental pressures placed on them by the rest of the population, and her ministry has recently developed a "green growth" paper to lay out a plan to meet those public environmental demands, yet still focused on productivity.

"Agriculture can change its production practices to be more green," Mrs Kjer Hansen said.

"Farmers can deliver in energy areas and there are big opportunities there, and a change of the rules is important if agriculture is to be part of the solution."

She said she wants to see the growth of more biogas plants, which turns livestock manure to gas, heat and fertiliser and says future farming policies and climate deals must embrace a "soil to the table" approach.

* More stories from Denmark in this week's Rural Press agricultural weekly newspapers.