This is a good friend of mine's
field. And he's doing the same thing I'm doing, growing corn,
right, for harvest. He's just doing it a lot differently.
You've got the contrast of the the soil versus the corn. You've
got the beautiful rows straight down. This is what I envisioned
when I was a kid, of doing when I was older is farming just like
this. And when you get into regenerative ag, you've got
chaos. On Trey Hill's farm in Maryland,
the fields look a lot different than the clean, orderly rows of
crops that his friend is growing. Unlike his friend, who
tills his fields after fall harvest and leaves them barren
for the winter, Hill plants rye, turnips, clover and a few other
species of plants in the off season so that his fields stay
covered year-round. Known as 'cover cropping,' this practice
is just one piece of a movement called 'regenerative farming.'
The approach focuses on replenishing the soils nutrients
and also includes things like no-till cultivation, rotational
cattle grazing and using less synthetic fertilizers. What we do is, after we harvest
our corn or soybeans in the fall, we plant a subsequent crop
called a cover crop. And that's what we're standing
in right now. But then, when we go to plant corn, our planters
will go right directly through this and put the seeds in the
ground in the middle of all of these flowers, and then we'll
spray the cover crop off, and it'll die and decompose into the
ground and the corn will come up through it. As the cover crops grow, and
eventually decompose, they provide nutrients for microbes
and improve the soil's health. At the same time, the plants
pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and store in the soil. Globally, about 25% of our
climate change pollution is caused by food and agriculture.
Most of that's because we're deforesting places like the
Amazon to create more farmland. But also the methane that comes
out of our cattle and rice fields is also contributing to
climate change, as is the over use of fertilizers and other
things. But regenerative agriculture seeks to reverse
that, and not only, kind of, cut down the pollution, but maybe in
some cases even soak up some of the pollution we put in the
atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide. Driven by climate conscious
consumers, a number of massive corporations, including General
Mills and PepsiCo are vowing to scale regenerative practices
across millions of acres of farmland. But can it help tackle
climate change? For the last five years, Hill's
planted year-round cover crops and refrained from tilling the
soil, which prevents the trapped carbon that he's worked hard to
sequester, from escaping back into the atmosphere. He says his
yields are comparable to what he would have gotten through
conventional farming, but since starting to farm regeneratively,
he's noticed that his soil is a lot healthier and his crops a
lot more resistant to pests and extreme weather such as floods
and droughts. He's also seeing some savings. In terms of the regenerative,
it's a lot more work in the fall because you're adding a another
planting season. But in the spring, it's a lot less work. In
the spring, we used to run a disk, a plow, and then the land
finisher and then the planters. Now we run the planter and
that's it. It's offset a lot of our diesel costs, it's offset a
lot of tractor costs, it's offset a lot of tillage costs,
all that stuff is expensive. So it actually is a much more
efficient way to farm. It just there's it adds a lot of
complexity. Initially HIll begin forming
regeneratively to appease local environmental groups, who were
worried about runoff from farms polluting the Chesapeake Bay.
Plus, Maryland has one of the most robust cover crop incentive
programs in the country. Right now, we get between I
think it's roughly $45 or $50 an acre to do cover crops. But Hill is also generating
revenue from selling credits through Nori, a small carbon
marketplace based in Seattle. Lately, there's been an
explosion of private marketplaces like Nori and
Indigo Ag. Here, companies and individuals eager to offset
their own footprints can purchase carbon credits from
farmers who've sequestered CO2. But some are skeptical that
companies will use the markets as an excuse to continue
business as usual. Still, McKinsey estimates that the
market for carbon credits could be worth over $50 billion in
2030. The Biden administration has also earmarked $30 billion
to help pay farmers to implement sustainable practices and
capture carbon in their soil. Part of these funds could be
used to create a federal carbon bank, which would stabilize the
price of carbon. Okay, 10-4 well we can go ahead
and do it then. Last year, HIll became the first
farmer in the country to sell carbon credits through Nori.
Currently, Nori offers its farmers $15 for every metric ton
of CO2 they sequester, We put in all of our data for
the farm, our yields were, planting dates, what our cover
crops are, what our cover crop plant dates are, when our cover
crop was killed, all of these different things and we put it
into a model that was developed by the Department of
Agriculture. What it ended up being is about a ton of carbon
per year per acre. Hill says his farm already keeps
records of most of the data required by the carbon
sequestration model, which made the process easier, but not
every farm does. And keeping track of all this data can eat
up valuable time. We didn't do every field, it's a
lot of work to get the model done. So we took a portion of
what we farm and sold that into the carbon markets. After paying a third-party
auditor $4,000 to verify Harborview's data, Hill has so
far made around $210,000 for sequestering just over 14,000
metric tons of carbon over the course of five years. So that's compost. And it's
basically turning into really awesome soil. Loren Poncia owns Stemple Creek
Ranch in Northern California. Through a partnership with the
Marin Carbon Project, a consortium of independent
agricultural institutions, Poncia has also adopted a number
of regenerative farming practices. These include
applying compost instead of chemical fertilizers to pastures
to avoid tilling, and periodically moving livestock
from one pasture to another, thus giving the grass and soil a
chance to recover. We're part of this study, a
10-year study, that had a 35-acre treatment plot. And
basically what we're seeing is we sequester about 3,000 to
5,000 pounds of carbon per acre per year. Poncia has already
received state funding from California's Healthy Soils
Program to implement sustainable farming practices on his ranch,
but says he's not yet ready to sell carbon credits on the
private market because of the high cost of determining how
much carbon is contained in his soil. The carbon that we're putting in
the soil has allowed us to grow so much more forage that we are
making more money now and selling more pounds of protein
now than we did 10 years ago. But we haven't gotten to the
point where we're selling carbon credits to the open market,
mostly because the value of the carbon credits isn't really
worth going through all of the process of monitoring and
measuring in order to pay for them. Current carbon market for
pasture-based carbon sequestration is somewhere
between $5 and $10 per carbon credit. And in order for me to
get interested, I would be you know, more like $80 or $100 a
carbon credit. Hill and Poncia agree that
regenerative farming has been beneficial for soil health and
their businesses. But the jury is still out on how effective
the practices are when it comes to mitigating climate change.
For one, setting up a carbon market is tricky, because
measuring carbon sequestration is hard. Back in the 1990s, there was
something called the Chicago Climate Exchange, which was
trying to trade carbon credits from farmers with companies who
were, very early on, talking about greenhouse gas pollution.
And the idea was, back then we thought farmers who didn't till
their landscape, didn't plow it up every fall, would be
absorbing carbon. They do, in the top few inches of the soil.
But then, when we started measuring the lower parts of the
soil, we noticed that they weren't accumulating carbon as
much. And it kind of became a wash. And then, the whole idea
of that market kind of fell apart. Even today, figuring out how
much carbon is trapped in the soil is not an exact science, The traditional method is you
take a core, you stick a big kind of pole in the ground and
pull up like what's basically a long rod filled with soil. And
you take that out and you actually stick it in a really
hot oven ,essentially, and you bake out the water. But then
eventually you bake out all the organic matter, you burn it all
off and measure the CO2 that comes out. That's really time
consuming, expensive. And you basically get a measurement for
the place you stuck the pole in the ground. So you have to then
go do that again and again and again across the farm. Because
every little patch of land is a little bit different. The other option is to use an
algorithm. Sometimes, what we do is we rely
on an algorithm that says, well based on the topography, the
basic soil chemistry where you are, the climate where you are,
and the way you're farming, I'm going to go look at 100 other
farms who did something similar and give you like a ballpark
number to use as kind of a baseline to credit the carbon
that you're putting away. Assuming that you get an
accurate number for how much CO2 has been stored, the next
challenge is ensuring that the CO2 will remain in the soil long
term. In America, a lot of farmland
isn't owned. It's leased by the farmers. And so there's
turnover. So I think as a policymaker, members of
Congress, the Biden administration and so on, if
they're going to plan to kind of pay farmers to do this, or if
companies paid farmers to do this in some kind of market, how
are you paying them to ensure it'll be there for the next 100
years? Nori demands that sellers on its
marketplace sign a 10-year contract promising that they
will continue farming regeneratively. So in Nori's market, the farmers
are signing a 10-year contract with us that says that they're
obligated to keep that carbon in the ground and they have to
re-verify the data that that we're using for quantification,
at least every three years. And then at every three year
verification mark, they can sign a new 10-year contract. Such a long commitment can be
tough for farmers. As a farmer, that's a huge risk.
If we get a hurricane in the fall, say September, and I have
to harvest after 22 inches of rain, I'm probably gonna have to
do some tillage. At least in places. What if I don't own the
land? The owners that I rent from, t's not typical to get a
10-year agreement because as the markets fluctuate, so do the
rental prices. I have some owners that don't like this
look. It's their farms and they'd like it to look neat and
clean and this is definitely a different look than a freshly
plowed field. And Hill's not alone. According
to the latest numbers from the USDA, around 40% of the farmland
in the US was rented in 2014. Hill says challenges like these
are why he's only sold about 35% of his fields into the carbon
market. The biggest cost, of course, is
time. If farmers have to switch the way they're doing things
from what they used to do for years, which reliably could give
them productivity and income, and have to make some
adjustments. During that time, you might not be earning very
much. Or maybe it takes time for the farm, the ranch to shift to
getting into kind of settling into these new practices. So
that's probably why it'd be good to see things like price
supports and government assistance for these kinds of
agriculture. Coming up with accurate measures
of carbon sequestration and figuring out how to keep that
CO2 in the soil long term are moot points, unless farmers
agree to adopt regenerative practices in the first place.
Nori currently only has six farmers who are fully enrolled
onto its marketplace and Foley estimates that regenerative
farming is still only practiced on less than 1% of the farmland
in the US. In order to gain wider adoption, Hill and Poncia
think there needs to be more incentives for farmers. I think what we need to do is be
able to couple markets together. So you know, if we can sell the
$15 credit on the carbon market, you know, maybe we can save
another few dollars on crop insurance. We're offsetting risk
by growing crops this way. So it should save crop insurance money
anyway. If the government would
subsidize carbon in the soil instead of subsidizing mono
crops across the country that we end up exporting overseas
anyway, I think we could definitely gain a lot of ground
very quickly. If we could make a living selling the carbon, I
would love it. As for a federal carbon market,
Hill says that may not be a good idea. We have to turn over so much
data in order to make this marketplace valid, transparent
and true. I don't know how many farmers are going to be
comfortable turning over that level of information to the Farm
Service Agency. Most experts agree that
regenerative farming is beneficial and should be
encouraged. But they say that it's by no means a silver bullet
for solving climate change and should not be used as an excuse
to continue emitting greenhouse gases in other places If we're paying farmers to
secure carbon from the atmosphere as an excuse not to
turn off the dirty power plant or to stop some industrial
process somewhere else, that's not a good idea. Foley thinks we should also
temper expectations of just how much carbon farmers may be able
to sequester. There's always going to be a
certain limit of land or how much the soils can absorb or how
fast they can absorb it. You could put a sizable amount of
carbon, maybe the equivalent of a few years of our emissions
back into the world soils, if we did a massive regenitive push
around the world. And that's nothing to sneeze at. But again,
it's not a silver bullet to climate change. But the nice
thing about regenerative agriculture, despite the limits
of it, is that it has so many co-benefits. That it helps the
soils. It helps the farms. It helps the watershed. And
ultimately should make farms more productive and more
resilient. But the concerns are, how big is this really? Let's be
careful about the claims being made here and maybe discount
them quite a bit until we're sure. Because at the end of the
day, the atmosphere's balance sheet is the one that matters,
not ours. Hill and Poncia believe that the
success of regenerative practices may not be driven by
the government or the private carbon markets. I really truly believe that it's
going to be consumers that demand it of the farmers. I think more and more consumers
on a daily basis are voting with their dollars, supporting people
like me and other regenerative farmers out there that are doing
their best to try and raise that nutrient-dense, very health
food
