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