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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