Subtitles section Play video
-
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