by Chris Clayton (DTN Progressive Farmer) When Ohio farmer Fred Yoder testified last month before the House Select Committee on Climate Change, the long-time no-till farmer and champion of climate-smart farming practices told lawmakers one of the best things that could happen would be to get back a carbon market that would encourage farmers to use those sort of farming practices.
“We need to have a metric that defines what carbon is worth,” Yoder said. “I told them if you incentivize a farmer to sequester carbon, they are going to do it. There should have been a cover crop on every single acre of prevented planting this year to sequester carbon.”
Yoder added, “I really pushed that carbon could be the next big crop we really consider to cash in on, and get ecosystem services benefit for planting it, and we should be able to be compensated for that.”
Yoder said he also tried to connect the dots between carbon sequestration and water quality. The same farm practices, such as no-till and cover cropping, that build organic matter in the soil also increase water-holding capacity and better filtering of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus.
“It’s a very simple connection that the same things that improve water quality are also the same practices that sequester carbon. But we don’t champion policy that gets two bangs for the buck,” Yoder said. “Here in Ohio, we are back on our heels because of nutrient movement, and we could kill two birds with one stone with climate policy as well as nutrient policy. But we just can’t seem to chew gum and walk at the same time.”
Agriculture hasn’t been able to effectively scale up ecosystem markets in more than two decades of work, but there are renewed efforts to build a market that would pay farmers for their conservation and environmental practices.
One of those initiatives got a financial boost on Tuesday when the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) announced a $10.3 million award to build out the research arm of the Ecosystem Services Market Consortium. The consortium, a group of more than 40 major agribusinesses and agricultural trade associations, will match the grant over the next three years to fund a total of $20.6 million for both research and development of environmental markets for farmers. The grant was announced at the beginning of the Sustainable Ag Summit in Indianapolis spearheaded by the group Field to Market.
The Ecosystem Services Market Consortium has been assessing what has worked and why some initiatives have failed. ESMC is looking to quantify soil carbon, but also overall net greenhouse emission reductions, water quality and water quantity. The goal is to “stack” the environmental services provided by a farmer or rancher’s conservation practices.
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One of the key goals of the consortium over the next three years will be to better validate and monitor the environmental impact of conservation practices by farmers and pay them through an ecosystem services marketplace. In that time, the plan is to launch a new ecosystem market. The consortium is working now on some pilot projects, including a 50,000-acre project with the Noble Foundation in Oklahoma and Texas. The pilot projects are expected to soon migrate to the Midwest.
IHS Markit, formerly known as Informa, conducted a study for the Noble Institute released in September showing the market for ecosystem credits in the U.S. could be as high as $13.9 billion. READ MORE