His farm has been certified organic since 2014, but lately he’s gone even further, adopting regenerative practices like eliminating fall tilling, grazing cattle on his fields, and planting cover crops and perennials .
Scientists are studying how regenerative agricultural practices like the ones Peterson is using can restore those soils and sequester carbon—1 to 3 billion metric tons per year, Lal estimates—in the process.
You can’t completely eliminate your emissions, but you can choose to offset them by buying carbon credits from farms that sequester greenhouse gases, making your emissions “net-zero.” A third-party firm estimates the amount of carbon you’ve sequestered and converts it into sellable credits—each of which represents 1 metric ton of CO2 or its equivalent.
Microsoft purchased Truterra’s first “crop” of 100,000 tons in 2021.
That is fundamentally much harder to do with soils, because their carbon content can change,” says Danny Cullenward, policy director at Carbon Plan, a nonprofit research agency that ensures the integrity and transparency of climate solutions.
After conducting a thorough review of these formulas, Carbon Plan has strong concerns: Are they based on current science? Do they measure deep enough in the soil? “I’m not seeing a lot of signs that these companies are trying to account for this stuff,” Cullenward says.
Pay a farmer to practice no-till agriculture for 10 years, and if she decides on year 11 she’s going to till up her field, the carbon will be released again.
For example, planting cover crops costs $15 to $78 per acre every year, according to a 2019 report from the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program.
That massive scale is a selling point for private carbon markets, who argue that they provide the incentive America’s industrial farmers need to change the way they farm giant tracts of land.
It’s leaving out farmers who have already been doing carbon-sequestering practices and Indigenous people who manage land well.” Carbon markets, after all, don’t address the holistic impact of chemical fertilizers, pesticides or other industrial farming practices on the environment—or reform the agricultural system so it allows small family farms to thrive.
Measuring, reporting, giving all his agronomic data to a third party, and all for a relatively mediocre paycheck? He’d rather charge a fair price for his organic, regenerative grains—one that incorporates all the ecosystem benefits he already provides.