Leading with Soil: Scaling Soil Carbon Storage in Agriculture

(Carbon 180) Soil carbon storage offers significant economic and environmental opportunities for farmers and ranchers. Agricultural practices that store carbon in the soil can help fight climate change at a low cost. Those same practices can also improve overall soil health, build resilience to extreme weather, and improve the bottom lines of farmers and ranchers.

Despite these significant opportunities, practices that increase soil carbon have been slow to gain traction at a meaningful scale. Simultaneously, existing federal programs that support soil health practices cannot meet growing demand and do not track carbon outcomes. Today’s agricultural systems need new, robust federal policy in order to implement soil carbon storage at a meaningful scale and unlock its potential as a powerful climate solution.

Barriers to Scale
Through Carbon180’s Leading with Soil initiative, we worked on the ground with farmers and ranchers in the Rocky Mountain states to accelerate the adoption of practices that increase soil carbon. Our stakeholder engagement led to the discovery of three key barriers that significantly hinder the implementation of soil carbon practices today:

Technical assistance and education resources are critical for farmers and ranchers to implement new practices and capitalize on the value of soil health.

New financial incentives and tweaks to existing incentives can reduce barriers to adoption and encourage durable carbon storage.

Practices need to be linked with soil health and soil carbon outcomes in an accessible and reproducible way.

Policy Recommendations
Despite the growing interest and action at the local and state level, significant gaps remain and current adoption rates
continue to fall short. Federal policy is pivotal to alleviate barriers ranchers and farmers face. We present our policy
recommendations at a high-level below.... READ MORE

Excerpt from Carbon 180 Behind the Scenes: After months of talking to folks in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, I was learning that the people who grow our food, fuel, and fiber feel the impacts of climate change firsthand and are already talking about it, but using different words.

I wasn’t totally new to soils and agriculture — for the last 15 years, I have studied how climate and land use change impact soils and plants in grazed ecosystems. Cows are an especially familiar feature of wide open western landscapes and a lot of land across the US is grazed, so what happens in these ecosystems has large implications for people and climate.

During my short stint in Washington DC working on climate change policy, I saw that agricultural interests were largely excluded from climate policy conversations even though we use a lot of land across the U.S. to grow food, fuel, and fiber. It was clear to me that if we want to address climate change, we have to think about agriculture.

When I first started thinking about the soil health — soil carbon connection, I dug into the science. Turns out, ag practices that help improve soil health — like cover crops, reduced tillage, and diverse crop rotations — also improve soil carbon sequestration.

Farmers and ranchers want healthy soils, but there are structural barriers that keep them from doing all they can to build back soil health. Producers don’t have consistent access to education and technical support, so they are learning about soil health on the internet, and many are figuring out how to change their operations without technical assistance from experts. Producers also want to know what’s happening in their soils and they want to be able to measure their soil health. The tools to track soil health and carbon outcomes are inaccessible — either too expensive, too cumbersome or both. And because there are so few demonstration projects to help derisk new practices across different operations and geographies, producers have to make decisions without good examples of how things would work in their corner of the world.

Beyond education and science, there is a confusing landscape of incentives and disincentives. There is a growing number of incentives that support soil health practices — on-farm demonstration trials, EQIP grants — but they are insufficient to meet the growing interest and need. The policies that do exist can make it really hard for folks to try new things. For example, a policy like crop insurance defines which practices are considered “good farming practices” and leaves out things like cover crops and reduced tillage. There is ample room in the policy space to simplify things and improve access to technical assistance, science, and incentives, all with the goal of ensuring every farmer and rancher can implement soil health practices on their land.

That’s what the Leading with Soil report is about. It lays out a suite of policies that help address the barriers farmers and ranchers face — policies that reinforce each other and help marshal a system of change. It’s the result of three years of listening and learning from people who are experiencing climate change right outside their front door and who have so much at stake in addressing it.

State policy is a critical piece of the puzzle because states can innovate more quickly and provide lessons for what works and what doesn’t. Despite a lot of progress at the state level, the big levers of change are still in federal hands. Making soil health possible for every farmer and rancher in the U.S. will take ingenuity, incentives, policy support, and leadership from producers. READ MORE