REGENERATIVE | Researchers created a carbon map of Alberta so they could zoom in on farms’ soil carbon content
A developing carbon offset program is designed to encourage and incentivize regenerative farming without forcing producers to fit a cookie-cutter protocol.
“To try to standardize something that is fundamentally adaptive and site specific, and also based on a lot of innovation, it’s going to put a cap on the innovation that can happen,” said Kimberly Cornish, director of Food Water Wellness.
Cornish spoke during the Manitoba Forage and Grassland Association’s Regenerative Ag Conference in Brandon on Nov. 16. She’s a founder of the Food Water Wellness Foundation, an Olds, Alberta-based organization that promotes regenerative agriculture.
“There are all these amazing outcomes of regenerative agriculture, and we know that we’re sequestering carbon in the soil because we know the organic matter is going up,” Cornish said.
Yet, while regenerative agriculture is growing, it’s “not at the rate that I think a lot of us who work in this space expected it to,” Cornish said.
She saw monetization through carbon offsets as a potential lever to scale up regenerative agriculture, but found that existing offset programs weren’t well suited to those farming practices.
Alberta has a government-run carbon offset market which includes a conservation cropping protocol that allowed farmers to generate carbon credits. This protocol ends at the end of 2021, according to the Alberta government’s website.
The model was essentially, “we think because you’re doing (this practice in this region), you’re going to get paid that,” Cornish explained. The province was split into two regions, and what farmers were paid was based on projections of what the prescribed practices could sequester.
“There is no mechanism to quantify whether or not you were sequestering any carbon,” Cornish told the Co-operator. “It just mattered that you had the equipment and you followed the protocol… and that, especially within regenerative agriculture, is especially problematic.”
Producers Cornish and colleagues spoke to weren’t keen on it either. They wanted to be paid for what they actually sequestered on their own land.
“There’s a potential for a considerable amount of money to be made, but it needs to be done in a specific way that the value rests with the land managers as a motivation to either continue managing this way, or start managing this way,” Cornish said.
Food Water Wellness was influenced by Alex McBratney, an Australian scientist who co-developed a farm-scale soil carbon auditing method that maps soil carbon over a given area. They are working with sustainable agriculture researchers Kris Nichols, Ish Wheeler, Tomislav Hengl and others.
The pilot project received funding through the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, according to Food Water Wellness’s site.
Counterintuitively, said Cornish, the simplest way to measure carbon on a farm scale was to map the whole province of Alberta, and then zoom in on a farm. The map combined layers of data and soil tests from as many ecoregions of Alberta as possible.
The resulting map shows a snapshot of soil carbon levels across Alberta from the topsoil to 100 centimetres depth.
From there, they could zoom in to an individual farm. Cornish showed Taber, Alta., ranch Shipwheel Cattle Feeders, which is a regenerative operation of a 5,500-head feedlot, crops, bees, and pastured poultry, according to Shipwheel’s site.
Cornish compared soil carbon on nearby cropland and Shipwheel’s adaptive, multi-paddock grazing land. The cropland contained about 26.9 tonnes per acre of soil carbon, while the grazing land had 39.6 tonnes per acre or 12.7 tonnes per acre more, or nearly 47 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per acre.
That’s “pretty considerable,” Cornish said.
The team will repeat the mapping process in 2022 to measure the change in soil carbon, and will repeat the process again after that.
While focusing on how to measure carbon sequestered, Food Water Wellness is also considering how best to sell credits and reward farmers.
Cornish said what they heard from producers is that they didn’t want to be locked into a long-term conservation easement. They wanted the flexibility to sell the land at whatever rate they wanted, and to not tie the hands of the next generation.
The foundation is considering a model in which revenue from credits would be secured in a fund to ensure permanence, and to index against the future value of carbon going up. An annual payment from that fund would be paid to the farmer in perpetuity.
This would incentivize farmers to keep the carbon stored or add more, Cornish said.
The program would begin by generating credits based on avoided conversion of pasture or grassland to cropland.
Some people are skeptical about these types of credits because they’re “just keeping a ranch, a ranch,” said Cornish, but said with the high price of canola, “anything that can be cropped is getting ripped up.”
Based on carbon mapping, they can demonstrate how much carbon land holds as is, and how much it stands to lose if ripped up.
Cornish said she’s seeing carbon credits sold as packed ecosystems services, and with the story of regenerative agriculture plus the validation of the carbon mapping, people will be interested.
“I feel like every day there’s a new company — a private company that makes the declaration that it’s going to be net zero by 2040 or 2050 and there’s really no way it’s going to do that, at least in the short term, without some degree of offsetting,” she said.
“Our goal is to see regenerative agriculture scaled, not to provide carbon offsets. And we think carbon offsets are a means to being able to do that,” Cornish added.
Food Water Wellness is leading the development of the offset protocol, which thus far is only based in Alberta. Cornish told the Co-operator they may be able to begin generating offsets in 2022.
