TRANSITIONING TO A
GREENER FOOTPRINT
Prepare your data now for opportunities with carbon programs By Martha Blum l AgriNews Publications
C
g Accordin . .S U to the tal n e m Environ on Protecti , Agency re u lt agricu ts n u o acc of for 10% n’s o the nati e s u o h green ns. io s is m gas e
arbon programs are here to stay with the increased government and corporate focus on agriculture as a climate solution. “The Fortune 500 companies have made corporate commitments to greenhouse gas reductions and they are driven by consumer demands and employee retention,” said Joe Winchell, conservation agronomist for AgOutcomes and the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund. “For companies like PepsiCo or Target, 80% of their footprint happens out of their direct control through goods and services they purchase, which at the root of that is the farmer,” said Winchell during a presentation at the Better Beans event hosted by the Illinois Soybean Association. “PepsiCo doesn’t have a team to work with farmers and that’s why they need to come through organizations like us.” The Soil and Water Outcomes Fund started in 2020 as a 9,500-acre pilot. “We expanded to 120,000 acres last year and we worked in Illinois, Iowa, Ohio and the Chesapeake Bay watershed,” Winchell said. “In 2022, we’re going to expand into Indiana and there will be 50,000 acres available in Illinois.” This carbon program pays farmers based on outcomes — not practices. “What makes us different is we stack the
12 | DeKalb County AG MAG | Spring 2022
carbon program with a water quality program,” the conservation agronomist said. “We pay up to $40 per acre with the average in 2021 across 120,000 acres of $35 per acre, so that’s the value of the water piece.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture is a large buyer of water quality improvements, Winchell said. “In Iowa, we work with the city of Ames and Cedar Rapids wastewater treatment plants and we also work with the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship,” he said. Once the fund establishes outcome purchase agreements with customers, then they can target a geography and enroll farmers. “I sit down with farmers to understand what they are currently doing and what they want to add,” Winchell said. “We have no maximum or minimum and we can scale a program across your whole operation.” Every farming operation is different in the type of practices that are utilized and the changes that the farmer wants to make. “We enter information like fertilizer or manure applied, tillage practices and the planting and harvesting operations to get a baseline crop rotation,” Winchell said. “We also enter the new practices such as going from conventional tillage to strip-till or planting a cover crop.” Two USDA-supported models are used to determine the greenhouse gas emissions and how the changes in farming practices will impact the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus loss.
