By Dennis Pillion
U.S. soybean farmers explore innovative ways to continuously improve their sustainability, with benefits that reach beyond their farms. Annie Dee, a soybean farmer and United Soybean Board (USB) director from Alabama, shares how she receives credit for storing carbon in her soils in this article from AL.com.
Deep in west Alabama, in a part of the state where most economic activity grows up from the ground, one woman is hoping to get paid for what she’s putting back into the soil.
Aliceville farmer Annie Dee, who runs the Dee River Ranch in Pickens County, is one of a growing number of farmers who are signed up to get paid to sequester carbon in the soil using what are being called regenerative farm techniques.
Dee uses a mixture of plants such as radishes, turnips, clover, winter peas and oats as cover crops for her 4,000 acres of row crops. The cover crops grow to different depths in the soil, providing a variety of benefits. She still tinkers with the mixture based on seed prices. In the past she’s used sunflowers, but she said those were too expensive this year.
Dee is one of the early participants in an incentive program run by startup Indigo Agriculture called the Terraton Initiative, which will pay farmers like her $15 per ton of carbon sequestered in the soil where she grows crops like corn, soybeans and timber and grazes cattle.
Dee isn’t a climate change activist, but she has been an advocate of no-till farming, using cover crops and crop rotations for decades. Now she’s making a little extra bank for the added benefits of keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.
“What I hope is to get paid for things that I’m already doing,” Dee said.
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher now than at any point in the at least the past 800,000 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Agriculture is estimated to be responsible for 20 to 25 percent of global carbon emissions, but some believe it may also be the easiest and cheapest way to put carbon back in the ground.
Atmospheric CO2 levels taken from Antarctic ice cores dating back hundreds of thousands of years. Source: NOAA
Plants naturally absorb carbon dioxide from the air, and using cover crops in between growing seasons can keep soil healthy, richer and full of carbon. The plants also break up tough soil with their roots, adding nutrients back to the soil as they break down.
Indigo Ag believes farmers like Dee can sequester enough carbon in their soil to make a real impact in the battle to limit the impacts of climate change. The project name Terraton is a play on words from “terra,” meaning earth, and “tera,” meaning one trillion, as the stated goal of the project is to remove one trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to enrich agricultural soils.
The company says it expects farmers who use “the full suite of regenerative growing practices” could capture 2 to 3 tons of carbon per acre per year.
Those practices include using cover crops, no-till, reducing fertilizer and chemical inputs, crop rotation, and integrating livestock and crop areas to allow “carefully managed grazing” for the animals and provide a bit of free fertilizer for the plants.
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