There are many ways farmers and ranchers can dive into the carbon market. Clay Craighton, an agronomist with Agoro says the opportunities are endless.
“A reduction in tillage for a row crop farmer, or going to no till, implementing cover crops, reducing your synthetic nitrogen or replacing your synthetic nitrogen. And we can always go more in depth on that once they contact us, we can go through really their operation and get to the nitty gritty details. For ranchers, the opportunities would be grazing management, so implementing more improved grazing methods, so more rotational grazing, more movements, fencing, paddocks, stuff like that to improve forage growth. Another one would be biodiversity. So, seeding a new species on that pasture,” Craighton said.
Craighton says the new carbon calculator from Agoro Carbon can help producers calculate the potential benefit on enrolling their acres in the carbon market.
“The Carbon Calculator is on our website, and a producer can enter like a section worth of acres, and which practices you’re interested in incorporating. So, even if you’ve already done no till, and don’t want to click on that, but you’re interested in seeing, hey, what would a cover crop look like on these acres? You could see your potential payout from there. So, it’s a really good tool for farmers to use for what if scenarios also, not only what they’ve already been doing, but what they potentially are interested in,” Craighton said.
A lot of growers have already implemented sustainable production practices, but that doesn’t automatically disqualify those acres from carbon farming.
“Just because you’ve already adopted no till doesn’t mean you couldn’t still enroll those no till acres with cover crop additions, for example, or synthetic nitrogen rate reduction or improved grazing, is there other tweaks to the improved grazing where he can go a little bit more intensive. Another one I get to is if a guy has native grasslands, they think they’re not able to enroll them either. And that’s not true in that case, you could just use your native species list and pick a species that’s more applicable to your range or pastures,” Craighton says.
He encourages all farmers and ranchers to consider what practices may be the best fit for your operation.
