Broken Carbon Credit Markets Threaten the Future of Farming. For Farmers, the Path to Profit is Ground-Truth Data.
By Adam Koeppel, CEO, Agrology -
It’s exciting to watch farmers adopt regenerative agriculture practices. We see our customers restoring soil and ecosystem health, and protecting the future of their farms. They are also using hard data to prove the results of regenerative practices.
However, carbon markets undervalue the work farmers do and offer farmers a low price for agricultural carbon credits. This isn’t right. Farming offers the fastest, most scalable way to sequester carbon, stop and reverse climate change. Yet, carbon credit markets are broken.
Current carbon credit markets do not provide farmers with the financial incentives to offset the costs of regenerative agriculture. Most farmers are unable to profit from regenerative farming. Yet many farmers are moving forward with regenerative practices because they know it’s good for the land and the planet.
Farmers are being robbed by middlemen in the carbon credit markets. And these broken carbon credit markets threaten the future livelihood of farmers everywhere. Middlemen ‘project developers’ make all the money, while farmers get almost nothing. These middlemen avoid the hard, real work of gathering in-field data from farms. Instead they rely on theoretical models and rough calculations since these approaches are fast and easy. But carbon markets value a data backed approach. So middlemen get to scale and farmers get ripped off.
The middlemen are playing a volume game. They sign up vast acres to make money and ignore the opportunity to create high quality carbon credits. Instead, they should be working with farmers to create high-quality, data-backed, high-value carbon credits. The resulting high values should be shared with farmers.
The current carbon credit markets are a great injustice to our farming community. Especially as climate threats continue to squeeze farm profits and threaten the security of our food supply.
There should be no theoretical models or guesswork that scale fast but shortchange farmers. No hand waving, no fuzzy math, no greenwashing. Just real ground-truth data. This eliminates the need for the empty work of middlemen project developers. This empowers farmers to earn significantly more money from high-quality, data-backed carbon credits.
Farmers should own their data, middlemen shouldn't control access to carbon markets, and farmers should profit from regenerative practices.
We know farmers can lead the world in sequestering carbon and they can ramp up fast. But they have to at least break even on regenerative practices to make this happen. It's time to empower farmers with data they need to profitably adopt regenerative agriculture, reverse climate change, and secure our food supply.
