Report: Big Ag Soil Carbon Programs Entrench Corporate Power And Delay Real Climate Action

Carbon-offset programs have become a leading U.S. policy approach for mitigating agriculture’s climate impact. These programs allow polluters to “offset” their greenhouse gas emissions and claim a “net-zero” carbon footprint by paying farmers to engage in practices that are supposed to draw carbon down from the air and sequester it in their soil. Over the past year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has distributed over half a billion dollars in grants to projects advancing private carbon markets as part of its larger climate-smart commodities initiative.

But a new report by the Open Markets Institute and Friends of the Earth reveals the many ways these programs defraud the public, forestall effective climate action, and even risk increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Scientific uncertainties and biological realities call soil carbon offsets’ validity into question, meanwhile, programs run by dominant agribusiness corporations serve to greenwash their operations and entrench their market power.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle and the Biden administration have fallen for carbon offsetting’s simplistic appeal to fund carbon-smart farming practices without new regulations or government programs. But without a mandate to cut climate-warming pollution, buying unregulated carbon credits amounts to little more than misleading green marketing as companies maintain the status quo.

Soil carbon is hard to commodify, and offset sales lack basic market mechanisms. For one, naturally high variations in soil carbon concentration make it hard to generalize how certain practices, like no-till or planting cover crops, increase soil carbon sequestration. Soil carbon offsets also sell a claim to something that’s naturally impermanent – just one major disturbance or change in management practices can quickly release years of accumulated soil carbon.

As it stands, there aren’t standards for accurately measuring or modeling soil carbon nor for determining if a soil carbon credit represents all the sequestered carbon that it claims to, or for how long. A 2021 study of 12 protocols for measuring and evaluating soil organic carbon found that their wide variation risks “creating credits that are not equivalent or even comparable.” For instance, models that fail to account for recent scientific revelations about the role that microorganisms play in breaking down soil carbon risk overestimating how much carbon will remain in the soil over the long term.

Agriculture carbon credits wouldn’t be the first offsets to overpromise and underdeliver. A 2017 report by the European Commission estimated that 75% of the carbon credits in the EU’s carbon trading system had a low likelihood of reducing emissions. Allowing corporations to buy fraudulent credits as they continue to pollute can increase net carbon emissions over time, as has been the case in California’s forest offset program.

Our report also highlights the ways dominant agribusiness corporations can game soil carbon markets. Major agribusiness companies like Cargill, Bayer, Corteva, and Nutrien have all launched private programs that purport to pay farmers for sequestering carbon. These projects let agrichemical companies define “climate-smart” agriculture in their image. 

Biodiverse, agroecological, and perennial farming methods have far greater climate and environmental benefits than implementing isolated practices like cover-cropping or no-till agriculture on conventional, monocrop farms. For instance, even by conservative estimates, agroforestry can sequester 10 to 20 times more carbon per acre than no-till or cover-cropping.

Yet virtually all agribusiness-led carbon payment programs only reward farmers for a limited set of practices that can be integrated into the conventional industrial approach to farming: reducing fertilizer use, reducing tillage, or planting cover crops. Bayer has a particular incentive to reward no-till and cover crop practices because most large-scale farms rely on glyphosate, the main ingredient in Bayer’s Roundup, to “knock down” cover crops and control weeds in lieu of tillage. We found that Bayer promotes using glyphosate to support no-till and cover crops.

Corporate carbon programs also require farmers to upload copious amounts of farm-level data through companies’ digital agriculture programs to certify carbon credits. Capturing this data helps Big Ag companies build dominant digital platforms through which farmers access agriculture software and data-driven farm management prescriptions. Agribusinesses use these platforms to sell more of their products and direct on-farm decisions. According to a 2022 presentation, Bayer generated more than 5% higher sales from its corn seed customers who use its premium digital agriculture platform, FieldView Plus, compared to non-FieldView Plus users. Bayer also found that FieldView users planted Bayer corn seeds at a 2.5% higher seeding rate than the national average.

Corporate-run carbon contracts also aren’t a fair deal for farmers. While some programs tie payments to carbon-credit sales value, Bayer and Cargill unilaterally set the prices they pay per practice per acre or per ton of carbon sequestered. Carbon contracts are also long-term commitments. Farmers in Bayer’s Carbon Program must sign 10-year contracts with an additional 10-year “retention period,” during which farmers must maintain their new practices to ensure long-term carbon sequestration. This effectively commits farmers to 20 years of new fixed costs with only 10 years of guaranteed pay, at a price set by Bayer.

Rather than wasting time and resources on carbon markets, our report argues that Congress and the USDA must invest in directly supporting farmers via established conservation programs with proven success, such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and Conservation Stewardship Program. With proper restructuring and increased funding, these programs can compensate farmers for adopting sustainable agricultural practices without enhancing corporate influence and fueling greenwashing.