The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is among a handful of nonprofit groups that have been working to expand this potential—to better connect carbon farming with carbon markets. The key factor is the availability of reliable data: As Robert Parkhurst, EDF’s director of agriculture greenhouse gas markets puts it, “You need some equation to calculate the agricultural practice into greenhouse gas emissions reduced. You need ease of use; you need credibility of the science… you have to have a high degree of accuracy. You have to be able to say, if I do x, y happens.” And you need all that at a price that is still going to return some value to the farmer—at the moment, carbon offsets are valued at about $10 per ton, which in most cases is not going to cover the farmer’s costs as well as the costs of monitoring and verification. Groups like EDF see their role as helping to develop the systems of quantification so that eventually, carbon markets for carbon farming can function on their own.

“Things in agriculture don’t necessarily move at that fast a pace,” Parkhurst points out. “In industry, you can change a production line multiple times a year; farmers just get one shot a year. We’re trying to provide the market signals to do that more and faster.”

The rice-farming example also highlights the fact that the idea of “carbon farming” can relate not just to soil carbon sequestration but also to reductions of the other two principal greenhouse gases, methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O). Paradoxically, documenting and verifying soil carbon sequestration is more challenging than documenting reductions in methane or nitrous oxide emissions. The rice-farming protocol involves reductions in methane emissions; another well-established approach to reducing methane emissions in agriculture is through the installation of covered manure storage facilities on dairy farms to capture and use the methane that escapes from stored manure and use it for energy production. (New York State has a Climate Resilient Farming Program, established in 2015, which has helped fund several such installations.) EDF also recently announced a pilot project to test whether improved nitrogen fertilizer application by corn farmers can be reliably linked to reduced nitrous oxide emissions, and thus qualify for the creation of carbon offset credits. Since fertilizer rigs can be connected to on-board tractor data-collection systems, some of the elements for this already exist.