After a harvest that lasted a lot longer than anticipated, Kyle Mehmen of MBS Family Farms in Butler County Iowa, is ready to refocus on his most poignant opportunity — carbon.
“I would say this is the first time I’ve actually been quantifiably rewarded for keeping good data on my farm,” Mehmen says.
Over the past couple of years, Mehmen has signed up for several carbon programs that pay for the credits generat-ed by his conservation practices and resulting carbon sequestration. While he’s calculated carbon credits, he’s yet to measure his farm’s carbon footprint.
“I don’t think ag as a whole is probably getting credit for doing the good things we have done over time just because they’re the right things,” he says.
Understand The Value
Mehmen expects more of those calculations about a specific farm’s own carbon emissions to happen as pressure builds across agriculture to become a net-zero emissions industry.
“If we’re going to go down that path, I want it to be more than propaganda,” he says. “If it gets watered down and everybody has a net-zero farm, then there’s no value.”
You can find many carbon footprint calculators online. They range from simple and rudimentary to increasingly complex. Most of these focus on homes, transportation and travel.
Calculations and Credit
Field to Market, a non-profit organization that aims to connect farms, agribusinesses, environmental groups and universities has a free online carbon and sustainability calculator called Fieldprint.
The organization says it’s a tool for producers to better understand how management choices affect their overall sustainability performance and communicate their sustainably performance to customers.
The tool also provides state and national averages so farmers can benchmark their sustainability efforts.
“Measuring your carbon footprint can take a lot of different forms,” says Allison Thomson, vice president of science and research at Field to Market. “Really understanding the carbon footprint of a farm involves understanding both the energy you use and your direct use of things that make greenhouse gases, which are relatively simple to record, but also includes more complex biogeochemical cycles where you need scientific understanding and access to scientific tools to get a good estimation.”
Those complex cycles are found in the soil and the soil ecosystem. Thomson says research and a true reading on those elements of a carbon footprint is helping answer questions from skeptics.
“There’s research going on and a lot of new soil tests and lab tests that farmers can do to better understand how their soil is cycling nutrients, how it’s storing carbon and how that might change based on different farming practic-es,” she says.
Thomson breaks the process down into three components:
- Understanding the efficiency of your production, such as how much energy you’re using to drive a tractor.
- Understanding the soil ecosystem, such as carbon sequestration capacity.
- Understanding the value chain’s concerns, such as what customers are interested in or willing to invest in from a farm production perspective.
“Having carbon footprint knowledge can help farmers see where they might want to engage with supply chain initi-atives, continuous improvement programs, ecosystem service markets or carbon markets,” Thomson says. “Under-standing your footprint is the first step to see if engaging with any of these will be beneficial to your farm’s produc-tion.”
Figure Out the Math
USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service has a calculator called COMET-Farm. It allows users to build and save farm profiles including mapping out fields, record crop or livestock history and set management practices. This fall, the online tool was updated to include new features.
Conservation leaders at USDA say the next step is to help agriculture figure out the math.
“USDA can partner with folks to provide better information,” says Robert Bonnie, USDA undersecretary of farm pro-duction and conservation. “Farmers shouldn’t be expected to figure out the carbon math associated with everything they do.”
It’s all part of USDA’s new focus on climate smart agriculture under the Biden administration.
“The thing about agriculture and forestry is not only are there opportunities for us to reduce emissions, but there are opportunities for us to have negative emissions,” Bonnie says.
At Mehmen’s farm, while net-zero for emissions isn’t a requirement yet, he knows the conversations are already happening.
“I don’t always agree with all of the different standards, but that doesn’t matter,” Mehmen says. “Those are the standards we will be measured by going forward.”
Farm Journal Editor Clinton Griffiths is a TV newsman, turned magazine editor, with a passion for good stories. He believes the best life lessons can be found down a dirt road.
