Almost 5 years ago I went to a meeting in Woodburn Indiana about nitrogen management in corn. There was a person there from the Environmental Defense Fund with brochures about selling carbon credits, i.e., we’d get paid for farming in a way that burned less carbon or sequestered more in the soil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I really had no idea what the Environmental Defense Fund was. I thought I knew something about them, but I realized later that I had them confused with the Environment Working Group, famous in the ag world for publishing how much individual farmers got paid in government subsidies.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n I was curious though, both for the high-minded principle of doing something good by burning less carbon, and more by what Sir Albert Howard[2]<\/a> called “the god-cursed thirst for profit.[3]<\/a>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n I emailed the person at the EDF about this and she put me in touch with the group who was doing this, an outfit in Canada called Canadian Carbon Solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, I’m predisposed to like Canadians, I worked up there for years. As I once told my friends there, “Canada has fulfilled what the US promised in the 1960’s.”[4]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n I started exchanging information with Canadian Carbon Solutions, sending them our field records, yield data, variable rate fertilization shape files, and so on. It went on and on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I retired from farming in 2016, and it was still going on. My nephew Tom took over responding to their requests and I continued to drag information out of our farming records, while complete, were pretty disorganized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The information requests finally trickled off, and I figured that was the end of that. But then this summer Tom called me up. We sold 70 tons of carbon credits for around 20 dollars a ton. For our farm that’s a fraction of 1% of our revenue, but I couldn’t be more pleased by it. It’s not the answer to solving the disaster we’re creating by burning fossil fuels[5]<\/a> but it’s a step in the right direction and I couldn’t be prouder for being part of it or for having Tom carry it on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n P.S. As Tom pointed out after I published this, that payout was in Canadian dollars. In that case, it’s a lot of loonies!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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