RealAgriculture's Kara Oosterhuis talks to Travis Kraft, director of U.S. Row Crops for Locus Agricultural Solutions, at the 2023 National No-Tillage Conference about carbon market models and similarities and differences among the more than 170 different carbon markets that exist globally.

A group of companies called the Agricultural Climate Market Collaborative believes that lack of “transparency” is one of major road blocks to acceptance. To address transparency, the Collaborative developed eleven principles to guide carbon ecosystem marketers when forming these new contracts with growers.

The soil carbon market is based largely on theoretical carbon offsets derived from complex algorithms, and in some cases artificial intelligence. While the mathematics that go into predicting these offsets is undoubtedly impressive, the predictions will invariably require ground-truthing.

The USDA is looking to create a set of pilot projects that provides incentives to implement climate smart conservation practices on working lands and to quantify and monitor the carbon and greenhouse gases associated with those practices. The pilot projects could even expand or develop new and additional markets.

For this No-Till Farmer podcast, we caught up with representatives from three companies who were talking with farmers about their carbon programs at the 2021 Farm Progress Show. We spoke with Ben Gordon, carbon and ecosystems global portfolio leader with Corteva; Lisa Streck, grower carbon lead with Bayer Carbon; and Cristian Barcan, sustainability officer with Rabo Carbon Bank.