Improving Soil Health Yields Unexpected Benefits For Farmers

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In the U.S., as farmers wrestle with extreme heat and drought, heavy rainfall and flooding, and erosion-all factors of climate change which can take a toll on crops-there's been a lot of buzz over regenerative agriculture over the past few years, as big agriculture companies promise opportunities to make money from "carbon farming" while also improving soil health.

Regenerative farming strives to improve soil health through various methods, including reduced or no tillage, keeping the soil covered year-round through the use of cover crops, integrating livestock into crop farming, and rotating crops to encourage both above and below ground biodiversity.

Such practices can also be used to create carbon credits for carbon offset programs, which enable polluters to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions through the purchase of credits.

Farmers have often been told all they need to do is adopt certain practices, such as no-till or cover cropping. But few adopting these practices have signed up for carbon market programs.

While farmer surveys suggest that carbon prices are still too low relative to the paperwork these programs demand, a new study published in Agriculture and Human Values finds that money alone does not explain either farmers' doubts about carbon markets or their interest in regenerative agriculture. Instead, many farmers view improving soil health as a way to improve their quality of life by reducing their dependence on agrochemical companies' products and advice.

"Farmers are really looking to get off that treadmill of high-input, high yield commodity agriculture," says the study's co-lead author Susanne Freidberg, a professor of geography at Dartmouth.

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