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• When we implement carbon farming, we also address many of ecosystem health impacts related to agriculture, including: groundwater and surface water degradation.

• There are at least thirty-two on-farm Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) conservation practices that are known to improve soil health and sequester carbon, while producing important co-benefits: increased water retention, hydrological function, biodiversity, and resilience.

• The Carbon Cycle Institute has developed a model framework for land management that emphasizes carbon as the organizing principle. Land management within this framework leads to enhanced rates of carbon capture, increases the provision of important ecosystem services (especially water), and mitigates climate change.

Carbon Farming involves implementing practices that are known to improve the rate at which CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and converted to plant material and/or soil organic matter. Carbon farming is successful when carbon gains resulting from enhanced land management and/or conservation practices exceed carbon losses.

When we implement carbon farming, we also address many of ecosystem health impacts related to agriculture, including: groundwater and surface water degradation.

Common agricultural practices, including driving a tractor, tilling the soil, over-grazing, using fossil fuel based fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides result in significant carbon dioxide release. Alternatively, carbon can be stored long term (decades to centuries or more) beneficially in soils in a process called soil carbon sequestration.

A 2018 study, for example, found that grass-fed beef, produced from cows that grazed in a regenerative way, could be carbon-neutral or carbon negative for the last stage of the animal’s life (from the point after a calf is weaned from its mother until it’s “harvested”), but it followed other studies showing that this isn’t the case.