Hayes did pressure USDA to make a serious commitment to verifying actual soil-carbon results, and to his credit, Vilsack agreed, creating a $300 million monitoring fund and steering a variety of grants toward data collection and measurement. Vilsack was excited to document the climate benefits underground, while Hayes suspected the department would learn that soil carbon was mostly a mirage; either way, it would gather valuable information.
But the Trump administration is cancelling those data-focused grants, too, part of its push to scrap grants that proposed to send less than 65% of their cash directly to farmers, or had not yet sent any cash to farmers. The measurement grants generally sent more cash to scientists, universities, and companies like Indigo.
The Trump team also axed most of the grants focused on large numbers of small farms growing unconventional crops, because they required much more administration. For example, the Pennsylvania group Pasa Sustainable Agriculture lost a $59 million grant because it planned to buy supplies like cover crops and tree seedlings in bulk for 2,000 farms as small as a quarter-acre rather than giving the cash to the farmers and making them buy supplies themselves. The association’s director, Hannah Smith-Brubaker, says it was finally ready to ramp up in the field after spending just $2 million of its grant over the first two years, mostly on administration and preparation — and now it won’t be spending anything.
“This was supposed to be an experiment,” Smith-Brubaker says. “We’d spend five years tackling these problems on different types of farms with different practices, and we’d start to get some comprehensive answers about what works. It’s such a shame that we won’t.”
Robert Bonnie, Vilsack’s deputy who oversaw the grants, says there was a political strategy behind the grant program: By offering farmers carrots rather than sticks, and helping them develop markets for climate-smart commodities regardless of their personal climate views, USDA could build lasting support for evidence-based innovations in farm country. But he says he underestimated the Trump team’s enthusiasm for policy vandalism, for trashing anything it could fit into its culture war against anything Biden-related or climate-related.
“It turns out there are no rules, and nothing matters,” Bonnie told me.
Again, it’s not the Biden team’s fault that the Trump team hates the climate. But just as many climate hawks now wish the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy provisions had focused more on getting green stuff built quickly, and less on requiring union labor, American-made components, and other conditions unrelated to the climate, it’s tempting to wonder what the climate-smart grants could have achieved before Trump ransacked them if they had focused on delivering quick emissions-reducing results.
Actually, we don’t have to wonder, because a single grant amounting to just 0.25% of the $3 billion climate-smart commodities program did exactly that.
Soil carbon wasn’t “practical and profitable.” But this was.
Four years ago, when a 23-year-old finance whiz named Tyler Hull was working for a farmland asset manager in Nashville, Tennessee, he spun off a subsidiary called AgriCapture to exploit the fledgling carbon markets that were starting to reward businesses for reducing emissions. Soil carbon was all the rage, and Hull figured that if he could persuade his firm’s tenant cotton and corn farmers to plant cover crops, stop tilling, and adopt other regenerative practices that would sequester carbon underground, they could sell carbon credits and the company’s land would get healthier.
But once he dug into the science and mechanics of soil carbon capture, Hull concluded it was mostly bogus. He calculated that farmers could at best sequester one-fifth of a ton of carbon underground per acre, so they would earn less selling credits than they would spend on seeds for cover crops — and since tilling the soil in the future would release the sequestered carbon, the carbon-credit agreements would prohibit any tillage on the land for decades.
“It just didn’t work,” Hull recalls. “We had to pivot.”
Hull soon stumbled across an emissions-reduction opportunity that wasn’t bogus at all: reducing methane from rice fields through better water management. Methane-producing microbes that thrive in flooded rice fields are responsible for 10% of the world’s agricultural emissions, but reducing the duration of flooding through practices like “alternative wetting and drying” and “furrow irrigation” can cut those emissions in half — the equivalent of up to two tons per acre, with no drag on yield and no restrictions on future land management.
AgriCapture received a $7.5 million climate-smart grant in 2022, and it was the only project to start sending money to farmers that first year. It used remote sensing to document 30,000 tons of methane reductions on 25,000 acres, then sold the credits to an international bank. It also saved 9 billion gallons of fresh water without any loss of yield. This year, it’s enrolling 150,000 acres, about 5% of U.S. rice production. The Trump administration is allowing the project to continue because it’s already used most of its grant, and Hull says it will be able to keep expanding without additional federal subsidies.
If rice farmers worldwide all adopted these practices, they could eliminate enough emissions to offset half the aviation industry.
“This can become the new normal,” Hull says. “It’s practical and profitable, and even if you don’t care about global warming, it’s saving water and creating a new export market for American farmers: carbon credits you can trust.”
Regenerative agriculture is sexy and popular, with support from Al Gore, Joe Rogan, Rosario Dawson, the Indian mystic Sadhguru, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but its ability to move a lot of carbon from sky to soil remains speculative at best. By contrast, AgriCapture’s effort to reduce methane by reducing flooding on rice fields is simple, effective, and potentially lucrative.
There are also proven strategies to reduce methane from cow burps with feed additives, reduce nitrous oxide emissions by using fertilizer more efficiently, and store carbon above ground by planting trees and shrubs in pastures and fields — with climate benefits that are relatively easy to measure and monetize. The Biden team could have made an international splash by bringing those strategies to scale, if it hadn’t been so excited about its soil-carbon experiment.
Now that experiment is over, and that’s Trump’s fault.
But in the future, if policymakers who do care about climate progress want to make climate action more popular with the public, they might want to focus on actions they know will help the climate. And if those actions can create measurable environmental benefits that farmers can get paid for, they might even be popular in farm country.