$120,000 to Fund Six Sustainability and Clean Energy Projects from Young Business Leaders SAN FRANCISCO – National nonpartisan business group E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs) and sustainability-driven hotel brand 1 Hotels announced the 2021 1 Hotels Fellowship class at E2 today as Climate Week NYC and National Clean Energy Week hit into high gear. This is the fourth year of the […]
“There’s an argument that’s been around for a long time, that somehow the economy and the environment are at odds and we can’t do two things at once,” says Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, an organization of business groups focused on environmental action. “What we’re seeing today is that there’s never been more clarity […]
Lt. Gen. John Castellaw USMC (Retired) is a third-generation farmer on his family farm near Crockett Mills, Tennessee. He remains involved in national security issues, serves on several boards and advocates for a strong national defense. Nicole Lederer is chair and co-founder of Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), an advocacy and communications platform for business leaders to advance strong […]
Reducing current and future global warming emissions is not enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. We must also aggressively remove carbon dioxide that’s already in the atmosphere. While advanced carbon removal technologies are still on the drawing board, E2’s new report, Healthy Soils and the Climate Connection, shows that agriculture presents an immediate, […]
Making stored carbon farming’s next cash crop is vital to U.S. climate battle WASHINGTON – America’s farms were struggling just to make a profit even before the COVID-19 pandemic, but long-ignored soil practices could provide new revenue opportunities and long-term profitability for thousands of hard-hit farms across the U.S., according to a new report from […]
Most initiatives to fight climate change today focus on reducing fossil fuel emissions from electricity generation, transportation, and buildings. But to avoid the worst impacts of climate change we must also significantly reduce the atmospheric carbon that has already been emitted. While efforts are underway to develop new and high tech mechanisms to accomplish this, there is an immediately available and economically viable pathway for atmospheric carbon removal—one that provides a compelling new value proposition for farmers to revitalize their soils and get paid for doing it.
Regenerative agriculture methods such as cover cropping, crop rotation, low-till or no-till practices, and reduced reliance on fossil-fuel based inputs can mitigate climate change by drawing down atmospheric CO2 and sequestering that carbon in the soil, while improving microbial soil health, and increasing soil fertility, crop yield and resilience. These practices also produce multiple additional economic and environmental benefits.
For most of the past decade, agriculture has been one of the most challenging sectors of the U.S. economy. American farmers have had to endure plummeting crop prices, trade-war tariffs, rising costs for inputs like fertilizer, and increasing crop and livestock losses from extreme weather events and less predictable growing seasons—an estimated 85% of U.S. crop losses are due to extreme weather events. Then came COVID-19, disrupting supply chains, upending markets such as restaurants, schools, and institutional food, and further dimming farmers’ prospects with a likely extended recession. According to the Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri, net farm income could plunge by 19% ($20 billion) in 2020.
But climate-smart agriculture and soil carbon drawdown are in the nascent stages of ushering in a potentially gamechanging chapter in 21st century agriculture. Through strategic direction of Farm Bill funds and other state and federal policies, partnerships with private sector companies seeking to go carbon-negative, and increased consumer demand for low-carbon food, fiber and fuel, regenerative cultivation practices can deliver four significant economic, environmental, and political opportunities for the U.S. farm economy.
Climate-smart agricultural practices offer a path to economic recovery and long-term profitability for hard-hit farmers by delivering increased and more consistent crop yields, reduced costs for inputs (fertilizer, fuel, pesticides) and crop insurance, and the opportunity to participate in markets for soil-based carbon removal. ‘Reduced carbon’ or ‘negative carbon’ crop outputs and the products derived from them may also have increased market value as consumer awareness and demand increases for products with these attributes.3 Healthier soils also make farms and ranches more resilient in the face of increasingly common extreme weather events.
“Ag tech” is one of the fastest-growing technology sectors, with investors from across the financial sector funding startup companies creating highly skilled jobs in technologies such as microbial soil additives, advanced sensors, drones, monitoring software, GPS mapping, genomics, AI, and data analytics. The demand for accurate soil data measurement and analysis is strong, and college programs to train new ag tech professionals are growing throughout the Farm Belt. Additional innovation is taking place in the creation of agricultural carbon trading platforms, establishing carbon as a new farm commodity.
While storing carbon from the atmosphere in agricultural soils can be a key factor in the battle against climate change, the practices that sequester carbon also deliver a wide range of other environmental benefits—including improved water quality and conservation, improved air quality, greater biodiversity, and reduced toxic inputs. Markets and other opportunities that monetize these practices are emerging, creating new revenue streams for farmers and ranchers across the U.S.
Support for policies to incentivize agricultural carbon sequestration has bridged the historically contentious divide between the environmental and agricultural communities because the practices that restore and enhance soil carbon produce both economic benefits for farmers and natural resource benefits to society. In 2017, for instance, an unprecedented coalition of environmental, business, and farm industry groups helped forge and recruit bipartisan Congressional support for the Soil Health Demonstration Trial in the 2018 Farm Bill, a key soil health enhancement and soil carbon measurement program. Since then, numerous policies building on that provision have been proposed at the state and federal levels by lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle, as diverse stakeholders recognize the benefits of valuing agricultural carbon removal.
Healthy Soils and the Climate Connection: A Path to Economic Recovery on America’s Farms provides a roadmap for how climate-smart agriculture policies could provide profit boosts for farmers and climate wins for advocates.
BOULDER — Environmental Entrepreneurs, an environmental advocacy organization known as E2, announced this week participants of the 2020 E2 1 Hotels Fellowship program, which includes Jock Gilchrist of Boulder. Gilchrist, who will receive a $20,000 grant as part of the program, is building a “multimedia campaign to make the business case for implementing regenerative agriculture, […]
WHAT Tackling climate change will require continual innovation and new technologies. With a groundswell of innovation from clean energy to carbon emissions monitoring to agricultural soil carbon sequestration, a new class of entrepreneurs are leading the charge. Please join E2 and Grist for an evening with the next generation of climate entrepreneurs to hear the […]
CDFA considers a carbon farming market CDFA measures the success of its Healthy Soils incentives program in part by how much carbon is sequestered in the soil. Now the department is considering a proposal to monetize that benefit through a carbon offset market, supplementing the incomes of those farmers. A coalition of businesses and organizations […]
Farm lands can absorb significant global carbon emissions if farmers adopt agricultural practices that remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. Thanks to the collaboration of E2 and a broad coalition of agriculture and environmental partners, along with the crucial support of Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the 2018 Farm Bill enacted […]
The Farm Bill isn’t typically considered environmental legislation, but that’s a mistake. The legislation has an enormous direct impact on the quality of our country’s air, water and, perhaps most important, its soil. As a result, it also determines the health of our economy and environment. And the 2018 edition, which provides a blueprint for […]
Featuring Ethan Soloviev from How Good from and Lara Bryant from the NRDC, the expert discussion focused on technologies and capabilities that are already available for states and the private sector to deploy that can dramatically reduce U.S. carbon emissions from the atmosphere – without the need for any geo-engineering or massive new technology breakthroughs. Below […]