Measuring soil carbon accurately is essential for ensuring confidence in large-scale efforts to improve soil health, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and support initiatives like carbon credit programs.
But determining how much organic carbon is stored in soil from decomposed plants can be a challenge, leading to a well-known problem: different soil testing labs can give different numbers for the same soil.
Maintaining animal health isn’t only an essential practice for livestock farming, though any farmer or rancher will agree that’s true. It’s also a way to lower the methane intensity of the meat and dairy produced by livestock and improve health and livelihoods for people, which is particularly important for smallholder farmers in low-income countries.
Livestock farming contributes more than one-third of human-caused methane emissions, a powerful super-pollutant responsible for much of the additional warming and extreme weather the world is facing. At the same time, animal agriculture both provides critical nutrition and supports the livelihoods of millions of families, benefits that are now at risk due to heatwaves, droughts and other climate impacts.
This op-ed was originally published in Hoard’s Dairyman. Since its initial publication, the financial uncertainty for farmers engaging in conservation practices has grown substantially. Ongoing trade negotiations, tariffs and blocked funding for existing U.S. Department of Agriculture contracts for conservation expenses and the uncertainty of future funding for conservation programs intensify the financial challenges faced by dairy farmers.
Dairy farmers are already part of a high-risk industry — the experience shared below shows how difficult it can be to align funding opportunities with farms’ financial needs. Now, farmers are being left to absorb that risk with less support. To continue producing food for their communities and responsibly stewarding natural resources, farmers will need more flexibility from financial institutions and greater investments from stakeholders advancing sustainable agriculture.
By Alice Crothers
Doug Peterson, State Soil Health Conservationist with USDA, displays soil sample from a field that uses cover crops.
Credit: Kyle Spradley, MU College of Agriculture, Food & Natural Resources
There’s widespread consensus that climate smart agricultural practices like cover cropping, reduced and no-tillage and crop diversification can help farmers adapt to climate change and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yet confidence in the impacts of these practices as a climate solution has been undermined by reliance on models to determine how much carbon has been accrued or retained in soils.
Soil organic carbon accounting and crediting relies on models because of the belief that direct measurement is too costly and cannot provide a practical solution to any large-scale measurement, monitoring, reporting and verification (MMRV) program for tracking soil carbon outcomes.
But that assumption may be wrong. Working with a team of researchers from the University of Illinois and Yale School of the Environment, Environmental Defense Fund found that a rigorous approach to soil carbon quantification that relies on taking soil samples before and after practice adoption across a large number of farm fields is economically feasible.
A large field of soybean crop.
The Regenerative Agriculture Finance Program, also known as RAF, was launched in January 2022 by Farmers Business Network in collaboration with Environmental Defense Fund. The pilot year of the RAF program included 48 corn, wheat and soybean farmers seeking access to lower interest rates on operating loans by achieving standards for soil health and nitrogen fertilizer management practices.
When launched, the RAF program quickly became Farmers Business Network’s fastest selling financial product ever. Of the participating growers who completed data collection, 83% met the environmental standards and received a rebate payment equal to 0.5% of their loan interest rate.
The success of the pilot year of the RAF encouraged Farmers Business Network to expand the program. Learn more about the 2023 program results, as well as new opportunities and challenges for the RAF.
Farmers must estimate how much fertilizer and other inputs their crop will need in the face of increased weather variability.
Nitrous oxide might not make the news like carbon dioxide, but it’s a powerful hidden force behind the extreme, climate-driven weather we’re experiencing. This super-pollutant is the third most significant greenhouse gas, with a warming impact almost 300 times greater than carbon dioxide. Lowering it is essential for avoiding the most dangerous climate impacts.
The newly released “Global Nitrous Oxide Assessment” confirms a sobering reality: atmospheric concentrations of the gas are rising faster than previously anticipated. The majority of nitrous oxide emissions come from synthetic fertilizer and manure. Yet nitrogen applications are also essential for producing the crops that feed a growing population.
We don’t have to choose between food security or climate stability. We can and must support farmers in achieving both priorities.
Reducing nitrous oxide emissions isn’t just possible — it’s within reach.
A combination of existing strategies could slash global nitrous oxide emissions by over 40%, but scaling these solutions requires commitment and innovation, but scaling these solutions requires commitment and innovation.
Global leaders increasingly recognize that agriculture and food systems must be part of solutions to the climate crisis. From the first Food Systems Pavilion at a UN climate conference in 2022, to 160 countries recognizing food and agriculture as a climate imperative in 2023, food advocates came into the 2024 UN climate conference, COP29, with wind in our sails. We made progress, but the world needs to do more — and quickly.
As we close out the year and look ahead to COP30 in late 2025, significantly more work remains to ensure farmers, fishers and ranchers can feed a growing population and lower climate pollution from food systems.
Here are four reflections from EDF and our partners about the progress made this year and the urgent work that remains to make farms and food systems more resilient, sustainable and equitable.
In recent years, North Carolina communities have weathered one storm after another, with Hurricane Helene being no exception. Hurricane Helene followed a once-in-a-thousand-year rain event in western North Carolina, which as a result caused widespread devastation and $53 billion of damage to the state alone. The impacts also stretched far beyond North Carolina, affecting communities throughout the southeastern U.S., demonstrating the growing need to prepare for increasingly severe storms.
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, FEMA introduced a $2.1 billion relief package to support families and businesses affected. These relief efforts offered some essential support in the aftermath but only scratched the surface of what is needed to truly help communities.
Moving forward, we must work to safeguard communities by investing in long-term resilience and preparedness. 
Read More
A farmer stands in a field of soybean crop and corn residue, facing a glowing sunset.
From extensive droughts across the Great Plains and back-to-back hurricanes damaging vegetable and citrus crops in the Southeast, the last two production seasons have demonstrated the intensifying damage of extreme weather on America’s farms. In 2023 alone, natural disasters caused nearly $22 billion in crop and rangeland losses. While crop insurance is a critical safety net for farmers, the growing impact of climate change underscores the need for proactive resilience strategies on the farm.
Recognizing this, Chubb and its crop insurance division Rain & Hail — the largest crop and agriculture insurance provider in the U.S. — has launched a new resource hub designed to equip farmers and crop insurance agents with essential tools, insights and advisors to increase on-farm resilience. Environmental Defense Fund Climate Corps fellow Carter Purcell led the development of the hub during her time at Chubb.
The new resource hub highlights the increasing need for comprehensive risk management solutions that not only protect farms financially in the short term, but also support long-term resilience.
Learn more about the relationship between crop insurance and resilience to extreme weather, and why it’s critical to provide solutions that support farmers’ short- and long-term financial resilience.
Virginia Conservation Network, a statewide coalition of 170 conservation partners, released its 2025 Common Agenda this year, providing a comprehensive overview of Virginia’s environmental policies and priorities to lawmakers and stakeholders. Detailed in the agenda are three key opportunities for lawmakers to continue progress on flood resilience initiatives.
While hurricane season officially ended on November 30, many Virginians in the southwest region are still recovering from the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene. We stand with those communities as they recover and must remember that now is not the time to lose focus on reducing the risk of increasing climate-driven storms and disasters. According to the agenda’s co-authors from EDF’s Climate Resilient Coasts & Watersheds Virginia program, the following three flood resiliency opportunities should be a critical focus in the coming year.
