Data on the financial impacts of climate-smart practices, like cover crops, can help inform farmers’ financial decisions when considering these practices. While cover crops can help improve soil health and make farms more resilient to extreme weather, farmers continue to have questions about the types of financial impacts cover crops will have on their operations. A multi-year collaborative project is collecting and analyzing data to help farmers and their advisers answer these questions.
Even if we completely eliminated fossil fuel emissions today, global food system emissions would cause us to exceed our 1.5 degree warming targets, unless they are slowed down. We cannot choose between food security and environmental sustainability – they are one and the same. Urgent action is needed to shift food and agriculture from a driver of climate change and biodiversity loss to a solution, with positive outcomes for producers, companies and consumers.
The good news? The global dairy company Danone is taking a big step forward by pledging to work with its farmer suppliers to reduce methane emissions from its fresh milk supply chain by 30% by 2030.
This announcement builds on past successes, with a plan to accelerate action in the years to come. It aims to achieve significant methane cuts while feeding a growing population and protecting the livelihoods of farmers around the world. And it creates a new level of ambition on methane emissions that I hope others in the food and agriculture industry will follow.
Even a large, global company can’t make this happen by itself. Danone is launching a strategic partnership with Environmental Defense Fund to support its methane reduction ambitions. Danone and EDF will work together in such areas as improved science, data and reporting standards, innovative financing models to help farmers of all sizes, and catalyzing industry and policy leadership through advocacy.
This is the first methane-specific climate pledge from a food or agriculture company. Danone’s size as a major global dairy company provides a significant opportunity for impact.
As enthusiasm for agricultural soil carbon as a climate mitigation strategy grows, carbon registries and private companies are developing carbon crediting protocols to bring soil carbon credits into the voluntary market. Credits need to accurately represent net greenhouse gas reductions and be equivalent to each other.
An analysis by Environmental Defense Fund and Woodwell Climate Research Center found that this isn’t the case across the board, which creates uncertainty and confusion in the marketplace.
In a new paper published in Science, scientists at these organizations recommend a regional framework to boost market integrity and support farmers, governments and the private sector in delivering high-quality credits.
Quantifying the long-term financial benefits of conservation practices that build farm resilience and recognizing that value in the financing offered to farmers would be transformative for farms, lenders and the environment.
That idea received a major boost when Farmers Business Network, a global farmer-to-farmer network and ag tech company, launched a new farm operating loan that includes a lower interest rate incentive for farmers who achieve climate and water quality benchmarks.
