Carbon removal is a polarizing topic within the agricultural community, often associated with wonky markets that don’t respond well to on-farm realities. In the carbon removal field, agriculture is treated as a marginal solution, tied to soil carbon offset projects of shaky durability. So why do we continue working on this intersection?
To evolve our approach, in 2024 and 2025, we held listening sessions with more than 200 land stewards nationwide and interviewed scientists and technical service providers about the barriers and opportunities for carbon removal on agricultural lands. This fall, Carbon180 offered our contribution in two companion pieces: Living Ground, our multi-actor vision for restoring carbon and health to agricultural lands rooted in what we heard from land stewards, scientists, and technical service providers, and Restoring Carbon for Healthy Agricultural Lands, our newly released federal policy roadmap for getting there – balancing the need to rebuild USDA capacity with the next generation of farm policy more responsive to land stewards’ priorities.
Why agriculture needs carbon
Farmers and ranchers across the US are living through one of the hardest stretches in a generation. Input costs remain stubbornly high, trade disruptions have upended export markets, and extreme weather, worsened by climate change, keeps getting costlier. The American Farm Bureau Federation estimates farmers lost more than $20 billion a year to weather disasters from 2022 to 2024. This spring brought the US its worst drought on record.
Support is shrinking at a time when farmers and ranchers need more support than ever. Farm Bill reauthorization is years overdue. Hard-won federal investments directed at soil carbon and climate-smart practices have been rescinded or stripped of climate requirements. The Natural Resources Conservation Service lost nearly a quarter of its staff in 2025, leaving many farms without the help needed to adopt or maintain conservation practices.
Soil degradation has led to economic losses for farmers as well as a loss in carbon and other ecosystem services. Already, in the Corn Belt alone, soil loss has reduced crop yields by 6%, costing an estimated $2.8 billion in annual economic losses. A history of agricultural policies that prioritize large-scale production of low-diversity annual crops over soil health has resulted in a significant carbon “debt.” Losses built up over decades of excessive tillage, prolonged bare-soil periods, heavy agrochemical use, and other practices that break down organic matter faster than it can be rebuilt.
This deficit can be reversed. Thankfully, many practices that build agricultural resilience build carbon as a co-benefit. And practices that build carbon — in soils, roots, and wood — also build agricultural resilience. If we care about the long-term productivity of our farmland, we have to restore its carbon.
Why carbon removal needs agriculture
There are two distinct carbon debts:
- Land use change and unsustainable land management practices have disrupted the fast, biogenic cycle of carbon (carbon produced by living organisms) that moves carbon through plants and soils.
- Extraction and burning of fossil fuels has disrupted the slow, geologic cycle of carbon locked underground over millions of years.
We believe in matching the solution to the debt. Biogenic pathways – tapping into the power of carbon stored in living biomass and soils, as well as those that convert living biomass to more durable forms (such as biochar) are best suited to restore biogenic carbon debts, rather than to address the carbon debt associated with fossil fuels.
A phased, full-spectrum approach is critical in preventing climate tipping points in the short term and maintaining long-term climate stability — deploying biogenic pathways now while phasing out fossil fuels and exploring the potential costs and benefits of technology-based pathways.
In the agricultural sector, we support agroforestry and sustainable cropland management as established nature-based pathways for carbon removal – shovel-ready and ready to scale today. There are opportunities to enhance the carbon removal potential of these established pathways with newer science, for example, on perennial grains and crop varieties with deeper root systems. Emerging pathways such as biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) and accelerated silicate weathering show potential, but we don’t yet endorse deployment at scale. More research is needed on their feasibility, risks, and impacts to ensure their storage potential and the ability to scale them sustainably.
Evolving our approach on agriculture
For many years, strengthening soil carbon measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MMRV) formed the core of our agricultural policy work. It remains necessary but far from sufficient. We don’t believe carbon removal on agricultural lands will scale durably with carbon as the primary driver of value, even if we were to perfect the science. Carbon payments for soil carbon have reached a small subset of farms and ranches. Much larger levers for scaling carbon removal are linked to a broader transformation of the food and agriculture system, one driven by common interests in healthy soils, clean water, resilient operations, and thriving rural communities.
Through our listening sessions, land stewards told us that they want to be rewarded for the environmental and social values they already prioritize, such as soil health,water quality, wildlife, and community, with carbon as a co-benefit rather than the only metric. And while carbon payments have a niche role to play, the political economy of agriculture is shaped far more powerfully by other modes of public and private finance: crop insurance, commodity and conservation programs, farm credit, federal procurement, and supply chain investment.
Drawing on our many conversations, we believe the way to scale carbon removal on agricultural lands is to drive a broader shift away from annual systems dominated by a few commodity crops toward more diverse, perennial systems that build carbon above and below ground, enhance soil and ecosystem health, and withstand extreme weather.
We also believe this transformation has to include small and medium-sized farms, beginning farmers, and land stewards who don’t own the land they work. Closing gaps in land and resource rights is a precondition of durable carbon storage, not a co-benefit. Carbon stored on farms and ranches lasts only as long as the people stewarding that land can afford to and are interested in maintaining it.
A next generation of policy
Carbon storage on agricultural lands depends on the decisions of millions of individual land stewards. Agricultural policy offers the rare potential for us to reinvigorate existing coalitions and build new ones across the political spectrum, going beyond the traditional carbon removal industry to engage farmers, ranchers, rural communities, and conservationists around shared stewardship values. We see an inflection point, one that calls for a new generation of agricultural policy that bridges divides across the political spectrum and endures across administrations.
Our policy roadmap provides actionable recommendations around five enabling conditions needed to unlock carbon removal on agricultural lands sustainably and at scale. We include original recommendations, alongside ones that farmers, farm groups, and conservation organizations have championed for years, adding our voice in solidarity. Below are our recommendations, with our top priorities highlighted.
| Enabling Condition | Recommendations |
|---|---|
| Infrastructure and Market Access | • Invest in a diverse supply of perennial seed in key agricultural regions. • Invest in market development for cropping systems with high CDR potential, such as a perennial pilot market development program. • Use federal procurement, including annual procurement goals and processes, to drive conservation practice adoption and more locally resilient supply chains. • Ensure policies governing private sector engagement center producers and prioritize practices that confer proven ecological benefits.. |
| Land Access and Tenure | • Preserve farmland from development while enabling long-term carbon storage across upcoming agricultural land transitions through investment in local land link programs and land, capital, and market access programs. • Expand sustainable land stewardship options outside of traditional land ownership through innovative land sharing models and a new sustainable land steward workforce development program. |
| Technical Assistance and Local Capacity Building | • Bolster technical capacity of local NRCS offices to provide comprehensive and up-to-date soil health and carbon management support. • Establish nationwide free soil health testing and interpretation. • Support local capacity building and community innovation in sustainable agriculture. |
| Incentives and Risk Mitigation | • Retool existing conservation programs to better support adoption of carbon storing practices and systems. • Adapt existing conservation programs to better enable durable soil carbon storage, including through longer program contracts. • Build on-farm resilience through a data-driven crop insurance program. • Strengthen federal incentive integrity to ensure that agricultural production does not come at the expense of other existing carbon sinks.. |
| Monitoring, Research and Development | • Improve landscape-level soil carbon MMRV to offer land stewards better tools that link holistic ecosystem outcomes with land management, including through a novel soil carbon inventory and analysis network. • Invest in innovative farmer-focused research on perennial systems. • Improve understanding of underexplored and emerging CDR pathways, like biochar and enhanced rock weathering. |
Looking ahead
However the next Farm Bill and other policy critical for the future of agriculture comes together, we’d like to advance this vision as part of a broader movement. Whether you’re a land steward, farm or conservation organization, policymaker, researcher, or funder who sees this moment the way we do, we want to hear from you. To learn more about the vision paper and our recommendations, email us at land@carbon180.org.