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In Montana, the day before I head out to the Halverson ranch, I check out downtown Big Timber, which is pretty much one street and the commercial heart of Sweet Grass County. There s the Big Timber Bakery and the Timber Bar. On a corner stands the Grand Hotel, built by Halverson s great-grandfather, Jacob, in 1890.
Inside, Chris Mehus is waiting for me in the restaurant. He s a range scientist in his early fifties, with closely clipped hair and that easy Montana manner that says there s nothing so bad a float on the Yellowstone River can t fix. ( The fishing is terrible, he assures me when he finds out I m an angler.)
Mehus is now the program director for a nonprofit based in nearby Livingston called the Western Sustainability Exchange that tries to find apolitical ways to help ranchers cut costs, increase profits, and restore their grasslands. The WSE is also a key player in the Montana Grasslands Carbon Initiative.
Mehus has invited the families involved with the initiative out to a steak dinner at the Grand. A big storm s coming, so only three of the four families make it. Together they ve put a total of 35,000 acres under a 30-year contract to capture carbon. I meet Halverson and his wife, Shirley; Alex Blake, a former Marine captain turned rancher with a Harvard economics degree; and husband and wife Roger and Betsy Indreland. The Indrelands raise bulls that breed small but stout calves. Like eight pounds of sugar in a five-pound sack, Mehus says.
We make a plan for me to visit them all over the next few days, but before I do, they tell me I need to understand two things: how a cow eats and what exactly counts as an offset.
When it comes to food, I m told, cows are a bit like children. If given a choice, they ll eat only the grasses they want to, repeatedly returning to the tender new shoots of an already-chomped plant over and over again, never allowing the plant to bounce back. That s bad. Roots begin to shrink. The soil holds less water. Eventually, the earth can no longer produce enough grassy calories to feed the cattle. In a cruel twist, some of the biggest expenses a rancher faces come from the cost of buying (or producing) hay needed to make up for what the grassland can no longer provide.
Typically, a rancher puts cattle on a large allotment and lets the cows pick and choose their grasses for several months before moving them to a new pasture, if at all. But the grasslands of antiquity evolved with herds of constantly migrating bison that would eat, move on quickly, and allow the grass to rebound.
To imitate this, a rancher can divide big pastures into many smaller paddocks and more frequently move the cows so the chomped grasses can regenerate and mature. Shallow roots grow long. Photosynthesis roars to full throttle. Carbon that wasn t in the soil gets replenished, the soil holds more water, and the grassland grows richer grass. But a rancher can t just switch grazing gears overnight. There s fencing to figure out and extra field hands to hire. Most critically, a rancher may need to invest heavily in infrastructure to get water to cattle grazing in the more remote paddocks. For Halverson, that meant digging the long trench and buying extra water tanks and solar pumps, which pushed costs into the $100,000 range.
But he only had to pay a portion of these expenses out of his own pocket. Why? The WSE s work caught the attention of NativeEnergy, a Vermont-based company that specializes in developing projects that generate carbon offsets. NativeEnergy partnered with the WSE to create the Montana Grasslands Carbon Initiative, offering to pay people like Halverson a certain amount up front for carbon yet to be sequestered. That futures bet created a help-to-build pot that the ranch families can dip into to fix diversions and ditches, lay water pipe, and construct other improvements to get the project going something they wouldn t do if it weren t for carbon payments. Once the project is up and running, the ranchers will also receive a share of the offset proceeds.
What if there was a strategy that sequestered carbon, protected wildlife habitat, protected water quality, increased soil health, increased soil resiliency, and increased the economic viability of a ranch family to stay on their land? WSE executive director Lill Erickson asks. This is that strategy.
For the offsets to qualify for a voluntary market, NativeEngery first had to follow a strict set of protocols laid out by a group called Verra, which sets the standards for carbon projects. In this case, Verra sent teams of college students studying natural-resource issues to about 500 sites around Montana to establish the area s baseline carbon levels and historic grazing patterns. The idea is to take soil samples regularly over the next few decades and calculate how much atmospheric carbon dioxide has been sequestered into the soil. Each metric ton will be verified by a third party, after which it will become a carbon offset, with a vintage date and serial number logged in a registry.
When a company buys that offset to reduce its own carbon footprint, that serial number gets retired, never to be sold or traded again. NativeEnergy sets the price. While the terms of the Montana Grasslands Carbon Initiative contract are sealed, a decent guess would put the total value of the group s offsets at at least $2 million. Lill Erickson, the WSE s executive director, calls this a win-win-win situation.
What if there was a strategy that sequestered carbon, protected wildlife habitat, protected water quality, increased soil health, increased soil resiliency, and increased the economic viability of a ranch family to stay on their land? she asks. This is that strategy.
When viewed that way, offsets like these push ranchers toward the front lines of the climate fight, since they hold domain over vast carbon sinks waiting to be unclogged. Roughly just 1 percent of North America s tallgrass prairie lands remains intact, and the majority of American farmers do no regenerative agriculture. Decades of industrial farming have depleted carbon stores held in soil to a fraction of what they used to be. Some estimates say American croplands could sequester as much as a billion tons of greenhouse gas a year enough to offset the entire country s emissions.
When most people think about using the natural world to take carbon out of the air, they normally think about trees, says Mark Ritchie, an environmental scientist at Syracuse University who developed a scientific model to calculate how much additional carbon could be absorbed in soil with intensive grazing methods. What they don t realize is that there s almost more carbon in the top few inches of soil than in all of the wood of all the trees in the world. Agricultural lands are like a dry sponge in a pool of water.
According to Ritchie s model estimates, the four Montana families might sequester about 1.1 tons of carbon dioxide per hectare per year close to 16,000 annual tons in all which is roughly like taking 3,500 cars off the road. In truth, the amounts will likely be higher than that; these are conservative calculations.
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