Last year, USDA announced historic investments to support farmer-led projects to reduce carbon emissions. Organic Valley was one of the 16 projects in Wisconsin to get money. It got $25 million for its carbon insetting program. This program aims to reduce the carbon emissions within the cooperative’s supply chain. Organic Valley has a goal to reach net-zero carbon by 2050.
The money will help farmers establish new practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Wade Miller is the vice president of farm resources and sustainability with Organic Valley. It’s his job to help their member farmers make money on conservation.
“If we want to farm in a certain way or if the world wants us to farm in an improved way, there needs to be an economic model that works for farmers as business men and women to pay them for their additional efforts,” Miller says. “We have worked with our farms to look at how they farm, what their practices are, what they love to do. And we’ve measured those practices and determined that many of them contribute to a lower carbon footprint.”
The co-op has come up with a list of about 25 practices farmers can choose from, such as grazing, manure management, cover cropping, planting trees, etc. It’s all voluntary.
But how does it work? Miller says Organic Valley has developed specific protocols that need to be followed in each of the practices, and the tools that will be used to measure them. A third-party validation service will review the protocols and give the “stamp of approval” of the impact. The carbon insetting is measured in a metric ton of CO2 equivalent.
“That has a value, and we’ve paid the farmer for that. And we will turn around and take that to the market as a component of our products and ask the market to pay for it and pass the money back to the farmer,” Miller explains. “So we’re priming the pump with this USDA grant.”
He notes that all three of their consumer categories are willing to pay a premium for that carbon reduction: consumers, private label and ingredients. Millers says consumers at the grocery store are interested in climate-smart practices. And the private label and ingredient customers are looking to reduce their own carbon footprint.
“These folks are looking to buy products that have a low carbon footprint because they perhaps have made a claim that their company wants to be at a certain place at some point in time in the future, and they know the only way they’re going to get there is if they have a tie through to the farmers that are actually producing the products at source,” Miller says. “Because really the largest impacts on the Earth occur there, not in the transportation and the processing.”
Organic Valley piloted 24 projects in 2022. The co-op is looking at reducing 13,000 metric tons of carbon in the next year, which equates to roughly 2,300 farm projects.
“When we talk to our farmers, they’re like, ‘is that all?’ Which tells me we may have a lot of uptake on the farm side,” he says. “And if we do, that means we will just be able to move quicker to do more projects (and) make more insets.”
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