Ranchers know the value of healthy soil. Healthy soil produces nutrient-rich forage, which grows stronger herds.
But these days, that indirect value from healthy soil is not the only way to monetize what is under your boots.
More and more, ranchers are cashing in on carbon credits, giving them financial incentives to implement practices that enhance soil health and carbon sequestration that serve as offsets.
Carbon payments aren’t the only value in that proposition — ranchers who monetize carbon are privy to key data and insights about their soil that can be critical to making operational decisions that benefit both land stewardship and bottom-line profitability.
“I think the benefit that carbon programs bring is the ability to help monetize a resource that ranchers were unable to monetize before,” says Ryan Dierking, director of northern rangeland for EarthOptics. “In some way, ranchers have been able to monetize soil through the ability to grow grass to then transfer that grass into growth on cattle, and then sell the beef off of that. But now we’re able to manage it in a way that brings an additional amount of revenue to your operation, beyond just the ability to grow and sell beef, and that also provides them a metric to see how to best utilize the resources at their disposal.”
New soil carbon measurement technology called GroundOwl, recently launched by Grassroots Carbon and EarthOptics, is unlocking even more potential by powering full mapping of soil properties using high-resolution, non-invasive electromagnetic induction (EMI) sensing.
Uncover a Blank Screen
“Soil is a very important medium that provides nutrients and rooting and biological space, but the challenge is that it’s pretty inaccessible,” Dierking says. “It’s not like you can walk through the soil like you can a hay field or even get in water and swim around and explore — it’s pretty much a secretive world in that sense.”
Commonly, ranchers who are investing in soil health use soil samples, but most are about 30 cm (roughly 12") deep. Grassroots Carbon programs require soil core sampling to be 1 meter deep (100 cm), more than three times deeper than the industry norm of 30 cm. While this deeper sampling provides more insights about what is happening deep in the soil, it doesn’t account for the variability across landscapes.
That is an issue for producing the precise measurements required to prove climate scale.
“Rangeland is enormously variable and traditional soil carbon programs rely on physical soil cores to characterize tens of thousands of acres,” says Jay Weeks, vice president, data and soil science for Grassroots Carbon. “That variability is the single biggest driver of uncertainty in soil organic carbon (SOC) measurement, and under every major carbon methodology, higher uncertainty translates directly into a smaller share of the real soil carbon change being recognized as issuable credits.”
GroundOwl solves this problem by mapping entire landscapes between sampling cores, providing a clear picture of what is going on underground.
“By giving us a dense, continuous map of those features between core locations, GroundOwl turns lab numbers from individual sampling locations into a high-resolution picture of how each ranch is actually put together below ground,” Weeks says.
At the ranch gate, more precise measurements add up to more value.
“Tighter measurement means more credits earned for the same on-the-ground outcome, and more revenue back to the ranchers doing the work,” Weeks says.
Enhanced Data for Better Long-Term Decision-Making
Analysts at Grassroots Carbon may look at GroundOwl data and see one thing, but Dierking says ranchers can use the data to unlock long-term potential through better operational decision-making.
“We are able to contextualize what you’re seeing across that landscape, either through how much organic matter is there at different depths, what does the soil texture look like, where are your impermeable layers, where does it become rock or compaction zones, where it becomes really tight and difficult for roots and water to penetrate,” he says. “Based on that information, now you can start seeing why grass isn’t growing over there or, when it gets hot, why the grass burns up, because the ground is shallow, or it’s very clayey or very sandy.”
That information translates into management decisions that look like grazing shallow areas earlier in the year and resting them during summer months or extending grazing from 30 or 40 days to longer.
Ultimately, Grassroots Carbon anticipates integrating GroundOwl data directly with its PastureMap platform, putting field-level visibility directly into their hands for better decision-making and long-term planning.
The Proof in the Pudding
Rancher Loy Sneary made the decision to transition his South Texas land to regenerative grazing because, he says, “it was the right thing to do.” With the fifth generation currently being raised on the ranch, he and his son started to take a longer-lens approach to manage their 4,000 acres near Corpus Christi and steward their 1,000-head herd of Brangus and Braford commercial cattle.
But upfront costs for the transition were burdensome. They paid 40% of the costs and borrowed the remainder, using NRCS conservation funding to finance some of the project.
Their partnership with Grassroots Carbon to sell carbon credits through the company, Sneary says, has allowed them to pay off that debt more quickly.
“During the time that we’ve been selling carbon credits, we’ve been able to forgive that loan at the bank with the payments that the carbon has paid for us,” Sneary says.
Sneary calls the program simple and has seen no extra hassle or damage to his pastures from regular mapping and sampling.
Even more, their regenerative grazing investments have boosted their bottom line.
“The proof is kind of in the pudding,” he says. “We’ve been able to increase our stocking rate by about 30%, and we’re now looking at adding an additional 100 head to our herd all on the same land.”
