CRPs and carbon programs: What's the difference?

For farmers looking to profit when switching to sustainable growing practices, the options may seem endless. Privatized carbon programs and USDA subsidized options such as the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) are two popular choices. While carbon programs that offer payments for sequestering carbon are the newest option on the market, CRP programs have been around since the mid-1980s.

“The idea is that producers can take acres that have a higher level of environmental sensitivity or higher vulnerability to erosion and change the nature of production,” says Zach Ducheneaux, a Farm Service Agency administrator. “Those acres are put into some type of vegetative stand that is then producing that forage, preserving and promoting wildlife habitat, and, in a lot of cases, providing for an emergency reserve of hay and grazing opportunity in times of drought or other weather events.”

Comparing contracts

The CRP contracts are set for 10 to 15 years, with the flexibility for reduced payments for producers looking to regularly cut hay or graze the acres. The ultimate goal of CRP is to prevent erosion by reestablishing land cover.

Unlike CRP contracts, carbon program contracts can vary vastly among companies, most commonly between one and 10 years. The land stays in crop production, and practice changes are implemented. Enrolling in a CRP program starts with a visit to the local Natural Resources Conservation Service office.

“The farmer will turn in an application with an offer to rent to engage in these practices in exchange for a rental payment,” Ducheneaux says. “In our general CRP program, we will batch up all of those offers. We will make a determination based on the environmental benefits index of what threshold we’re going to accept. Then producers will be notified whether or not we’ve accepted their CRP offer.”

Carbon sequestration

Carbon programs are more intensive, both in the practices required to sequester carbon and in the data needed for verification.

“It’s data-intensive, and it takes a lot because fields are not uniform,” says Jerry Hatfield, an ag-industry adviser for The Context Network. “Then somebody has to verify all that data, much like an auditor would look at tax returns.”

Hatfield says acres enrolled in carbon programs sequester more carbon than those in CRP.

“We don’t optimize CRP systems to really store carbon,” Hatfield says. “CRP acres are highly erodible land, which is degraded and has low nutrient availability in a lot of cases. The whole accrual process is going to be a lot slower than converting a cornfield’s practices.”

Farmers cannot enroll the same acre in both programs, but participating in one does not exclude a farmer from the other. “There’s nothing preventing a producer from participating in both,” Ducheneaux says. “They can really go hand in hand.”

Editor’s Note: The Context Network is a global agribusiness consulting firm that helps organizations achieve results through strategic management insights and a network of ag industry professionals, creating business solutions that deliver actionable outcomes. Learn more at contextnet.com.