MaiaGrazing & A Soil Carbon Opportunity

The Western Stock Growers’ Association (WSGA) held a 2-part webinar Outlining the Soil Carbon Opportunity. The webinar is part of an information sharing series with the aim of increasing the abilities of agricultural producers to access and apply knowledge of nature-based solutions and increase the ecosystem services benefits provided through a market system. The second webinar featured MaiaGrazing.

Want more carbon in your soil? Implementing a good grazing management plan is the key says Bart Davidson. He’s a co-founder of MaiaGrazing, a software company with a decision-making tool that utilizes technology to analyze observations and data to make grazing planning more accurate.

Davidson says grazing management happens, good, bad, or ugly. But good management results in increased productivity and other benefits such as increased resilience and carbon storage, moving an operation onto a regenerative path. Getting paid for carbon credits is the capital dividend of that good management.

Australia started an emissions reduction fund ten years ago, working on a system for credits that turned out to be not very efficient. The inefficiencies, combined with the cost of measurement eating away the margins, resulted in very little uptake. Now, the private voluntary market is maturing, the number of carbon buyers is increasing and demand for credits is growing.

Corporations are looking for nature-based solutions to help address the challenge of becoming carbon neutral. For example, Wilmot Cattle Co was the first Australian cattle operation that will sell one million dollars worth of carbon offsets to Microsoft in a private unregulated market transaction. Wilmot has the baseline data and regenerative grazing principles in place to achieve carbon outcomes and is set up to sell carbon credits to a company that requires the offset. They measure all aspects of the operation and use the MaiaGrazing technology to help manage their intensive paddock rotation. Wilmot’s soil carbon is verified by Regen Network for their sale of carbon credits to Microsoft.

Cow-calf producer Johannes Meier was looking to improve productivity and management on a cattle farm he had just started to manage in NSW, Australia. Much of the soil on Meier’s ranch was badly degraded when he took over. He wanted to see an improvement in ecosystem health and biodiversity. He knew soil carbon is one of the keys to an ecosystems’ life and an important driver of productivity. Using a holistic management approach, seeding multi-species forages, adding essential micronutrients, fungal dominant extracts, and using other management tools including the MaiaGrazing tool he’s moved much of his soil carbon from 1.5 percent to 2.2 percent.  As the soil organic matter increases, the rate of carbon sequestration accelerates.

Meier is getting paid by the pound of gain on his steers but is looking at selling carbon credits as another revenue stream. As he improves ecosystem productivity, he puts pounds on his cattle and puts more carbon in the soil. Meier is now deciding where and how to sell his future soil carbon; the Australian compliance-based market or a private voluntary market. Either way, the carbon market could be a significant component of their business.

Credits:

Written By: Peg Strankman

Funding: Climate Action and Awareness Fund, Government of Canada

The Western Stock Growers’ Association (WSGA) is championing the development of a Grasslands Conservation Exchange. For additional information https://www.grasslandcapitalx.com/about