Sustainability Marketplace Grants Pays Farmers for Cover Crops

Yesterday you heard from Grey Montgomery, Senior Vice President and head of agricultural products and operations at DTN, as he talked about a new product called EcoField. Today, he talks about the fact that DTN was one of the companies that received a climate-smart grant from USDA, the grant will enable DTN to develop a sustainability marketplace that will lead to corn and soybean farmers receiving a premium for adding cover crops into their farming strategy.

“Watching a marketplace that will help farmers in two ways. One, we are ultimately serving as kind of an intermediary for the USDA to serve up grant dollars from farmers to plant cover crops. And then to are that we're now also building a marketplace where farmers can be paid for their practices at some sort of premium so we're working with a number of in-produce buyers to ultimately be able to pay a farmer you know, some premiums and percent of all or whatever for a variety of practices. So now, we kind of go beyond just sort of tracking practices for the sake of agribusiness being able to know who does what do now having a model in place that incentivizes and provides benefits to farmers for a variety of things that they do that lead to a closer to net zero role.”

Montgomery says that farmers will need to register to be a part of the sustainability marketplace. Registration and more information on the program is available on the DTN website.