First Ever On-Farm Audit of Carbon Intensity Scores
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Finding ways to reward farmers for lowering their carbon intensity sounds like it could be a win-win. But the devil is in the details as far as how we verify that a farms carbon intensity score is actually accurate. Continuum Ag founder Mitchell Hora has been working in this area for years. For him, it started with his desire to track his own Carbon Intensity, or CI, score.
Hora… “ Me being a farmer myself and having a very low CI score, our corn was a 2.6 last year, our soybeans a negative 19. We wanted to control that data. And zero is carbon neutral, right? The higher the score the worse. And that's due to years of adopting soil health practices. But we wanted farmers to own their data and farmers to be able to proactively go through these audits.”
His software, called Topsoil allows farmers to self-assess their own carbon intensity scores, and he just completed a first-of-its-kind audit to verify the carbon intensity for several Topsoil users.
Hora… “ We recently passed the first ever on-farm audit in this space, verifying over 29 million bushels of US crop, hundreds of thousands of acres across the country. So really excited to be able to pass first ever audit in that space.”
This audit will be critical as biofuel producers start to qualify for 45Z tax credits.
