Applying ground-up silicate rock to Midwestern farm fields can capture significant amounts of carbon dioxide and prevent it from accumulating in the atmosphere, according to a new study that successfully quantified those climate benefits for the first time.
Working with Eion Corp., researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation (LC3M) developed a new method to calculate the CO2-reduction potential of basalt rock amendments applied to cropland soil, a process known as enhanced weathering.
Traditional row-crop agriculture releases sizable amounts of soil-derived carbon to the atmosphere as CO2, a greenhouse gas that is a primary driver of climate change. With enhanced weathering, silicate rock is applied to farmland to capture that carbon before it reaches the atmosphere. As the rock weathers, calcium and magnesium are released and react with dissolved CO2 to produce bicarbonate, essentially locking up the gas and redirecting it harmlessly into groundwater.
Quantifying its carbon-capture potential, however, has been a challenge — until now. The Illinois team was able to calculate both the weathering rate and carbon dioxide reduction potential of the basalt rock amendments applied to maize and miscanthus fields. Those factors are critical for efforts to optimize carbon sequestration and for farmers hoping to earn carbon credits.
“In addition to reducing emissions, we desperately need effective ways to draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide. Our results suggest that basalt application to farms could be a win-win for farmers and for the planet, improving yields and drawing down CO2,” said study co-author Evan DeLucia, Director Emeritus at the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE), G. William Arends Professor Emeritus of Plant Biology, and Co-Investigator at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) at Illinois.
The breakthrough — the result of a five-year study at the Illinois Energy Farm — was published in Global Change Biology Bioenergy. The study was led by DeLucia and Ilsa Kantola, Research Scientist at iSEE and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB).
The work is part of iSEE’s partnership with the Leverhulme Centre at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, which is investigating enhanced weathering for carbon dioxide removal in field sites around the world: Malaysia, Australia, the U.K., and the United States.
In this case, researchers repeatedly applied finely-ground basalt on twin fields at the Energy Farm for four years — one field with a maize/soybean crop rotation and the other with Miscanthus x giganteus, a perennial grass that is emerging as a productive bioenergy crop to replace fossil fuels.
Grinding the basalt accelerates a natural weathering process that involves two chemical reactions. First, atmospheric CO2 dissolves in rainwater to create carbonic acid. Then, the acid reacts with the rock dust in the soil to form bicarbonate, a soluble compound that leaches with soil water; that redirects the CO2 from the atmosphere to the water cycle, where it can pass harmlessly into waterways and potentially help fight ocean acidification. Basalt contains both calcium and magnesium as well as phosphorus and minor nutrients that are released during weathering and benefit soil fertility.
The Illinois team calculated the CO2 reduction and weathering rate of the basalt by measuring the change in rare earth elements in the soil with the addition of basalt and comparing it to the calcium and magnesium in the system. The rare earth elements are “sticky,” building up in the soil in tiny amounts as more basalt is applied, and calcium and magnesium are released by weathering, with some taken up by the crops. The difference in rare earth elements indicates how much basalt, and therefore how much calcium and magnesium, has been applied; and the difference between the expected amount of calcium and magnesium and the actual amount in the soil tells researchers how much has been consumed by reactions in the soil.
The calculations showed that enhanced weathering reduced net carbon loss to the atmosphere by 42% in maize plots. Paired with conservation tillage or cover crops, the basalt application could turn maize into a net carbon sink. In miscanthus plots, which already stored more CO2 than they emitted before the addition of basalt, enhanced weathering more than doubled carbon storage. The finding adds to the potential climate benefits of this renewable bioenergy crop, one of three targeted by CABBI in its U.S. Department of Energy-funded work.
Carbon dioxide removal methods are a critical part of climate mitigation strategies, and as social and political efforts to reduce carbon emissions to the atmosphere are delayed, pressure is growing to implement these strategies soon.
Farmers, landowners, and others seeking carbon credits all want to know how much basalt rock to apply and how long the effect will last, both of which depend on the composition of the rock and the environmental conditions where it is applied.
“As we look for new ways to offset carbon emissions, we need to be able to quantify those carbon savings to better compare our options,” Kantola said.
Co-authors on the paper included Professor Carl Bernacchi of the Department of Plant Biology at Illinois, CABBI, and the USDA Agricultural Research Service; Illinois researchers Elena Blanc-Betes of iSEE and CABBI and Mike Masters of ISEE and Plant Biology; Elliot Chang, Alison Marklein, and Adam Wolf of Eion Corp; Caitlin Moore of the University of Western Australia and former CABBI postdoc; Adam von Haden of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and former CABBI postdoc; and Dimitar Epihov and Professor David Beerling of LC3M.
— Article by iSEE Communications Specialist Julie Wurth
For over two decades, U of I alumna Jennifer Walling has dedicated her life to fighting for environmental progress. During her time as an undergrad in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, Walling got her start with environmental advocacy through the Students for Environmental Concerns (SECS) registered student organization. As SECS president in 2003, she played a major role in the passing of U of I’s very first clean energy fee: a major step toward campus sustainability. Walling also helped to found the Student Sustainability Committee (SSC), the group that manages the funding accumulated from student sustainability fees.
Now, as the executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council, a legislative advocacy group, she is able to create change on an even larger level. Walling still works closely with the university, maintaining roles as a faculty member and a serving on various advisory committees, including iSEE’s Environmental Leadership Program. Ahead of the coming semester, iSEE’s Kratika Tandon sat down with her for a Q&A.
Kratika Tandon: How long have you been the Executive Director of the Illinois Environmental Council?
Jennifer Walling:It’s been more than 12 years since I started this role in January 2011.
KT: What does your professional background look like? What did you study before starting with the IEC?
JW: I have a bachelors in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences from the University of Illinois. After getting this degree in 2003, I received a master’s and law degree through the joint degree program. My undergraduate and graduate degrees were very science-oriented. I studied mercury and water, but I knew I really didn’t want to work in a lab. I did a lot of different internships during high school and college, and everything boiled down to the fact that I was ultimately interested in some sort of lobbying or advocacy work. After I graduated, I started working at the Environmental Law & Policy Center, which is a public interest nonprofit law firm. I was there for a year and a half before I made a move over to work as Chief of Staff for State Senator Heather Steans, where I was for three years before taking my current job.
KT: You mentioned that you got a law degree, but you don’t practice law and you never have?
JW: I have an active attorney license, but I don’t practice, and I have never been to court. I do some things that I believe have benefited from my law degree, but I really didn’t need that degree to be successful in the work I’m doing now.
KT: How did you first get involved with the Illinois Environmental Council, and what made you realize that this organization would be a good fit for you?
JW: I learned about this organization and about the work that they were doing in Springfield when I was in college. At that time, the IEC was more of a generic environmental think tank and education center that did some lobbying and advocacy work. When I got involved, many of the members already had an established niche, and my position was also just the perfect niche for me, because it was focused on advocacy and lobbying in the environmental space. This position matched my interests of advocacy, state-level lobbying, and working on anything and everything having to do with the environment.
KT: What has your IEC role provided for you, and likewise, what have you been able to bring to the organization?
JW: I think what has made us successful is finding a niche and sticking to it. Our niche is working on advocacy that is directly related to environmental issues. We’re not just a generic environmental education group; we work specifically on informing lawmakers and building our influence so we can pass the best environmental policies. Everything that we do is focused on our priorities of where we want to go and ensuring that we’re headed in the right direction. We don’t take money to run programs or talk to children’s groups — doing generic education for the public. That’s not the work we do, and our funders know and appreciate that. We might need to occasionally turn down some opportunities because they want to take us out of the work we’re supposed to be doing, but I think that’s part of what has made us tremendously successful.
Walling testifies with Illinois State Representative Jay Hoffman
KT: Can you detail the responsibilities that your position entails? What might a day, or even a week, in your life look like?
JW: I balance running the organization as an executive and working with our program as a registered lobbyist. I make sure that we’re raising enough money, finances are flowing correctly, our board is meeting, our employee handbook is right, managing staff and policies, and making sure that everyone’s working together; all those sorts of things are among my responsibilities as executive manager. That is a piece of it. Taking a look at a week in my life is interesting right now. Mondays tend to be the days when I’m in Chicago with my Chicago staff. On Mondays, I meet with all 20 of our staff. I check in with my four directors: our development, communications, finance, and programs and policy leads. I’m meeting with those four people and just figuring out what’s going on: what issues they’re facing and what they need help with; that takes up a lot of the day. On Tuesdays, I usually head down to Springfield and prepare for a day of lobbying the state legislature. There’s a bit of a schedule to Tuesdays, because on Tuesdays at around 4 p.m., the House Energy and Environment Committee meets. Once I arrive in Springfield, I’m usually chasing down votes from people I haven’t talked to already that need to vote for something to get out of committee. We then have the committee meeting and run everything through to see how it goes. Sometimes there’s really exciting things.
Last week, we moved a crucial bill banning Styrofoam, which I’m so excited about, and I really believe we’re going to be able to at least move it out of the House*. On Wednesdays, we have some committee meetings, usually only with one or two bills. Thursdays usually have Senate Energy and Senate Environment meetings. Our staff splits up and goes to those different committees. There are receptions and dinners that I attend in the evenings to network with lawmakers and other lobbyists to make sure that I’m kept up to date on anything that might be going on. I really enjoy that work. In the 48 hours spanning from Tuesday at noon to Thursday at noon, we get a lot of things done. Friday and Saturday are spent wrapping things up, making sure that we’re writing something to go out to our email list to keep people updated. On Friday, IEC hosts a call with dozens of our member organizations, such as NRDC, Sierra Club, and Faith in Place, as well as many community-based organizations and issue organizations to discuss the priorities for the week. I spend the rest of Friday trying to prepare for the upcoming week in terms of legislation, and anything we might need to do in terms of key funder updates. That’s usually how January through May works. We don’t have legislative session after May, so it’s a little less exhausting then.
KT: What do you do for the rest of the year?
JW: That time is spent focusing on relationships. We do a lot of partnership building with our member affiliates, going to different member organizations.
There’s a lot of staff management and fundraising work that I do the rest of the year—especially fundraising. We have a big gala in September that we spend months preparing for. I also try to do a lot of fun stuff with lawmakers. We like to take them on farm tours and canoe trips, we all go down to a trip to Southern Illinois every year. In my personal life, I go to a lot of fundraisers and galas, because it is crucial to build those relationships with lawmakers. I do a lot of politics outside of work to help me be better at my job during the day.
KT: What are some of the current key legislative priorities on IEC’s radar? What have you worked on in the past and do you have any plans for future priorities?
JW: I’ve got a whole document of bills that we focus on, but I can give you a few examples. We’re really prioritizing environmental justice, and we have a big bill about the cumulative impact of air pollution sources that we hope to get passed this year. We got it out of the House last year, but we haven’t gotten around to the Senate yet because it keeps running into problems there. Regarding transportation, we’re very focused on the electrification of the transportation sector, specifically public transit buses, school buses, trucks, and cars. We’re also working a lot on pedestrian safety and public transit. We’re talking a lot these days about carbon capture and storage in the energy realm. We have a bill that proactively regulates this process to protect landowners and the environment. We’re also always working on natural gas and how to transition buildings off natural gas, so that’s a big one. In terms of sustainable agriculture, we’re working on strengthening restrictions on pesticides or increasing violations for pesticides that have been sprayed improperly.
One of the bills I mentioned earlier, which is a huge one, involves working on Styrofoam. We really would like to ban it this year, so we’ve been focusing a lot of our efforts on the polystyrene ban. I would say energy and plastics are what we spend the most time on. We are working on bills regarding composting, flooding, resiliency, recreation in waterways. PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are also a huge concern this year. The bottom line is that there are always a lot of priorities.
KT: What is your favorite part of working as the executive director of IEC, and what do you find most rewarding about the work you’ve done?
JW: My favorite part is when a big bill passes and has such a huge impact on the people of the states that we work with. We passed the Climate & Equitable Jobs Act in 2021, and this bill was incredibly important to the whole state; it will move Illinois to 100% clean energy by 2045. This is not even something I would have even dreamed about ten years ago. And here we are passing it, signing it into law, and then watching all the jobs that have been created from it, especially in disinvested communities. That type of work where you are able to do something that has a real impact on people and organizations is easily the best part of this job.
KT: On the other hand, what do you find most challenging about the work that you do?
JW: I get really frustrated when people just don’t do the right thing. I keep reading about PFAS and the impacts that they have on human bodies. These are forever chemicals, meaning that they don’t break down in the environment or in our bodies, and we just keep making them and putting them in everything. They’re in our bodies and already leading to serious negative health impacts. That frustrates me. We’re not making progress faster on that. It’s incredibly challenging, knowing the right policy outcomes, but not having the right politics to get something done.
KT: What are some of your professional goals within or even outside of the IEC?
JW: I love this job. At some point in time, I would love to take on a role with more responsibility and power as an agency director or somebody at a state or federal government agency working to make a difference. I think there’s so much that government can do, especially if you have the right people who are proactive in those seats. I teach a class at the university (NRES 499) every other fall. I’d love to eventually teach more, but that’s likely a little bit after I do all this stuff. It would be really rewarding to share those experiences and train people to move forward with advocacy and lobbying, which are rarely taught in schools.
KT: What are your goals for the future of the Illinois Environmental Council?
JW: I want to get high-quality staff and pay them well. We don’t necessarily have to be a large organization. I want to make it easier to pass great environmental laws in Illinois. However, hiring great people and paying them well and giving them a great place to work where we can make an impact is the most important thing to me.
KT: You work closely with certain groups and programs at the University of Illinois. Can you tell me about some of your experiences with students and student groups here?
JW: Anything from working with students that want to shadow me to my experience on the advisory boards for the Environmental Leadership Program and the Prairie Research Institute. There are a lot of places where I like to stay plugged in at the University of Illinois and with NRES. I love to make sure that students, especially science students, are bringing their voices into state government. That is always exciting, especially to see the way that students quickly pick this up and want to move forward with it. It was so great last year when we brought the ELP students to the state capitol. It was one of the first days that the public was even allowed back in the state capitol after the pandemic, and it was so exciting for everybody. The lawmakers were just thrilled to see them be there on behalf of the policies that they cared about. I know that they made an impact with that. It’s great to see where students want to go, and I hope students don’t get frustrated at how terrible government is sometimes, because we do have the ability to change it and move it more in the direction that we need to do things like solve the climate crisis.
KT: What can students do if they’re interested in getting involved with environmental policy and advocacy or lobbying?
JW: Students can start with policy and advocacy lobbying right there on campus. They can think about things that they want to change and put together campaigns to move towards those changes. Oftentimes you can make a big difference just by asking for something to change, and then pushing and asking again and again and again. I’m just really excited by the students that want to do that and the changes that they’re making on campus.
Walling and students in the Environmental Leadership Program
KT: Why is it important for students to get involved with environmental policy and advocacy lobbying?
JW: I can directly relate my career to my time at Students for Environmental Concerns, even more so than with the university. I mean, I love the U of I, and my degrees, and NRES. But my work as SECS is most directly responsible for what I’m doing today. I think that it’s a perfect way to get initial experience if folks want to do that as a career, or even just as something on the side. Advocacy at all levels makes the difference. It’s really satisfying. For instance, I can compost at home, but if I can pass that first commercial food scrap composting law in Illinois, I can have hundreds of thousands—if not millions of people, composting.
KT:Finally, what are some of your hobbies? Interests, passions, anything outside of work?
JW: I do work a whole lot, but I like to spend a lot of my time outside of work with quiet time. I have a 14-year-old standard poodle named Sally who is amazing, and she comes with me to Springfield sometimes. I also do a lot of sewing, yoga, running, and cookie baking — anything that’s kind of quiet — in my off time to relax.
* Editor’s note: At the end of legislative session, the Styrofoam bill (HB2376) passed through the Illinois House of Representatives but stalled in the Senate. The Senate agreed to SB58, a bill that will ban Styrofoam for state agencies and universities starting Jan. 1, 2025, and their vendors on Jan. 1, 2026.
This rain garden in Aurora, Ill., is another example of green infrastructure. A rain garden is a landscaped, shallow depression planted with native plants that captures, temporarily holds, and filters stormwater back into the ground. Credit: Brian Allan
The prevalence of mosquito-borne disease has plagued urban communities for decades, prompting scientists to look to stormwater infrastructure for sustainable solutions. Brian Allan, Professor of Entomology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, leads an iSEE-supported research project exploring the use of environmentally sustainable “green infrastructure” to eliminate standing water environments necessary for mosquito larvae survival.
Existing stormwater infrastructure is typical in many urban environments, designed to capture and retain stormwater and prevent flooding. However, from an ecological standpoint, these catch basins are prime environments for urban mosquitoes to lay their eggs, thrive, and promote vector-borne disease outbreaks.
“Not only are we creating a ton of mosquito habitat, but it’s all physically disjunct,” Allan said. “From a management perspective, if you want to try to control the mosquitoes developing in those habitats, you have to go from catch basin to catch basin and put pesticides for mosquitoes in them, and there are millions of these basins in a city like Chicago.”
Conventional stormwater infrastructure causes other issues, too: Pollutants from the urban environment, such as oil from cars, sit in the basins until rain flushes them into surface waters, contaminating rivers, lakes, and streams.
Green infrastructure is an engineering innovation designed to intercept the stormwater on-site. Unlike traditional catch basins, green infrastructure designs have permeable bottoms that allow the water to filter back into the soil.
Allan and his colleagues saw this existing sustainable solution as an opportunity to study how it might prevent mosquito growth — a potential “win-win” scenario. His team decided to investigate locations where green infrastructure was implemented to see if habitats for mosquito development decreased. Additionally, they were curious about the composition of the aquatic microbiome and how this impacted mosquito growth.
“We are very familiar with the microbiome inside our bodies,” Allan said. “Mosquitoes have a microbiome as well … there’s potential that the microbiome can be manipulated in some way that’s not beneficial to mosquitos.” The area around the basins could play a key role in altering the microbiome composition of the mosquitoes, as the leaves are dropped and washed into the stormwater catch basin. The microbes that break down these leaves are a food source for mosquitoes and may result in different mosquito microbiomes forming.
On the basis of this observation, Allan’s former Ph.D. student Allison Gardner introduced leaves from different plants into the basins. She found that leaves from non-native plants, like bush honeysuckle, a common invasive species in eastern North America, were ideal for mosquito development. However, blackberry, a native species, had the opposite effect. Blackberry leaves created what is known as an “ecological trap.” Female mosquitoes expect that aquatic habitats containing blackberry leaves have optimal conditions for their larvae’s growth, but when they lay eggs in these habitats, the microbial growth there is detrimental to larval survival. “It looked to be an organic form of mosquito control,” Allan said; blackberry leaves appear to be just as effective as larvicides.
The sustainability of green infrastructure and the mosquito control component are parallel functions.
“We’re looking to bring them together, particularly in the context of rain gardens, because rain gardens are one of the forms of green stormwater infrastructure that eliminates the aquatic habitat for larvae, but they’re also landscaped with various plants,” Allan said. His research team hopes to explore the potential for mosquito control through landscaping rain gardens with plant species, such as blackberries, that inhibit larval growth.
An infiltration catch basin in Aurora, Ill. This example of green infrastructure is a shallow impoundment that infiltrates stormwater into the soil. Credit: Brian Allan
As Allan describes it, prioritization of human health can be used as a tool in sustainability: “If you can do something that benefits people’s health, they’re much more likely to support an environmental solution than one that doesn’t benefit human health.”
One current aim of the project is to analyze the effects of rain barrels, a standard green infrastructure tool that might negatively impact human health. They are becoming popular green stormwater tools for homeowners, who buy these barrels, hook them up to a gutter system, and reuse the water that is collected. While a good idea for water conservation, the barrels can quickly become colonized by mosquitoes. An analysis of a residential rain barrel survey by current Ph.D. student Becky Cloud indicates that the main culprit is the debris screen that tops the barrels. Most homeowners find that the screen gets clogged and end up removing it early in their ownership. However, as the primary barrier between the water and mosquitoes, the screen’s removal is actually quite harmful. The simple solution is to clean the screen and reapply it.
This finding gave Allan and his team the motive to engage in community outreach to explain the science behind green infrastructure.
“I think that’s an example of where I feel, as a scientist, an obligation to communicate my findings to the public,” Allan said. “If I just publish that in a journal that only other scientists will read, that’s really not the most useful thing I could do.”
Educating the community about sustainability, green infrastructure, and mosquito-borne diseases is necessary to elicit change. The public is much more likely to support causes that are both sustainable and beneficial to human health, and discovering more of these “win-win” scenarios is an important motivating factor of research today. Inspiring the community through education can lead to collective action and a more harmonious co-existence between urban society and nature.
The Stormwater & Mosquito Control Project was funded by a seed grant from iSEE in 2015 and has since been extended with two major National Science Foundation awards and a U.S. Geological Survey grant.
— Article by Anjali Yedavalli, iSEE Communications Intern
Today’s farmers are on the front lines of climate change. Higher temperatures, wildly variable rainfall, and unrelenting droughts, storms, and floods have upended growing seasons and threatened their livelihoods.
“Climate-smart agriculture” promises a more sustainable and resilient farming future — but how do we help farmers get there?
Maggie Monast, Senior Director for Climate-Smart Agriculture, Finance & Markets at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), is dedicated to smoothing that transition. Monast works with banks, cooperatives, and others in the agricultural finance sector to make it easier for farmers to adopt climate-smart practices that curb harmful emissions and grow food in a sustainable way — while earning stable profits in a changing world.
Monast is the keynote speaker for the fifth Critical Conversation hosted by the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) in September, a forum in Chicago for farmers, food distributors, consumers, researchers and other stakeholders to discuss climate-smart commodities and agricultural practices and their potential role in enhancing resilience in the Midwest. The event is sponsored by the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.
In her Sept. 18 public keynote, “Climate-Smart Agriculture: Overcoming Barriers and Financing the Transition,” Monast will review the public and private investments needed to help transform the way agriculture operates. The next day, invited stakeholders will continue the discussion on several fronts.
In this Q&A with iSEE, Monast explains how the climate is already affecting farmers and how the agricultural sector is responding to what she calls the most significant challenge to farming today — and in the future.
What is climate-smart agriculture?
Climate-smart agriculture involves two main goals. The first is to mitigate climate pollutants from agriculture — which includes reducing greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and methane, sequestering carbon, and avoiding conversion of natural areas to agriculture. Second, agriculture needs to build resilience to the impacts of climate change that are already occurring to maintain food production.
We’re already seeing climate change affecting agriculture, with rising temperatures, rainfall changes, and drought. Where are you seeing the greatest impact on farmers in the U.S.?
I think the most important thing to realize is that every region in the U.S. is grappling with climate change, and those challenges surface in different ways in different places. For example, we’re seeing a lot of issues with water availability in the western part of the country — tremendous drought followed by tremendous rains. And producers in that area are having to make tough choices about what to plant and how much of it, and how they’re going to use their available water or try to get more water. On the East Coast, we’re dealing with much flashier rains and more frequent and severe storms. I live in North Carolina, and increased hurricane intensity and flooding has been a major issue for farmers. Across the country we’re seeing higher temperatures, which creates a lot of stress on crops, and different crops deal with that differently. In the Midwest, higher temperatures create a lot of stress during pollination for corn, especially with those hot days and nights not offering any respite.
Natural disasters also impact infrastructure and disrupt supply chains, as well as the people who grow our food. Farmers and farm workers are challenged by these weather conditions, whether it’s too much heat or the dangers of extreme weather.
So climate-smart agriculture not only makes sense from a global climate view, it makes sense for farmers as well?
Climate-smart agriculture is inherently local, and it is aimed at addressing the local impacts of climate change as well as mitigating climate pollution that has a global impact. So the right practices and farm management changes really do depend on the local climate stressors, the commodities that are grown in a given region, and how farmers can adapt and build in resilience to those stressors in order to reduce the impact on our food production and the people and the animals involved.
What is a climate-smart commodity?
A climate-smart commodity is any commodity that’s produced using climate-smart practices or management systems toward the goals of reducing climate pollution and building climate resilience. So perhaps climate-smart livestock is endeavoring to reduce methane emissions. Climate-smart grains would be focused on reducing nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer, improving soil health through practices such as no-till and cover crops, and diversifying crop rotations.
Tell us how your work with EDF is helping to promote climate-smart agriculture.
My work focuses on how we pay for climate-smart agriculture. It’s one of the first questions that a farmer will ask you. They may want to adopt new practices, but any change requires some measure of cost and risk. Many of those changes can also offer longer-term benefits and increased value, but the challenge is getting there.
I work with folks throughout the agricultural system, but especially agricultural finance providers like banks and cooperatives, to help them better understand the cost challenges in that transition and also the benefits and value that can be gained on the other side. The goal is for agricultural finance providers to more proactively support their farmer customers in managing through that transition and ultimately becoming more profitable over the long term with climate-smart agriculture.
What are the barriers to that transition? What needs to change in terms of insurance or financial products to make all of this work?
The agricultural finance sector is still in the early days of figuring out its role as it relates to climate change. For example, along with Deloitte we conducted the first-ever global survey of agricultural finance institutions on climate risks and opportunities last year. We found that 87 percent of agricultural lenders see climate change as a material risk to their business, but just 25 percent have begun incorporating climate change into their decision-making in a significant way. So there’s still a big gap between the perceived risk of climate change and what agricultural finance providers are doing about it.
What we are seeing now is that many agricultural finance providers are trying to understand climate risks, they are starting to build up their teams internally — hiring chief sustainability officers for the first time, creating sustainability reports for the first time — and then trying to learn from their farmer customers and others in the landscape, like supply chain companies, to figure out what they can do and how they can be effective in doing it.
Are they developing new kinds of loans or insurance coverage?
We are seeing a few innovative financial products out in the marketplace. One example is a collaboration between EDF and Farmers Business Network on a farm operating loan that provides an interest rate rebate for farmers who meet environmental standards for climate and water quality. That program started as a $25 million fund in 2022 and was so successful it doubled in size to $50 million this year.
I always try to encourage finance providers to think about what problem they’re trying to solve. Because different climate-smart agricultural transitions will require different financial solutions. So it’s different if we’re talking about a significant risk or an upfront cost, or a long transition period. Farmers need different financial solutions to overcome those financial barriers.
For example, there’s the case of transition risks, where farmers worry about losing some crop yield as they switch to new practices like cover crops. We’ve seen some risk products like warranties that provide compensation to the farmer if he or she does experience a yield drag during cover crop adoption. My hope is that we’ll see a proliferation of different types of financing that are tailored to help farmers overcome the financial barriers they face in adopting these practices.
Is this effort still in the early stages?
I think we are finally seeing the scale of investment that’s needed in climate-smart agriculture, both with the scale of the federal investment that was made through the Inflation Reduction Act and many of the USDA programs, including the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program (which funded a new iCOVER project through iSEE). And we’re also starting to see much more private sector investment, whether it’s through major food companies, carbon programs, or agricultural finance providers. While many climate-smart practices are not new, in the past few years are we seeing investment on the scale that is going to be needed to actually solve this problem.
Is the industry fairly attuned to climate risks after seeing the impact on the ground, or do businesses still need some convincing at this point?
The agricultural finance industry is still in the early days of understanding these risks and what they mean for their businesses. As farmers experience the impacts of climate change, of course their finance providers see that, too, in their communities. But the much bigger question for them is what do they do about it? How do they assess those risks in a forward-looking way? How do they incorporate that information into their own planning, and how do they help producers to ultimately reduce those risks? And that’s where this conversation needs to go.
What other kinds of things is EDF doing to advance this work?
Our Climate-Smart Agriculture team works globally on climate-smart agriculture — and then from a variety of different perspectives. So we have policy teams who are working on the farm bill right now in the U.S. We have a science team that’s really digging into the science around soil carbon and methane, and nitrous oxide, and trying to figure out what types of practices and management shifts really create climate benefits. We have my agricultural finance and markets team, which is focused on unlocking the financing for climate-smart agriculture solutions. And we also have a supply chain team that works closely with companies throughout the food and agriculture sector to help them set goals to reduce emissions and then figure out how to collaborate with farmers to achieve those goals.
Do you have a willing audience? Are they receptive to these ideas?
I’ve been working on agriculture at EDF for 12 years, and I have seen a very significant shift during that time in terms of the openness and willingness of people in the agriculture sector, everyone from farmers to major farm organizations and companies, to talk about climate change and to proactively engage on these topics and try to figure out solutions. I think the biggest reason for that shift is that farmers are really feeling those impacts now. And because of that it’s become much more real. We now have much more interest and engagement by organizations throughout the agricultural system to try to collaborate and figure out what to do about it.
For example, EDF was a founding member of the Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance, a group that is developing climate and agriculture policy solutions in Washington, D.C. Now is the time to be working together on these issues.
Would you say climate change is one of the biggest threats to agricultural livelihoods?
Climate change is the biggest threat to agriculture. Farmers depend on predictable weather and on natural resources to grow crops and livestock, and the pace of adaptation is just not keeping up with the pace that the climate is changing. We’re in a critical period both to bring down emissions and to accelerate efforts to build resilience to the impacts of climate change that are already happening.
Five years from now, or 10 years, what would you like to see in place to achieve real progress?
I hope we’re in a place where the agricultural industry and community has realized that climate-smart agriculture is the path toward profitable, successful farmers and stable farmer livelihoods. And so investment, both private and public, has reoriented to be all-in on climate-smart agriculture.
For example, there’s much better information for farmers to make economic decisions on conventional practices than on climate-smart practices, so at EDF we work with universities to build up farm financial information on climate-smart practices so farmers have the information they need to adopt these practices profitably. Everywhere there’s an imbalance like this, we need to see much more support and investment so that climate-smart becomes the new status quo.
What does that look like, in terms of support?
It means reorienting our research, it means reorienting what our public programs are funding. It means much greater investment by food companies and by finance providers. It means new markets for environmental services provided by farmers. Every current segment of the agricultural system needs to bring that climate-smart lens into how they operate in the future.
An example is our current crop insurance program. The best crop insurance coverage is for the major grain crops, and it supports farmers in maintaining their businesses in the face of natural disasters. However, it’s not forward-looking in terms of what climate impacts are going to occur and how that’s likely to accelerate in the future. We also need a lot more thinking about how we can encourage farmers to adopt practices or make other changes on their farms that actually reduce their underlying risk. We need a crop insurance program that’s more tuned into the impacts of climate change and more supportive of farmers who are taking actions to reduce their underlying risk. That would mean insuring things in a different way that brings the likely increased risks of climate change, and farmers’ ability to reduce risks through management changes, more explicitly into the pricing of their insurance.
— Article by iSEE Communications Specialist Julie Wurth
Research Technician Michael Douglass and Postdoctoral Researcher Nan Li conducting deep soil coring for quantifying soil organic carbon stocks on a farm in Piatt County, Ill. Credit: Dan Schaefer
Earth’s soil contains large stocks of carbon — even more carbon than in the atmosphere. A significant portion of this soil carbon is in organic form (carbon bound to carbon), called soil organic carbon (SOC). However, SOC has historically been greatly diminished by agricultural activity, releasing that carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, contributing to climate change.
To monitor and sustainably manage SOC stocks under agricultural land use, an accurate way to measure SOC is essential. However, current methods of accurately estimating SOC are resource- and cost-intensive. In their new study, published in Geoderma, Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) researchers tested a new sampling method in hopes of improving the ability to estimate SOC stocks.
The team’s previous research suggested that readily available spatial information in public databases could improve the efficiency of SOC sampling in agricultural fields. This study, led by ASC’s Eric Potash, a Research Scientist in the Department of Natural Resource & Environmental Sciences (NRES) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, tested that hypothesis in eight fields across Illinois and Nebraska.
Measuring SOC is challenging due to its variability. The SOC stock at two locations just a few feet apart can differ significantly. This means that many locations need to be sampled to estimate the total SOC stock, which translates to a lot of work in the lab and in the field.
“Past studies, including one that we did one year ago, proposed ways of reducing the number of samples needed,” Potash said. “But it was unknown just how much more efficient those methods were. We put those methods to the test using a new high-quality dataset our research team put together.”
The team found that SOC stocks in agricultural fields can be more efficiently measured by using a method called doubly balanced sampling, which accounts for auxiliary information available in elevation maps, satellite images, and previous surveys. Doubly balanced sampling is a modern strategy that improves on the classic method of stratified sampling by selecting locations that are more representative of the field in terms of this auxiliary information.
“Quantifying soil carbon stock through soil sampling is a hard and expensive task, but our approach was found to reduce the number of soil samples needed by a very promising 30 percent,” said Kaiyu Guan, project lead and coauthor, Founding Director of ASC, and NRES Associate Professor. “We believe this is a significant advancement for improving soil sampling efficiency and should be promoted in future practices by carbon project developers or researchers.”
The work is made possible by unique field-level, high-resolution soil samples collected by scientists from different projects.
“I am glad that our hard work and collected soil sampling data enables the development of this approach,” said DoKyoung Lee, another coauthor and a Professor of Crop Sciences at the U of I.
The team has made its methods and data publicly available so that the scientific community can benefit from, and collaborate on, further improving the understanding of SOC.
“I am especially excited that we are publicly sharing the data for this study,” Potash said. “I hope that this will foster increased collaboration to accelerate progress on soil carbon research.”
In addition to Potash, Guan, and Lee, co-authors on this publication include Andrew Margenot, Crop Sciences Associate Professor and ASC Associate Director; Arvid Boe, Professor of Agronomy, Horticulture & Plant Science at South Dakota State University; Michael Douglass, ASC and Crop Sciences Research Technician; Emily Heaton, Professor of Crop Sciences; Chunhwa Jang, Crop Sciences Postdoctoral Researcher; Virginia Jin, USDA-ARS Research Soil Scientist at University of Nebraska; Nan Li, ASC and Crop Sciences Postdoctoral Research Associate; Rob Mitchell, USDA Research Agronomist and Adjunct Professor of Agronomy at University of Nebraska; Nictor Namoi, ASC and Crop Sciences Graduate Research Assistant ; Marty Schmer, USDA-ARS Research Agronomist at University of Nebraska; Sheng Wang, ASC and NRES Research Assistant Professor; and Colleen Zumpf, Bioenergy and Ecosystem Services Specialist at Argonne National Laboratory.
