By Baylee Sweitzer for Kent State News Lab.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan reporting for the Kent State-Ohio News Connection Collaboration.

Jeff Duling's 1,400-acre farm sits at the end of a long and dusty gravel driveway in Northwest Ohio's Putnam County, about halfway between Lima and Defiance. An aluminum-sided grain elevator towers over his fields, where he grows corn, wheat and soybeans.

Duling recently entered the estimated $84 billion carbon market after he purchased 134 new acres of farmland and enrolled them in a program called RegenConnect, which incentivizes farmers to use regenerative agriculture practices that help capture carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and move it via plants into the soil.

Those 134 acres represent a new revenue stream for Duling: RegenConnect pays him for each acre that helps sequester carbon, using funds from companies seeking to offset their greenhouse gas emissions or declare themselves "net zero."

Carbon sequestration is the process of capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide to help reduce the amount of it in the atmosphere, with the larger goal of reducing global climate change, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

There are two types: geologic, which is where the carbon is stored in underground geologic formations, and biologic, which refers to the storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide in vegetation, soils, woody products, and aquatic environments.

Until he bought the new land, Duling was skeptical about carbon sequestration as a way to make extra money on his farm. "I think the carbon market is so immature, it's like the Wild West," Duling said.

But he already sells a lot of his grain to Cargill, the company that runs RegenConnect, and has a good relationship with his buyer. So when the company created the sequestration program, it asked him to enroll some of his acres.

Regenerative agriculture practices include cover crops, which cover the soil and help reduce erosion, improve fertility and soil quality, among other effects; no-till, which helps decrease erosion because the soil is undisturbed through tillage; or reduced-till, which means the tillage may be less intense, shallower or cover a smaller area in the field or across the farm.

John Davis is a Delaware County farmer who enrolled more than 100 acres in Nutrien's carbon program last year through the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund. Davis is a fourth-generation farmer and has farmed for 35 of his 54 years. He grows corn, soybeans and wheat.

Davis, like Duling, thinks the carbon market is still young. "I don't have any issue with the thought process or the idea behind it. I think there's a lot of unknowns for the producer, for the grower," he said.

The fledgling carbon market

Programs like Cargill's and Nutrien's are part of the carbon market, a trading system where carbon credits are bought and sold with the intent of reducing pollution overall, according to the United Nations Development Programme.

Agricultural practices can help capture and/or keep carbon dioxide and other pollutants out of the atmosphere. By using certain management practices, farmers can earn money in the carbon market by selling carbon credits to companies looking to offset their own greenhouse gas emissions.

A carbon credit, also called a carbon offset, is a permit that represents the reduction, sequestration or avoidance of one metric ton, or 1,000 kilograms, of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. If a company emits two metric tons of carbon dioxide and purchases one carbon credit, the company overall produces one ton of carbon dioxide for the purposes of a carbon market.

Most of the carbon market worldwide is a mandatory one, where governments require companies to offset their emissions. In the United States, except for California, the carbon market is voluntary-that means companies are not required to participate. In Ohio, the buying and selling of carbon credits are also unregulated.

Many companies in the United States are looking to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, said Brent Sohngen, a professor of environmental and resource economics at The Ohio State University. But to become net zero, they have to buy carbon credits.

"These large companies are looking at their carbon emissions and finding there is no way to avoid carbon emissions from using greenhouse gas-polluting fuels, so they are shifting gears," he said. "They are looking to reduce emissions through the agricultural and forestry sectors and take those emissions and use them towards their net-zero goals."

Since most of the carbon market in the United States is unregulated, companies were created to develop a methodology to make and sell carbon credits. Measuring, reporting and verifying carbon offsets are key to obtaining a carbon credit.

The process of entering into a carbon farming practice plan

Once a farmer enrolls in a carbon program, a carbon farming practice plan is designed based on an initial assessment of the farm.

Farmers implement changes on their farms, such as not tilling their soil and planting cover crops like alfalfa or clover. Then they measure and record data, which is checked and verified by an independent verification body such as Verra or the Gold Standard.

After the farm's carbon offsets are verified, a carbon credit is issued. The project developer or a broker connects the carbon credit with the end buyer, usually a company that purchases the credit to offset carbon dioxide emissions.

When Duling enrolled his acres, it was an easy process. "The guy that signed me up for the carbon came with his laptop," he said. "He just brought my farms up into aerial view, we picked the fields out with satellite imagery. The total time I was with him was 15 minutes."

Carbon programs must look at the history of the acres to determine how to create high-quality carbon credits. Gathering the history of whether or not the fields were tilled or cover-cropped would have been a tedious process for Duling.

"That's why I lost interest with these other companies. I only got 15 minutes invested," with Cargill, he said. "I made $740 in 15 minutes. That made a lot more sense to me."

Duling signed a one-year contract and will be paid $370 in the fall and $370 in the spring to earn about $5.52 per acre.

Carbon credits are issued based on new practices that are implemented on a farm. "To produce a premium, high-quality carbon credit, it would have to come from an additionality, meaning a new practice," said Clay Edwards, the program lead for Cargill's RegenConnect.

Carbon credits encourage change - but don't reward existing sustainable practices

If farmers are already using practices that capture or avoid carbon emissions, then there is not a measurable carbon dioxide savings to count toward a carbon credit.

"We want farmers that have been doing those practices, like no tillage, to continue doing those practices. The carbon market isn't paying farmers enough to stop doing something that is working for them. It just hasn't evolved that way," Edwards said.

Duling is frustrated he can't benefit from his already carbon-friendly acres.

"The problem with carbon-credit programs is that they want us to be doing things like not tilling and planting cover crops. I am already doing all that, but they will not let me in," Duling said.

By tilling his new acreage, the carbon naturally stored in the soil will be released into the atmosphere-avoiding further tillage and planting cover crops will recapture that released carbon, allowing him to earn carbon credits.

"It wasn't ground that I had in my operation for five, 10, 20 years. The acres that's been in my operation, I am not going to till," Duling said.

Prices for a carbon credit vary, but generally, a farmer could earn from $1 to $5 extra per acre on top of what they make for their crop. For example, according to the Farm Office of the Ohio State University Extension Office, Ohio corn should yield a range of return from $260 to $619 per acre in 2022, depending on land production capabilities.

"A lot of programs are asking farmers to do a lot of practices for very little money. When it came down to it, I figured out I had the carbon they wanted, but I was getting the least amount of money," Duling said.

Carbon programs will eventually have to change, he said, because "they're going to run out of farmers."

Duling and Davis think the money from carbon programs helps offset the extra work they have to put into their fields, but ultimately they will not be "a huge money maker" for farms. Instead, they think the companies selling the credits, like Cargill, will benefit most.

Most farmers are eligible for a carbon credit program, Edwards said. The only way a farmer would not be able to participate is if they used best-management practices on all of their acres.

"That's probably less than 1% of the acres in the U.S. Every farmer's field is different; it has its own unique characteristics. It's really got to be a customized approach," he said.

Companies trying to achieve their net-zero emissions goals in the United States are driving the voluntary carbon market, Sohngen said. "If companies continue to get serious about their net-zero goals, and the price of carbon starts to edge up, then we'll see more people jump into it."



Baylee Sweitzer wrote this article for Kent State News Lab. This collaboration is produced in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the George Gund Foundation.


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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

One of the chief purposes of the Department of Agriculture is to support American agriculture, and in practice, that means supporting meat. Meat and dairy producers receive around $38 billion every year in financial assistance from the federal government, and it's long been argued that these agricultural subsidies result in cheaper meat to American consumers. But do they really?

The answer is a (very) qualified yes. Agricultural subsidies probably do reduce the price of meat for consumers, but it's likely a very small reduction. The bigger reason for meat's relative inexpensiveness is the simple fact that meat, and especially chicken, is incredibly cheap to produce. This cheapness comes at a cost to many - including slaughterhouse workers, communities living near factory farms and farm animals, who endure immense suffering as a result of these "efficient" farming practices.

Meat comes with many hidden costs related to health and the environment, that are paid not by meat producers or consumers, but by society at large. Increased greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, water contamination, ecosystem destruction, heart disease and antimicrobial resistance are but a few examples.

Why Meat Is So Cheap

Chicken is the most popular meat in the world, and with the exception of fish, chickens are the most commonly-farmed vertebrates by a fairly wide margin. There's a good reason for this: in comparison with beef and other types of meat, poultry is very cheap and efficient to produce.

Some of this has to do with the biology of chickens; they eat corn and soy, which are relatively cheap crops to grow. They also require less food on a relative basis: it takes just 2.4 pounds of chicken feed to produce one pound of edible meat, while creating a pound of beef requires over 10 pounds of cattle feed.

But this isn't entirely a natural phenomenon. Over the decades, chickens have been selectively bred to grow bigger and faster than they naturally would have. This allows farmers to raise far more chickens more quickly than ever with less food, but it also results in chickens who struggle to walk or even stand up, and spend much of their lives laying in their own waste as a result.

This brings us to another huge reason why meats of all kinds are so cheap. In factory farms, animals are frequently kept in cramped and unsanitary conditions, denied the ability to engage in their natural behaviors, separated from their parents at birth, and killed in painful and often gruesome ways.

The reason factory farms treat animals this way is to save money. It's cheaper to cram a bunch of animals into one dirty pen than it is to give each of them enough space to roam and graze, for instance. But this "efficiency" comes at an enormous cost to the animals themselves, who live out most of their lives in pain and misery as a result of these practices.

The Hidden Costs of Meat Production

The daily suffering that farm animals experience isn't the only hidden cost of the meat industry. Animal agriculture also takes a steep toll on the environment and public health - things that, much like the wellbeing of animals, is difficult to put a dollar amount on.

To begin with, meat production is a major contributor to global warming, as it's estimated that between 11 and 20 percent of all greenhouse gasses are the result of animal agriculture. Factory farms are also the number one source of water pollution in the U.S., which threatens both human and aquatic life alike, while the misuse of antibiotics in factory farms has led to the rise of deadly, antimicrobial-resistant pathogens.

In addition to all of this, beef production in particular is the number one driver of global deforestation, which has an array of disastrous environmental impacts on its own, including soil degradation, ecosystem destruction and biodiversity loss.

On the societal front, multiple studies have shown that when new slaughterhouses are built, incidents of domestic violence and sexual abuse increase in the surrounding communities. Factory farms and slaughterhouses are also rife with illegal labor practices, including child labor and falsification of payroll records. The fact that a disproportionate number of farm workers are undocumented immigrants means that these abuses often go unreported and unchecked.

These costs aren't baked into the price of meat. They're paid by humanity at large, in the short and long run, and will have increasingly dire consequences over time.

Why Defining 'Subsidies' Isn't Straightforward

While federal subsidies do reduce the price of meat, quantifying that reduction is nearly impossible, in large part because there's no firm definition for what does and does not constitute a subsidy.

Some of the USDA's policies indisputably count as subsidies. Direct payments to farmers are the most obvious example of this; crop insurance discounts, price loss coverage, conservation programs and disaster aid are also forms of financial assistance that agricultural producers receive from the federal government.

But some initiatives fall into a grayer area. There are many federal policies that don't involve any direct financial transactions with agricultural producers, but nonetheless reduce those producers' operating costs and ease their financial burdens as businesses. Depending on the definition one uses, policies such as these could reasonably qualify as subsidies.

Unofficial Subsidies: 'Avoided Costs' and Special Treatment

"Another way to think about subsidies is as 'avoided costs,' and that can be done through favorable regulatory environments," Andrew deCoriolis, Executive Director of the nonprofit Farm Forward, tells Sentient.

For instance, up until very recently, salmonella was not considered an "adulterant" in raw chicken. This meant that, among other things, raw chicken that was found to have salmonella in it was nevertheless shipped to stores and sold with a label stating that it was "Passed and Inspected" by the USDA.

This has recently changed, and beginning in 2025, salmonella above a certain level will be considered an adulterant in stuffed raw chicken products or frozen breaded chicken - much to the chagrin of poultry producers. But previously, this lax regulatory environment allowed chicken farms to save money on salmonella-related safety protocols that they otherwise would have had to implement.

Does this count as a subsidy? It's a matter of perspective, but deCoriolis, whose organization aims to end factory farming, argues that it does.

"Right now, those products enter the marketplace even if they have salmonella and the USDA knows that they do," deCoriolis says. "I think of that as a form of subsidy, because that's something unusual to the meat industry - that they get these sort of regulatory passes."

There are plenty of similar examples. Every year, the USDA spends $1.2 billion on advertisements and promotions for American agriculture. This could also be considered, in effect, a subsidy. The USDA also spends $3 billion on agricultural research every year, leading to the development of new technology that increases efficiency and profitability of farms. That said, this funding also goes towards research into climate-smart farm projects and conservation programs, not just animal agriculture.

In almost any other industry, businesses themselves pay for advertising and research. But agribusinesses are essentially given a $4.2 billion voucher from the federal government to spend in these areas. While the USDA might not consider these "subsidies," they have the same effect of offloading some of the industry's business expenses to the federal government.

What Is the Price of Meat, Without Government Assistance?

Some researchers have attempted to calculate how much more expensive beef would be without federal subsidies. Unfortunately, these estimates differ wildly.

In 2015, for instance, a highly-touted paper from UC Berkeley's engineering school claimed that, if not for federal subsidies, a pound of hamburger meat would cost $30, compared with the $4.00 per pound that it actually cost at the time. That's an enormous reduction, and would mean that the USDA is artificially reducing the market price of meat in the U.S. to a much bigger extent than many people realize.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the much more modest estimate in David Simon's book Meatonomics from 2013, which says that a $4.56 Big Mac would only cost $0.70 more without federal subsidies. That's a 15 percent reduction in price - not nothing, but not exactly earth-shattering, either.

It's also frequently argued by vegan and food justice activists that the price of a Big Mac would jump from $5.00 to $13.00 without federal subsidies. This claim, however, is based on a misreading of the aforementioned UC Berkeley paper.

What the paper actually says is that a Big Mac would cost $13.00 "if the retail price included hidden expenses that meat producers offload onto society." That's a much broader category than just subsidies. It includes things like the health and environmental costs associated with meat production and consumption, neither of which are subsidies.

All of this is further complicated by the fact that agricultural subsidies, like all federal expenditures, are paid for with taxpayer dollars. In that sense, consumers are already paying for the "true" price of meat. They're just doing this through their tax payments, as opposed to the money they spend at McDonald's.

Around five percent of Americans don't eat meat at all - but their tax dollars still fund agricultural subsidies. This means that, even accounting for taxes, meat-eaters are paying a little bit less for their meat than they otherwise would, as vegetarians and vegans are paying for a portion of federal meat subsidies.

In other words, it's complicated. And in the end, all of these complications make it nearly impossible to say exactly how much cheaper meat would be without federal subsidies.

Are Agribusinesses 'Too Big to Fail?'

The main argument in favor of agricultural subsidies is that the agricultural sector is "too big to fail." Americans need to eat, and food systems are so central to the continued functioning of society that the government must shield agribusinesses from the normal market risks that other industries face.

The general premise of this argument is correct. We do rely on food systems to live, and a collapse of any country's agricultural sector would have catastrophic consequences.

But it doesn't follow that, because of this, the federal government should be subsidizing the meat industry specifically. Americans eat four times more meat than the global average, and while there's debate around whether more fruit and vegetable subsidies would actually reduce the price of produce, that's not an argument for propping up a polluting industry like industrialized meat.

Moreover, the argument that subsidies are needed to feed Americans is undermined by the fact that American farmers export around 20 percent of the food they produce. Some of the high-value products that are top exports include animal feed, beef, veal and pork, and the overall most-traded commodities are corn, soy and wheat.

Every year, American agricultural producers sell between $150 and $200 billion worth of U.S.-made food to other countries. This includes around $35 billion of meat and dairy - which is just a little bit shy of the $38 billion a year in subsidies that meat producers receive every year from the federal government.

"A huge amount of American production goes abroad," deCoriolis says. "This isn't about feeding Americans. Increasingly, it's about feeding Mexico, and Canada and Asia, and other places around the world."

These exports don't result in cheaper food for Americans, and they don't make food any more accessible for Americans. Rather, they provide food for people in other countries by boosting international trade, and increase the profits of American agribusinesses.

The Bottom Line

Federal subsidies do reduce the price of meat for consumers, at least to some degree. But putting an exact number to that reduction is tricky, as subsidies are a nebulous concept that can be difficult to measure.

There's no question that the federal government wants the American meat industry to be profitable, and spends quite a bit of money to ensure that it is.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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Farmers in Nebraska and across the nation might not be in panic mode anymore thanks to another extension of the Farm Bill but they still want Congress to look past political divisions to ensure producers are getting the right support for the long haul.

As part of their budget deal to avoid a government shutdown, federal lawmakers also decided to keep the current Farm Bill, which technically expired in 2023, in place for another year. It is usually updated every five years.

John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, said it is a tough market right now and they were happy to see economic and disaster aid included. But he pointed out farming communities still feel overlooked.

"Those of us who represent agriculture see a deepening financial crisis that a lot of farm families are facing," Hansen explained. "We look to Congress for relief."

He noted farmers are still largely working under 2018 spending levels even as their operational costs go higher. The National Farmers Union said it is especially unhappy about a key provision kept off the table, which was granting nationwide year-round sales of E-15 blends of ethanol. It said it would open more markets for farmers but it faces a broad range of opponents, including the oil industry.

Hansen and other advocates hope a new Congress does not fall into the same trap it did last year, urging them to develop a permanent plan.

"As we look into the next year, we hope that the Farm Bill does not languish for another September 30th deadline," Hansen stressed.

It's uncertain how newly shaped agriculture committees, as well as the budget-cutting goals of a new Trump administration, will influence debate over certain elements of Farm Bill funding, including food assistance programs and conservation aid.


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Communities around the state will be watching the progress of a unique project coming up for the north-central Indiana town of Logansport.

The Cass County Community Foundation-backed dream for the new community space includes a permanent farmers market, an incubator kitchen for small food businesses and making community garden plots available to local residents.

Deanna Crispen, president and CEO of the foundation, emphasized the initiative's focus on uniting the diverse community.

"The whole idea behind this proposal was bringing people together through food," Crispen explained.

Planners chose Heritage Park for the project and intentionally designed it to honor the town's immigrant history. They are working with minority groups to ensure inclusivity. The Lilly Endowment has awarded a $5 million grant to fund the project.

Crispen pointed out Purdue University's Extension program will teach agricultural techniques to new residents. The garden plots will allow families to grow traditional foods alongside local staples.

"The space where we're going to build is where the immigration statue is," Crispen noted. "This was meant to be a gathering place."

Organizers expect construction to begin next spring. Local organizations and city officials are coordinating logistics, such as relocating the farmers market during construction. Crispen described the project as a future centerpiece for the community, bringing pride and economic opportunities for years to come.


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