How Can We Tell If Climate-Smart Agriculture Stores Carbon?
By Savannah Gupton, Mark Bradford, Alex Polussa, Sara E. Kuebbing and Emily E. Oldfield, Eos/AGU.
Excerpt: In the modern era, the necessity to adapt has led to expansive land use, fertilization, irrigation, and other agricultural routines—powered primarily by combusted carbon and freshwater extractions—to suit local environmental conditions and meet demands of growing populations. These practices have been a boon to food supplies, but have also contributed to many of today’s climatic and environmental challenges. ...the Paris Agreement ... legally binds participating nations to implement land use methods that mitigate emissions and actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. One such set of modified land management practices, known collectively as climate-smart agriculture [U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2025], is lauded as a pragmatic, low-barrier pathway to manage climate change through nature-based atmospheric carbon removal and avoided emissions (related to both land use and livestock). However, these practices have primarily been studied in small, controlled experiments, not at the extent needed to verify their effectiveness—and help motivate their adoption—on a large scale. ...one project developer selling carbon credits since 2022 recently reported that their efforts have so far stored nearly 1 million tons of soil carbon in U.S. farmlands. Further, across farms in four U.S. states, the combined use of three climate-smart agriculture techniques—no tillage, cover cropping, and crop rotation of corn and soybeans—is claimed to have resulted in a shift to carbon gains from soil carbon loss using conventional practices [U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2025]....