Monsanto seeks farmers' help with climate

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- It's obvious where David Moose's property line ends and the neighboring farm field begins.

Moose's field has a light brown hue, coated by the dead cereal rye and corn cobs that remain from the cover crop he planted in October. Across his property line, the traditionally tilled earth is a darker brown, uncolored by cover crops.

"Cover crops, they've been kind of the buzzword for the last five to six years," said Moose, who farms corn and soybeans on about 1,500 acres south of Illinois' capital.

Moose, whose family has been farming for generations, stopped using traditional tilling methods when he began taking over a larger role in farm operations from his father 32 years ago.

In the past several years, he has added cover crops to further stabilize the soil, help build up even more organic matter and control weeds. Now, he's trying to reduce the amount of fertilizer he uses by applying it in the spring rather than the fall so that the new crop can better absorb it.

It's these types of practices agricultural products giant Monsanto is trying to refine and promote among farmers. If the company wants to live up to its pledge to go carbon neutral by 2021, it will need a lot of help from its customers.

The company, based in suburban St. Louis, can only do so much in house to reduce its own greenhouse-gas emissions. It will apply best farming practices to its own seed production. But that only accounts for about one-sixth of its carbon emissions.

The majority of Monsanto's emissions, about two-thirds, come from the production of its signature Roundup herbicide, said Michael Lohuis, who heads Monsanto's agricultural environmental strategy. Those factory emissions will be difficult to reduce completely, so the company is looking for carbon offsets from farmers.

But all these practices and their associated environmental benefits and global-warming offsets have to be studied and quantified to prove their worth.

More than that, they have to make business sense for farmers. In order to get farmers to reduce their carbon footprint -- agriculture makes up about 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, and about 24 percent of global emissions -- Monsanto will have to figure out both sides of that equation.

"None of this happens unless farmers buy into this," Lohuis said. "It needs to make sense for them practically and economically."

Luckily, there do seem to be economic benefits to farmers in some instances. Tillage, for instance, decreases soil carbon sequestration and requires more trips across the rows with farm equipment. Using less tillage can help build up carbon in soils.

But cutting carbon isn't why Moose adopted no-till. While traditional tillage helps fields dry out faster, making it easier for farmers to plant earlier in the year after heavy rains, it also makes the soil more prone to erosion, and Moose wanted to keep wind and rain from carrying off any more of his family's soil.

"Mother Nature only gave us so much soil to work with," he said. "Everything we lose with wind or water erosion, we're likely not going to get back."

He admits it took some time before he started seeing noticeable benefits, and no-till does tend to require more management and patience. But he wants his son to eventually take over the operation, and he was willing to wait for his investment in the soil to pay off.

"It took about five years for the soil to come around," Moose said. "The soil gets hard initially, but once the earthworms and bacteria and fungi get stabilized, they tend to loosen the soil up."

SundayMonday Business on 05/08/2016

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