 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the 2021 Hot Topics and Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series. I'm Jenny Rushlow, Associate Dean for Environmental Programs at Vermont Law School. We're very pleased to welcome you here today for our last presentation in this series. If you've been looking to get Vermont CLE credit for these talks, please keep track of what you've attended in order to claim that credit. We'll have time for Q&A after the presentation today, so I encourage you to type any questions that you have at any time in the chat box, and they can just hang out there until we get to the discussion at the end. Today, we're very pleased to welcome Lisa Held. Lisa is the Senior Policy Reporter for Civil Eats, where she covers food and environmental policy and various other aspects of food and agriculture from local food justice initiatives to multinational meatpacking companies. She covers the food system and the environment for many additional publications, and her stories have been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Eater, and NPR. She also publishes a weekly newsletter on Substack called Peeled and produces and hosts the weekly podcast, The Farm Report on Heritage Radio Network. Lisa is here at BLS as one of our 2021 summer media fellows selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants, and we've really enjoyed having her here this summer. And today, she'll present a talk titled The Corporate Capture of Agricultural Climate Solutions. Please join me in welcoming Lisa Held. Thank you so much, Jenny. I am so thrilled to be here. I have really been grateful for this opportunity to be a media fellow at Vermont Law School over these last two weeks, and I'm really excited to be here with all of you doing my talk today. As Jenny mentioned, I do a lot of things, but my main gig right now is I am the Senior Policy Reporter at Civil Eats, which is a daily news source for critical thought about the American food system. So we cover the food system across a range of issues and areas, including labor, immigration, health and nutrition, and definitely the environment is a major focus of our reporting. And yeah, so I am just going to get started by sharing my screen with you, and we will jump right in. Okay, so hopefully everyone is seeing my slides. So as Jenny mentioned, the name of my talk is The Corporate Capture of Agricultural Climate Solutions. Before I jump in, I want to just break down a little bit about what I mean by that. So first of all, when I say solutions, what I'm mainly going to be talking about are policy solutions. So they could be private initiatives or government programs, a mix of the two, but there are essentially ideas that are being discussed right now that would use taxpayer money or government support in some way to both reduce agriculture's climate impacts and involve farmers in bigger climate mitigation measures. And you know, we know that this is a really important time for these discussions. There was just new research that came out in January 2021 that found that even if we stop burning fossil fuels immediately, we wouldn't be able to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement without reducing emissions from the food system. So this is a really, really big timely topic. And also, I should say, I'm going to be scratching the surface of some of these issues. These are big, complicated discussions. And in this short time period, I'm not going to be able to get into a lot of the nitty gritty details, but I'm going to do my best to just share some of my reporting and some other reporting to kind of give a little bit of a glimpse at some of these specific issues. So before I move on, I just want to point out this picture that I put on the first slide is a farmer named Keith Olander. He runs a farm in western Maryland. I went out to visit him, I think last year, maybe the year before, to report a story on a system called Silvopasture. So he operates this farm where he grazes livestock, intensively grazes them to build soil health. And he plants trees, systems of trees. He actually builds fences with living trees. You can't really see that in this picture. Maybe in the far back, you can kind of start to see the outline of it. He's walking in his pollinator meadow here. This is just this kind of sort of advanced climate positive farm system that he's experimenting with. And I put this picture here because I thought it kind of encompasses what I think people probably imagine or visualize when they think of climate solutions related to agriculture or regenerative agriculture. And I think, unfortunately, some of the solutions that are being discussed are not going to look like this. And we're going to get into that. But I wanted to kind of just have a real farmer as a little bit of a framework. So the other thing I want to talk about, actually I'm going to go back before I jump into that quote, is just when I say corporate capture, I actually really don't like that phrase. And I'm not sure why I used it. It's a little dramatic. But my intent is not to tell you about how big food and agriculture corporations are bad or point fingers. It's just to kind of point to this moment of massive change we're in and explain some reporting that can give us an understanding of how these companies are going to attempt to potentially steer or benefit from these changes. So Biden's USDA is already implementing climate programs. Congress is talking about the connection between food and climate in new ways. A lot is happening. That's going to shape the future. And so some questions I'm thinking about as a journalist covering this space is, how are the agriculture companies that have historically wielded power and influence in this space responding to that? My job is to hold power to account. Questions like, are the most popular policies being discussed? Who's in the room? Are food and ag interest in that room? And what are they asking for? In the race to shift funding towards climate friendly agriculture, who's really going to benefit? So what will the real impact of the policies be? And really at the end of the day, will meaningful climate action be thwarted by corporate interest in the way that action on other issues, say antibiotic use or pesticide reform, has been in the past. So this quote from John Kerry I added here. So this is from a recent interview he did with the New Yorker radio hour and he was asked about how he is going to kind of move people along on making changes to their diets that would help with climate action. And he said, I don't believe people will necessarily have to eat differently. Agriculture will change. He talks about some research that's being done and the economic analyses. And he says, I just think we're looking at a remarkable transformation. This will be the biggest transformation since the industrial revolution literally. And I thought this was really telling because Kerry and a lot of other people in the administration and in DC are talking about jobs, many technological solutions and not for better or for worse, but that's just the framework that a lot of this is being put into. And so that's a different framework from we need to change what we're doing in terms of the food system right now. We need to rein in bad practices. It's a very different framework. So I think it's good to just have that in mind. Okay. So first of all, I'm going to talk about some examples of how big agricultural companies and sort of the agribusiness interests that have a lot of power are currently involved in shifting their messaging around environmental impacts of farming and climate change specifically. So this slide, if you look at this timeline that I pulled, this is from an Inside Climate News article. And they created a timeline of some of the Farm Bureau's kind of highlights of their lobbying over the years. And basically, you know, the takeaway is that the Farm Bureau, which represents the biggest agricultural companies in this country, certainly represents some commodity farmers as well. So basically, you know, for decades, they have been aggressively lobbying to thwart any and all environmental regulations related to farming, many of which are related to climate. And this timeline ends in 2012. But another big initiative they were involved in since then, for example, is they were lobbying on the waters of the US rule, which was promulgated under President Obama. And it would have extended Clean Water Act protections to more waterways, essentially, in the US. And the Farm Bureau was really, really big in fighting that rule. And and then I have this quote from from Zippy DeVall, who's the head of the Farm Bureau. And, you know, he's just talking about here how the Farm Bureau really worked hard to put Trump in the White House and were successful that the first time. And, you know, we know that President Trump, while in the White House, rolled back in a massive number of environmental regulations, including the waters of the US rule. So so that was then. This is now, it's all actually kind of happening at the same time. But so the Putin agricultural climate alliance is a new organization that was formed. And the Farm Bureau is the main organizer behind this alliance. And so their messaging has really changed their spearheading this alliance, they're saying, you know, something kind of like, well, farmers are already environmental stewards, and they have an important role of playing climate solutions. And they're coming out and putting themselves in these talks about climate action and farming. And this alliance, it involves, it does involve a lot of mainstream environmental groups like Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense Fund, and also some other food and ag groups like the National Farmers Union. But it also has a very strong showing from industry, including groups like Crop Lake America, which represents the nation's pesticide industry and groups like the National Pork Producers Council, which represents industrial pork production. Here's another example. This one is actually brand new. This was just announced definitely within the past month. This is an alliance called Protein Pact. And this alliance says that its mission is to strengthen animal proteins contributions to healthy people, healthy animals, healthy communities, and a healthy environment. And so this was created primarily by the North American Meat Institute, also known as NAMI. So they are a extremely powerful lobbying group for the biggest meat packing companies like JBS, Smithfield, Tyson. And so, you know, we're talking about meat companies that primarily are in the business of selling meat from concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs. And this is an alliance that is also going to be kind of pulling in lots of industry partners like the United Soybean Board, also the National Pork Producers Council. There's a lot of overlap between these different groups. And it pulls in other alliances. So it involves this something called the U.S. Round Table for Sustainable Beef, which its members are like Cargill and Tyson, Burger King, Walmart. So this is kind of another example of just industry coming together and saying, hey, we are, we're involved in this conversation about climate and we want a seat at the table. So those are kind of big alliances. And this is just an example of an individual company that I wanted to share that I reported on earlier this year. So this was an April JBS, which is the biggest beef and pork processor in the world based in Brazil, but has a huge presence in the U.S. as well. They ran a full page ad in the New York Times in April that said, as you can see, agriculture can be part of the climate solution, bacon, chicken wings, and steak with net zero emissions. It's possible. There was a lot more to the ad, but I couldn't fit it in the picture. So this is really significant because JBS is not a company you think of and you think, oh, they're really going forward on climate. They have mainly, well, they've been in the news a lot recently for the bribes that they were busted for paying to help their acquisition of Pilgrims Pride, which is another big chicken company in the U.S. But, you know, I did some reporting on in this in this story on my my sub-sac newsletter appealed about the kind of picking apart the actual commitments that they made that they were advertising here. They were kind of committing to reducing emissions from some parts of their supply chain, but not all reducing emissions intensity, not absolute emissions, which is a whole other topic. And then the net zero of course would be coming from offsets, which there are a lot of issues with them that I'll talk more about later. But I just wanted to point out kind of the most misleading aspect was this kind of declaration that the company would end Amazon deforestation and its supply chain by 2025, when it actually had made that exact same commitment in 2009. And not only did it fail to meet at that time, but environmental group that tracks these things has ranked JBS as the number one for deforestation in some critical ecosystems in South America. So, I mean, the big takeaway here is just that, you know, these companies like JBS, they're declaring like we care about climate change, we're part of the solution. And we need to be paying attention to that messaging. So, so why, why are they, why are they doing this? So I think, I mean, these are just some headlines I included. One is a story I did with the new house ag chairman where he said climate change is one of his priorities. There's an article from a farmer saying, you know, Biden is betting the farm on climate. So there's, as I mentioned before, this there's a lot of talk about this. But I mean, I want to give them the benefit. I don't know if this is getting in the depth, but really, there is an aspect where I'm sure, you know, these companies are thinking about preventing disaster that if, you know, anyone looks at the science, they need to be thinking about how to secure their supply chains as the climate changes. So I'm sure that's part of it. But consumer demand and public image are obviously huge right now as consumers are thinking more about making choices related to climate impact, preventing regulation. So this is big, they, you know, food and agriculture companies historically want to be in the room saying, we'll do this, we were absolutely on board, it has to be voluntary. So this is, I heard Zippy Duvall in multiple hearings this year say that we're over and over and voluntary, voluntary, voluntary. And a lot of senators will kind of parrot it back in hearings to just like, give them to say, yep, we get it. And so it's kind of just a, we show up to make sure that you're, that there aren't harsher regulations that are going to be put on the agriculture sector when it comes to climate. And then of course profit. So there's a lot of money, there's, there's government funding flowing this way, there's private funding flowing this way. And that's, you know, they want to be in line to benefit. Okay, so I'm going to talk about two of these kind of agricultural climate solutions. They're very specific and they both, they kind of overlap a little bit. So I decided to focus on these two. But just before I do that, I just wanted to note that there are many more that could fit into this category of agricultural climate solutions. This is in no way comprehensive. So for instance, fake meat, both plant and cell based is really big right now. It's mostly getting venture capital funding, but advocacy groups are definitely working to push it into the policy arena. There's seaweed, I just did some reporting on big companies getting into seaweed production for civil eats. So there's a lot of other things, but we're almost going to focus on these two. So starting with methane capture or biogas. This is also referred to as factory farm biogas or renewable natural gas. So you can see, depending with what you think of this idea, you might call it something very different. So this is sort of just the basic idea. Industrial scale dairies and hog farms, that's mostly what we're talking about when we talk about methane capture and biogas. They hold waste from their animals in lagoons. And as that waste breaks down, it releases methane. And we know that methane is 25 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. So reducing methane is really important right now. And so the basic solution is, well, we can capture that methane, convert it to biogas, biomethane, and then distribute it in natural gas pipelines as a renewable fuel source. So the way this works right now, there are many dairies in California that are already operating these. And there are some examples on the East Coast. There's actually a Vermont example that I found that is in Salisbury that was built with Vanguard Renewables. And it's a smaller dairy operation as far as these projects usually go. And they're also putting food scraps into the digester in order to get enough waste to run it efficiently. And the energy is being purchased by Middlebury. And so this, that's kind of an example of what I think people think of when you think of digesters and these capturing methane and sort of creating this small closed-loop system that you're immediately getting the energy back. But that's not what most of this is going to look like in the future. So we're going to get into that. So these are the big issues that experts and advocates are talking about right now around this idea of methane capture. I'm going to run through the first two real quick because they're not related to this kind of idea of corporate influence. And then I'm going to focus on the last two. So oh, first actually, let me just say, so there isn't current legislation on this or, you know, a current USDA policy that's explicitly supporting this. But it's definitely just one of these things that is being talked about consistently. And, you know, offset markets that exist now are already paying these operations for capturing methane for their carbon reductions. So it's definitely growing and there's going to be a lot more conversations about it in DC. So big problem. So the first one, shift climate efforts away from electrification towards continued reliance on gas. You know, the vast majority of natural gas is still going to come from fracking. Yeah, so this is going to represent a very small portion of that. And many people say, well, if we keep adding to the kinds of gas we're putting into these systems, it just prolongs the transition away from fossil fuels. And kind of along the same lines, the low price means systems rely on offsets for profitability. So these systems are very expensive to set up to build and then also to run. And fracked natural gas is always going to be cheaper than hog or dairy biogas from the conversations I've had with experts. So essentially like companies can't make the economics work by solely selling the gas as energy. So they need offset markets. Right now it's California has the low carbon fuel standard and their cap and trade program. But they need to be paid for the service of capturing the methane in order for it to make economic sense to build these essentially. So these are the big kind of takeaways in terms of how this might lead to kind of bigger agribusiness companies benefiting and more consolidation. So in order to power digesters, you need a lot of manure and for it to be economically feasible, you need even more. So you know, there's some research that puts the capital costs at building these, it's definitely millions of dollars. And it's expensive to run annually, as I mentioned. So some estimates put the feasibility for instance on a dairy at around 3,000 to 3,500 cows. So these are large operations that are able to make this work. And you know, that's so say we're talking about a 3,500 cow dairy and that's not even for some of these operations in the West, that's not even nearly close to the top level in terms of size. But you know, that's a lot of animals in one place. And all the other impacts of CAFOs of that size remain, right? So water quality issues, you know, there might be air quality issues, obviously any animal welfare concerns, if you have concerns about animals being confined in small, you know, concentrated areas, but that's all going to still be there, public health risks, you know, associated with antibiotic use, for instance, used in hog farms and large dairies. So by kind of creating a new revenue stream for these kinds of farms, essentially what a lot of people are pointing out is that we're creating new revenue streams for them. And all these other issues still remain and are probably not good for the environment or people living in these areas. And of course, also, so in terms of tipping the scales further, small dairies who are doing grass fed or regenerative grazing, hog farms raising pigs on pasture and woodlands in diversified systems, they're certainly not going to benefit from these. They're they can't they don't even have lagoons to because they're not creating those emissions, so they don't have methane to capture it. And so it's essentially creating a new income stream for these large operations, where the smaller maybe diversified operations that are trying to do things differently are not going to benefit. So this is just a little I wanted to give you a kind of a sneak peek at some of my reporting on these issues. This is actually reporting I'm doing right now and the story has not come out yet. So it is literally a sneak peek and I'm not going to I'm going to try not to give away what the crux of this story is going to be. Hopefully you'll read it when it comes out on the leads very soon. But I have been looking into this project that Smithfield and Dominion Energy are building in Utah. Well, it's this project is actually already up and running as you can see the headline. They're calling it the first of its kind renewable natural gas project in Utah. They you can see in the I don't know if you can read this on the slide but it basically they're saying that project is now producing renewable natural gas from a network of 26 family farms that raise hogs under contract with Smithfield. So I'm going oh and this is the first so they're doing this in Utah now and then they're also working on systems in North Carolina, Virginia and a couple other states. So this is a huge push and it's just they're just going to keep expanding it and building more of these natural gas pipelines specifically all these projects are all hog farms. So this is a Google Maps screenshot something I use a lot when I'm trying to understand what landscapes look like. These buildings that are used for and capable production are big enough that you can see them on the satellite. So this is the county that the project I was just talking about this Smithfield methane capture project is located in. The project that they are building includes 26 farm sites. Permits that they filed that I've reviewed say that they had planned for each site to have four hog finisher barns with 4,800 hogs per barn which means that the complex that is providing this natural gas it would the actual complex of 26 farm sites would have just under about 500,000 close to half a million hogs at a time in this one farm complex and one thing to point out is so this picture is this is not actually let me see how to explain this there I think there are at least two other farm hog farm complexes in the same two counties in Utah so it's hard to purse out by looking at the maps which are which so this might not be the exact complex but that's it actually speaks to kind of what we're talking about is not only are there these you know we know that there are half a million hogs in this one complex but there are actually many many more that are already there so it's just a really really high level of concentration and consolidation and you can you can take this map and compare it to the natural gas pipeline maps that the federal government provides and see how the pipeline kind of runs through this area so it gives them access to tapping into that so so my story is going to look into some bigger questions about actual emissions reduction value of of projects like these but you know we can just think about like well what other impacts that might these farms have I mean the numbers here again in terms of animal welfare the impacts would be pretty obvious and then a big one here I think would be water use so there's persistent drought in this already normally very dry region right now Utah is actually fighting with surrounding states in the Colorado river basin over water access so that could be another impact that we should consider okay so that was methane capture biogas I'm going to briefly talk about carbon markets so and I should say I'm really talking about agricultural carbon markets there are different kinds of carbon markets but essentially the way I laid it out here you know agriculture contributes to climate change via greenhouse gas emissions from land use input production nitrous oxide emissions in fields methane from livestock but on the flip side healthy soil when properly managed can also capture and hold carbon potentially contributing to climate action by sequestering that carbon so the idea is that in order to incentivize farmers to adopt those practices that sequester carbon carbon markets sell credits to companies that want to offset their emissions so in this case they'd be purchasing those credits and farmers are providing are getting paid for the sequestration the company gets to say well sure we emitted this this amount of co2 equivalents in the past year but then we paid this farm and they sequestered it and so it evens out essentially so seems seems pretty straightforward I guess oh and I should also say that carbon markets already exist I mentioned earlier I think California's cap and trade market but that one is really different because it has a cap so companies are certain companies in certain industries that are that admit a lot of that have high emissions they're only they're given a certain threshold and then they have to offset what when they go over whereas most of the agricultural carbon markets that exist so far don't involve a cap there's totally voluntary um so you know companies just that want to offset can but it's not required of course I should also say though that these ideas there's so many different ideas but actually we'll talk about this on this slide so there's so many different ideas related to carbon markets um and in agriculture that are circulating right now and I want to talk about the growing climate solutions act but first I should say so the the Biden administration has has pointed to carbon markets before Biden the USDA actually appointed Robert Bonney who's an advocate for what he calls a carbon bank to for a climate position within USDA and and he hasn't been confirmed yet but likely will be and um so that a carbon bank is a little bit different from private carbon markets so they're talking more about the federal government taking a larger role in potentially paying farmers for for carbon credits and in this case the growing climate solutions act is a bipartisan bill that was introduced by senators Braun and Stabenow and it passed the senate in June which is pretty amazing right now not much as passing the senate um and that would kind of um essentially it sort of top level it would support it would kind of direct the USDA the federal government to support the growth of private carbon markets to kind of help standardize some of the practices that are being used um right now and because the third various markets and they're all doing things differently and it's a little bit of a um wild west I think so I wanted to just show a little bit um of this this act um it is kind of miraculous that it got passed and then in this moment um how difficult it is to get things through the senate right now and one of the reasons I think it passed is because it had huge industry support um which is relevant to this conversation so it got tons of support from environmental groups as well which I should say um the more progressive side of environmental groups are not supporting it but um kind of the a lot of them are and um you can also see though that we've got Cargill there um Sinjenta McDonald so this is a and the farm bureau of course so industry likes this this um bill so here are the issues that um advocates and experts are bringing up when it comes to agricultural carbon markets first one um research so none of the um research that we have so far what we know so far from a scientific perspective on on farm carbon secretion is kind of at a point where most people think it's just not at a point where we could really say okay this this if we do this thing it's going to sequester this much carbon and we can pay for that amount of carbon um there's a long way to go so we have to answer questions like how much carbon can soils really hold how long does that carbon stay there if you till it once is it just gone um how far down is it being sequestered um that's a really important aspect that sometimes doesn't even get measured in studies um how to measure if you're going to pay farmers for for secretion how are we measuring it there are different tools or are we doing it paying them by practice instead of by actual carbon so there's a lot of a lot of um unanswered questions at this point um and then I think I think I see an offset so this is complicated but I just want to bring it up quickly um ProPublica has done some really incredible investigations that show offsets often don't reduce emissions at the rate they're they're actually measured at or sold at one problem is you know if we if we pay a farmer because they have a certain amount of carbon in their soil we don't know what that amount would have been if they had not been paid what would they have done it's hard to say well maybe they would have planted the cover crop but they wouldn't have but they would have tilled or maybe they so it's hard to say um this is exactly how much carbon um resulted in a change in what they were doing and therefore it represents a meaningful reduction in the overall amount of carbon in the atmosphere okay so moving into um our focus today sort of the the corporate side so just like methane and biogas capture um most of what we're seeing so far in terms of how carbon markets are structured suggests that the biggest farms are the ones that are going to benefit um and specifically commodity farms so right now um the rates are about 15 to 20 per acre so if you're a regenerative diversified 20 acre farm well first of all some of them some of the markets don't even um take farms that aren't commodity um but also like if you're 20 acres and you're going to be 20 per acre $400 isn't really going to do much to to help um improve the economic viability of your farm but if 3000 acre commodity farm you know 60k is is pretty significant so there's a scale preference for sure change in practices um most of these markets require a farmer to change one or two things they're doing in order to get paid so maybe it's reducing tillage or fertilizer use um planting cover crops I mentioned so essentially the markets do that because they want to be able to say they made this change it likely led to this much more carbon in the soil so that means it can represent an offset but you know that obviously then exempts or leaves out the most sort of um innovative farms that have been doing kind of climate leading work for years so again like a diversified regenerative organic farm that has been really just doing the work for years um and prioritizing biodiversity and um and internalizing those costs along the way they're not there's likely not going to be a little change they can make to say well we made this change and so now we can qualify for a credit and it's important for me to point out that's not a flaw that's actually essential to the design because as I mentioned earlier for an offset to truly represent meaningful emissions reductions net reductions it has to represent new capture right so again just like kind of the summary bullet is that like methane and biogas um because of these issues the fear is that if carbon markets work for any farmers it will become out of the farmers with thousands of acres that can get paid to make a relatively small practice change in the the grand scheme of things and you know therefore this will further tip the scale towards the status quo towards the same kind of production that dominates our agricultural landscape now okay so this is just to kind of sum up I just wanted to share um this is a story I did on carbon markets for the Guardian earlier this year and I started by showing you a farmer and I wanted to end by with the voice of a farmer and so for this story I talked to Nicole and Aaron Bradley they run a diversified livestock farm in North Carolina which is pretty amazing because North Carolina is the second biggest producing state in the US and after Iowa and you know they're raising hogs in a place where hog production means manure lagoons and and capos but they're doing it 200 pigs at a time on pasture and in wooded areas um you know the manure gets integrated into the ground naturally as fertilizer they move if 40 grass fed cattle they move them in a mob grazing system to maximize soil health with laying hens following behind and they really prioritize biodiversity and ecosystem stewardship and I talked to Aaron um about carbon markets about methane capture and his sort of assumption was well of course firms like mine won't benefit and whatever dollars are going to programs like these he was sort of you know he kind of said yeah it makes sense that they'll likely go to industrial scale farms um because in his mind that's just kind of the way things go and um I thought this quote that I included was just important to sort of end on so he said you know while his farm can't compete with the price efficiency of industrial scale animal operation it's more efficient in other ways quote in preserving natural resources and managing ecosystem if I can hold carbon our policymakers are disconnected from what our style of agriculture is and I'm not sure they believe we can really be productive all right so that is it um I just did this slide at the end um with my contact information these are some of my recent stories on civil eats um I would love if you want to talk to me um I'm going to take questions now but if at any point you want to reach out and send me a story idea ask me a question chat more about this topic um my email is here and I'm happy to um interact with you okay um I'm ready for questions Jenny whenever you are okay awesome great thank you so much for that talk Lisa um for our listeners um if you would like to ask a question and you're watching our website live stream you just click on the icon at the bottom of the video to bring up the chat box where you can log in and add your question and the login is super easy um and if you're watching on our facebook live stream add your question to the comment box below and we'll try to get through as many questions as possible so Lisa first question there um in the context of carbon markets for um sectors other than agriculture there have been a lot of criticisms from the environmental justice community around distributional justice and um you know the reduction of carbon and the use of offsets to sort of relocating pollution into areas that are already disproportionately overburdened um how have you seen any um racial or economic justice criticisms of the use of carbon markets in agriculture that's such a great question and um definitely something that I'm thinking about a lot um I don't have a specific example of but one thing that I that I am thinking about is so for instance um the example I showed of the Smithfield um Dominion project I haven't been able to confirm yet that they are definitely getting offsets from California's um cap and trade or low carbon fuel standard market but um they did say in another article that that was something that they were someone from the company said that was something they were looking into and so one this an example of where this would fit into your question is um they're installing lots of these um biogas digesters right now in North Carolina where historically the concentration of um hog farms there is a huge environmental justice problem I mean these communities have been hammered for years and there's been tons of reporting all over on how the pollution that air quality um has affected primarily um low-income black communities in North Carolina and so in this case this would be an example where potentially if if Smithfield is getting paid by a you know an offset market to essentially capture the methane there it's just giving them kind of a financial incentive to continue business as usual otherwise on those farms in North Carolina where the people being affected by those operations are low-income people of color so I think I think it's a really big thing to to be looking out for and there will be many other examples um that yeah I'm sure popping up and we'll have to be paying attention to there are examples of um pollution trading um in the area where you're from in terms of like water quality um pollution credits trading I think in the Chesapeake Bay right is that is that something that the and that came first in terms of this um like pollution trading idea and agriculture before carbon markets were contemplated has there been any learning from that earlier attempt I'm not sure do you mean are you talking about like um paying um for paying farmers not to put like nitrogen and phosphorus in the Chesapeake Bay like that kind of thing yeah I yeah I know that that exists I it's not something I've covered a lot and unfortunately I don't um know a lot about how that would potentially relate um I know there are some there's some talk right now about new markets to pay um oyster farmers to remove nitrogen from like for the ecosystem benefits of putting oysters in the Chesapeake Bay and essentially paying like people who are polluting the bay with nitrogen could pay for credits um that go to oyster farmers to remove that nitrogen so it that does have a little it seems like a similar structure but I don't know enough about it to know if there are you know problem potential problems with it or what the real impacts have been okay thank you is there any way to allow for biogas generation in a way that doesn't support KFOs it's a good question I think you need a concentrated source of manure so I mean it's it's always I mean I'm saying always but I you know there's also like a lots of innovation happening right now so who knows what will happen what will change you know how these things will potentially improve right now what we know is that you need a lot of waste in one place and when we talk about KFOs I mean the examples I was showing were like massive right but there are examples where it might still be quote unquote like a KFO the way that EPA would define it you know a thousand livestock units or more so with that that's with cows it would be a thousand cows um but that that would be you know potentially small compared to a large KFO so there are different sizes and so I think there are ways to do it on smaller livestock operations that might still be considered a KFO that might not have the same like massive impacts and might also be run by um you know more like an individual family farm and not be you know these big developments that the larger companies are going to cash in on so like for the example I gave in Vermont I think I think that firm had 900 cows which is pretty small for an industrial dairy but it's you know it's still big it's still large but it's small enough that it's not it doesn't look like the same thing compared to some of these other massive operations so I think there's a difference in scale and it's probably a range but the big takeaway is you have to have a lot of manure collected in one place and if you have animals that are outside they're not in a KFO their manure is being distributed on land. We have a um one of our viewers who has asked a question um about your opinion on whether the UN Food Systems Summit might make corporate capture worse given that they haven't had any focus on regenerative agriculture. Huh that is a big question so I did do some reporting on the lead up to the UN Food Systems Summit and um I think there is a kind of feeling among some groups that a lot of the summit is tipping towards kind of big industrial food interests and not so much involving groups that are pushing more agroecological approaches to food production and um regenerative methods. However I don't think the UN Food Systems Summit has a huge impact on US agriculture at the end of the day. It might have a bigger impact internationally but I think US agriculture is so powerful the UN doesn't really impact how we do things here to a large extent. Okay we have lots of questions coming in. Anaerobic digestion and climate solutions have been given lots of attention presumably because of their benefits. Are there alternate technologies you recommend that could help make meaningful change? And then there's a follow-up to this which is what about co-digestion anaerobic digesters that use municipal green bin waste or other organic waste streams beyond just manure only digesters? Uh yeah I think that those digesters I think could be really cool like if you can if you can you're putting food waste you're getting all these different ways and there are a million ways to do this that I think I don't think it's just like this is a bad thing. My intention was to kind of just show that when we start to propose these like solutions then kind of companies come in and do what they will with them but that doesn't mean that there aren't situations in which digesters could be amazing and make perfect sense. I and I think it really will have to kind of be on a case by case basis that we think about like does it make sense here and is it really representing a meaningful reduction in emissions? In terms of other technologies I mean I think one of the big issues is that it's really hard to get policymakers to think about agriculture as a more holistic system and kind of invest in full system solutions so like we already know that diversified production silvo pasture we know that there are these systems that I mean a lot of people will call it you know regenerative and we call it regenerative organic that that do a better job but they require and they use a lot of technology and by the way like the most scientific technological thing you can do is start talking about soil health and so I like to point that out because I hate when people think like organic is like anti-tech or but it just those kinds of solutions could be supported and expanded but I think it's harder because they're not just well we can change this one input or we can build this one thing they require kind of holistic thinking and systemic shifts and it's a much bigger lift to do those things and it's also not always the people who have power that are the ones really kind of working on these bigger solutions. Okay what would regenerative agriculture and smaller scale farmers have liked to see in the growing climate solutions act to benefit them? That's a good question I well so I think this act in particular is particularly it was written completely for carbon markets so I don't know that I don't know that there's a way that groups and farmers in those groups would want to be included in the markets I think that they would just more likely want support to do the kinds of things that they're already doing and be rewarded in the same way that some of their fellow farmers are that aren't using the same climate friendly practices so one thing a lot of groups that represent farmers and other environmental groups are calling for is an expansion of conservation programs at the USDA level so expanding the conservation programs like equip and CSP but also updating them and improving them so that you know things like soil health and diversification and ecosystem stewardship are ranked higher in these programs and so farms that are doing that will qualify for grants and funding to support their operations ahead of an operation that maybe is just making a small tweak to a commodity system so I think that's something that gets talked about a lot and there's also some really there's a big push now for investment in regional infrastructure that I think could help shift things a lot even though it doesn't sound like it's climate policy a lot of farms like the one that I mentioned at the end that if you're doing if you're doing livestock on pasture and you're trying to compete with the giant meat market we have in this country and then you can't get your animals processed for three years that's what the weight is right now in a lot of places for small producers there's just no way at the end of the day you're going to be able to have a viable operation so investing more putting more dollars into small-scale processing food hubs that help distribute more efficiently distribute food from smaller more diversified farms things like that I think even though they don't aren't climate policy on you know they don't make they might have climate in in the title they actually might be what those kinds of farms will ask for and I think we just need to kind of think a little more systemically okay we'll do one more question before you wrap up a benefit if there is one of scale farms is that if they make real changes then the impact is large are there examples of medium to large operators that are doing good there definitely are and and that is it's a really good point because like I said at the beginning I didn't mean I wasn't in any way saying big is bad and there are two ways of thinking I think in agriculture and in many other places which is like if a big operation a big farm or a big food company makes a tiny change then a lot of people would say that's better than a lot of small farms making big changes because they have such an outside impact right so those are just two different ways of thinking about things I don't necessarily you know it's a long conversation about which is right or kind of backing either side up but but I do think there's lots of examples of bigger operations doing things well and there's also just it doesn't have to be one or the other like there's mid-scale like there are farms there's like a farm in Massachusetts called kitchen girl farm that I think is amazing that is doing fruits and vegetables I don't know if they had like a hundred acres or something but they have regional production their their vegetables are in whole foods there but they're so they're they're not a small farm just selling at a farm stand or at a farmers market but they're not you know part of the central valley shipping their stuff all over the country either so there's there's a whole range of farms and production scales and it doesn't have to be like it has to be tiny or it has to be you know the highest example of what we want it to be I think there'll be a range of scales and sorry I know I'm like just I keep talking I know we're ending but I think one thing about scale too is that replicability is that the right word is really important so um if if you create a kind of a mid-scale operation that is is doing really great work I think one question that doesn't get it's always like well can it scale are we going to make be able to make it big enough to feed people but it doesn't necessarily have to scale it could be replicated so there could be a lot of something good rather than one thing doing everything right awesome thank you well we are at a time I want to apologize to the folks who we didn't get to their questions but thank you for such active listening today thank you Lisa for such an interesting presentation and thank you to everybody who's joined us today and I know many of you join throughout the summer for each of our talks in the lecture series so thank you so much if you missed any or want to go back and watch again they're all available to view online both on the vls youtube channel and at vermontlaw.edu backslash live under past events thanks again everyone have a great rest of your summer