Truterra Eyes a Path For Every Farmer, Transformation to Carbon Insets

Truterra’s goal is to help farmers future-proof their business by providing carbon removals, climate-smart commodities and other ways for them to be rewarded for their stewardship. As such, the business is launching its sustainability services with a wider funnel to catch farmers with various offers and widening beyond a sole focus on carbon offsets. 

“We want to offer farmers a suite of opportunities,” says Tom Ryan the president of Truterra. “They aren’t all in the same spot with their sustainability journey—one size doesn’t fit all. And because of that we will have a phased approach throughout the year.” 

For its 2022 carbon program, Truterra is expected to pay $4.5 million in cash payments to 220 participating farmers for sequestering 237,000 tonnes of carbon. That was the second year for its program, and the business has also announced sign ups through February for the 2023 enrollment. Farmers can earn between $15 to $30 per tonne of new carbon based on eligible practice changes made in the past four years.  

Ryan says January/February is a becoming a key timeframe to get farmers signed up for carbon programs, and it’s a great time for Truterra-aligned  retailers, of which there are 54 in the network today, to talk to farmers about conservation agronomy.  

“We’ve introduced a Soil Health Assessment as part of our sustainability services , which is an on ramp for growers who are starting to think about how to participate in this space,” Ryan says. “It helps set a baseline for farmers across their fields, compare those fields to each other, and do benchmarking against other farms,” he says. 

In addition, the goal of the market access program is to eliminate barriers to entry for carbon programs (namely data) while also helping farmers with some of the risk in adopting new regenerative practices. Farmers can potentially receive $2/acre as part of market access, and then can also participate in the WinField United Advanced Acre Rx prescription plan, which has a component to provide a warranty to offset some of the risk in practice change implementation. 

Additionally, Truterra is working on a program to be launched later in 2023 for long term practitioners. 

2023 Is A Turning Point

Ryan says this will be a transformational year for two reasons: the groundswell of efforts with USDA Climate Smart grants and a shifting focus to carbon insets. 

“Up to today, the focus has been on the offset market. And we’ve had tremendous success. From the best we can tell, we have market leadership. We’ve paid $8 million to growers and sequestered 450,000 tonnes of carbon,” he says.

And while he sees a future where offsets will continue to be offered, he describes offsets as transactional and insets as transformational. 

To differentiate insets and offsets, insets reduce emissions on the farm in how the grain was grown, while offsets compensate for emissions elsewhere. 

Truterra will announce official opportunities to reduce a company’s carbon footprint within their value chain in 2024 by the end of 2023.  

With both insets and Climate Smart Commodities, Ryan says collaboration is key to success in realizing the opportunities and executing on them. 

In all of this Ryan says the goals of Truterra are centered on, “expanding the opportunity for growers—we want to make sure we can quantify the benefit, and monetize it in ROI, yield and sustainability benefits.”
The future for Truterra includes building out more key performance indicators on nitrogen utilization, agronomic optimization as well as additionality. 

And Ryan says more opportunities specific to livestock are in development.