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Dan Hooks isn’t one to take chances with his rice crop, but that hasn’t stopped him from being a pioneer of sorts.
The Arkansas native is one of a small group of rice farmers in the United States who are changing the way they grow their crops to cut back on methane emissions from their fields. In exchange, they will be eligible for the first-ever carbon credits for crops through California’s cap-and-trade program.
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. . . supporters of the carbon credits like Robert Parkhurst, director of agriculture greenhouse gas markets for the nonprofit group Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), say rice is just the beginning. In the coming years, a rising number of U.S. growers will likely become eligible for adopting practices that both cut emissions and help farmers use resources like water and fertilizer more efficiently, he said.
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But for Bruce Linquist, an assistant cooperative extension specialist at the University of California, Davis, the move to gain credits for methane reductions from rice is a bit ahead of the science.
To date, much soil methane research has been on small plots of half an acre to an acre where scientists have been able to measure how a certain level of soil moisture correlates to emissions. . .
Because researchers don’t yet have a reliable way to quantify methane emissions at a field level, Linquist said he has been critical of the efforts to generate carbon credits for methane, at least right now.
Read full, original post: Rice growers on the front lines of U.S. carbon markets
