In November, the US Department of Agriculture approved a program that will open a path for beef producers to market their meat as low-carbon. Producers who can prove that their cattle are raised in a way that emits 10 percent less greenhouse gases than an industry baseline can qualify for the certification scheme, which is run by a private company called Low Carbon Beef.

A few weeks ago, USDA climate adviser Robert Bonnie used a variant of “walk before you run” to describe the Biden administration goal of bipartisan support for climate mitigation in agriculture. On Monday, a sector-spanning coalition said the USDA “needs to crawl before it can walk” into a carbon bank that would help farmers adopt climate-smart practices. The Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance (FACA), a carbon bank advocate, said the USDA should lay the foundation for the climate bank by first setting up a series of pilot projects to identify fruitful avenues for future action. The alliance did not suggest how long the pilot projects would run but said they would aid the development of carbon markets and the direction of the carbon bank.

Producers could see three new revenue streams from climate mitigation, he said. They were income from carbon markets, from conversion of agricultural waste into products ranging from chemicals to fabrics, and capture of methane from manure for use as a renewable fuel.