School of Sustainability

Sixty ranchers in the Southern Cone took their first carbon payment

The dateline is El Calafate, a wind-beaten town at the bottom of Argentine Patagonia, and the news is the kind that travels slowly in ranching country: money arrived. Sixty cattle producers across Argentina and Paraguay received a combined 1.2 million US dollars for carbon credits generated on their own pastures, the first payout from a regenerative livestock programme that has been running its first commercial cycle.

The mechanism matters less than the husbandry underneath it. Regenerative livestock programmes generally mean managing cattle so that pastures recover and soils hold more carbon, and that is what Ruuts, the platform running the scheme known as SARA, set out to measure. It aggregated the change across the participating ranches, had it audited, and in March Verra issued 209,244 verified credits under its VM0042 methodology for agricultural land. Some have since sold; the rest await buyers.

Do the division and the romance drains out, which is useful. The average came to 27 dollars per hectare for the producer - roughly 20,000 dollars per ranch if the split were even, which it will not have been, since ranches differ in size and in how much carbon their soils actually gained. On a Patagonian spread where a hectare of grass supports a fraction of an animal, 27 dollars is a modest line in the accounts, closer to a fencing budget than a fortune.

Yet the programme expects the disbursements to grow, and the first cycle has done something harder than raise money: it has put a verified, audited number on ranching practice. Sixty producers now have a paper trail showing their pastures sequestered carbon, and a buyer somewhere has paid for it. The second payment, when it comes, will land on land that is already better grassed than it was.

Regeneration International · Read the source