Managing Sampling Risk to Deliver Verifiable Soil Carbon Credits

Share on social media

White Paper 

Background

The integrity of a carbon credit depends on the accuracy of the measurement used to create it. For a soil carbon credit, that measurement begins in the field, with soil samples collected across a wide geography and range of conditions.

Soil sampling looks straightforward: pull a core, send it to a lab. Doing it thoroughly, scientifically, and at scale, across dozens of states and hundreds of operations, is a different challenge. Much of the difficulty discussed in the paper lives in access, timing, safety, and consistency, and how those are managed determines whether the resulting data can be trusted.

Managing the Risk in the Field

Sampling at scale carries challenges that have to be planned for and worked through before a single core is pulled. These are the four most common risks our sampling team run into while in the field. 

  • Communication ensures our team has reliable access to fields. Reaching the right fields at the right time, across changing schedules and many partners, keeps the work transparent and predictable.

  • Weather forecasting keeps the work on schedule. Planning across multiple geographies means tracking several forecasts at once and laying out contingency plans for the short windows before planting and after harvest.

  • Drought and wildfire mapping protects crews and keeps the schedule moving. Scheduling high-risk areas before or after their drought and fire windows keeps people safe and the work on track.

  • Standardization and QA/QC hold the whole system together. Shared methods and a set of non-negotiables mean every core is collected and recorded the same way, and quality control run in near real time catches issues early, which is what lets a third party trust the inputs.

 

Dust Storm Washington Picture Fall 2024
Sampling halted by an incoming dust storm. Washington, Fall 2024.

Download the full paper below to keep reading.

Download Soil Sampling White Paper

Share on social media

John Pullis
John Pullis
Senior Agronomist, Soil Sampling Lead, CCA
Michigan’s diverse agriculture influenced John’s lifelong love for farming—from specialty crops like cherries, apples, grapes, potatoes, pickling cucumbers, and sugarbeets—to commodity crops like corn, soybeans and wheat. He earned an M.S. in Soil Science from South Dakota State University and a B.S. in Chemistry from Oakland University. John’s areas of expertise are soil fertility, nitrogen management, soil sampling and precision agriculture. He has more than 15 years of experience working in agriculture, including a decade’s worth of retail agriculture experience, a stint in manure and environmental management research for USDA-ARS and serving as an ag agent (specializing in potato and dairy & livestock production, and GAP third-party food safety audit preparation for growers throughout the state) at Michigan State University Extension. John thrives on the constant evolution and development of the agriculture industry. John’s greatest priority is harnessing the power and unique dimensions of soils to provide sufficient, diverse food for current and future generations to come.
More about John Pullis

You might be interested in

Managing Sampling Risk to Deliver Verifiable Soil Carbon Credits

Regenerative Agriculture & Soil Carbon Measurement and Modeling

The Accuracy of Agoro Carbon’s Soil Organic Carbon Measurement

Talk To An Agronomist Calculate Your Carbon Potential
}