Bayer chose Northern Trust as one of the providers for the Bayer Carbon Program. Last year the bank launched the DLT based Northern Trust Carbon Ecosystem aiming to enhance the transparency of the carbon offsetting process, particularly for voluntary carbon credits.
Bayer is recording part of its carbon credit inventory on the platform and is using it to support clients adopting regenerative farming practices.
So far Bayer has retired several carbon credits owing to customers offsetting emissions.
“Bayer has a sizable volume of future vintages in the process of being verified, which will be made available to additional buyers,” said Cornelius Streit of Bayer Crop Science. “These future issuances, along with the current batch of credits listed on Northern Trust’s platform, make up one of the largest credit issuances of any regenerative agriculture project to date.”
One of Bayer’s programs is called ForGround, aiming to preserve soil quality. It promotes the no till practice because tilling can remove water from the soil, making it more sand like and capable of blowing away and causing erosion. It also encourages the use of cover crops, which improve soil health.
However, if farmers don’t till the soil and want to remove the cover crop for their primary crop, the quick solution is a herbicide. But the most common herbicides have side effects.
Some Spanish farmers accused Bayer of greenwashing because a Bayer executive suggested the use of the Glyphosate herbicide as part of regenerative farming.
Bayer acquired Monsanto in late 2018, a company infamously linked to the Roundup brand of Glyphosate. So far it has paid out at least $11 billion in legal settlements in the United States over allegations that Glyphosate caused cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) lists the herbicide as a probable human carcinogen.
