BISMARCK — Ranchers across North Dakota are increasingly looking to add value to the cattle they raise.
Some do that through marketing their beef as grass-finished, or minimizing the use of antibiotics and hormones. Others look to niche markets by using heritage breeds or seeking organic certifications. Still more are looking to carbon credits and other sustainable practices to add value to their livestock and land, and two tip-of-the-spear projects in North Dakota may help them achieve this goal.
Through using rotational, managed grazing practices on a ranch near McKenzie, North Dakota, over the past two years, scientist Rebecca Phillips and her ranch partner Lewis Heaton were able to show an increased amount of carbon storage in the soil at the working cattle ranch.
Rates of storage were higher compared to standard grazing techniques, potentially generating carbon credits that can later be sold on carbon markets.
A carbon credit is a unit signifying one metric ton of carbon dioxide that is not getting into the atmosphere by being captured or reduced through an implemented process. For a coal-fired power plant, that means capturing it before it comes out the stack. For these ranchland projects, it means keeping more CO2 in the ground than standard grazing practices would.
Precise numbers for carbon sequestered on Heaton’s 300-acre ranch with 150 cow-calf pairs haven’t been finalized as Phillips still needs to have her research go through a peer-review process, she said.
“The buyers are all asking him about our numbers because this project represents the first experimental evidence of the annual net ecosystem carbon balance for cell-grazed pastures in production,” Phillips said of the growing interest in the project.
Heaton said he already has offers from three different companies to buy carbon credits generated by the project, but said it will take time for both this type of carbon credit generation and the voluntary carbon market itself to mature to really make it viable.
“The voluntary carbon market is not very high right now, per metric ton, but it’ll probably come around in time once we understand a little more,” Heaton said. “There’s always been a question about the ability of rangeland soil to store carbon long-term, and that’s what this study would help.”
A big factor will be future demand for carbon credits, with scenarios widely divergent on what prices will look like in 2050.
In 2024, Bloomberg New Energy Finance projected that by 2050, carbon credits could balloon to $238 per metric ton on the high end, or stagnate at just $14 on the low.
A new project Phillips is now launching on her own land near Hazelton, North Dakota, aims to duplicate what was learned in McKenzie. The hope is to solidify data backing the practices and their potential for storing more carbon in the soils and grasses under the hooves of cattle.
Using rotational, managed grazing practices means moving cattle from one paddock to another throughout the year so they don’t overgraze on a particular spot. This allows the grasses and other plants to both diversify and recover.
“If you leave the animals and don’t manage them in any way and let them graze as much as they want, they tend to graze out their favorite species,” Phillips said during a visit to her project near Hazelton. “That makes it harder for that pasture to come back and recover that season before winter.”
Michael Standaert / North Dakota News Cooperative
Recovery and increased diversity lead to greater carbon sequestration, particularly later in the season after plants have a chance to grow back, she said.
While grazers like cattle remove carbon as they eat, the rotational, managed grazing practices increase the carbon input into the soil compared to a more hands-off approach, she said.
“This is more of the bison roaming sort of idea where bison would come in and graze intensively, then the whole herd would move on, keep going and going, and then that would give the grass a chance to recover,” she said.
Those roaming bison were once a key part of the ecosystem across the Great Plains and Midwest, feeding off grasses that helped lay the groundwork for the rich, biodiverse soils and grasses in these regions.
Measuring the impact of the projects requires sophisticated and expensive equipment for continuous data gathering, making it paramount that carbon pricing is eventually robust enough to entice ranchers and partners to gather data from these practices.
Getting that data piece right is extremely important, Phillips said. She sees interest growing from other ranchers, but also sees hesitation because of all the unknowns and complications.
“What we’re trying to do is give them the straight story, and one that’s not coming from someone that wants to buy or sell them anything,” Phillips said. “We want to give them the information to take with them.”
An eye to increasing value
That said, there are other impacts from the projects besides generating carbon credits that also bring value, Heaton said.
One thing is the increased productivity of the land from rotating cattle, he said, allowing ranchers to run more animals on the land.
“You are able to increase your productivity quite a bit, in addition to building your soil organic matter and sequestering the carbon,” Heaton said. “It’s not a fast process, but after a few years, you really notice it. You’ve got a lot better drought resistance. Your water infiltration is quite a bit better. You get a lot more use out of what nature has when you do that.”
Another impact he’s seen is increased cattle health.
“The health benefits are quite a bit better when you rotate a lot and move from paddock to paddock,” he said.
Heaton said he’s seen growing interest from other ranchers, but these practices take a bit of a learning curve as well as more infrastructure with pastures and water systems that allow for the rotation.
There are also other opportunities to leverage better conservation practices through rotational grazing and market beef in a myriad of ways besides just grass-fed or grass-finished, which is growing in consumer awareness.
The increased diversity of grasses and native plants, for instance, can attract more birds and more pollinators.
The National Audubon Society has certification labeling for “bird-friendly beef,” which could be a spin-off possibility from these projects.
“You get the full growth back there again and it makes for great nesting cover for birds and other wildlife until the following spring,” Heaton said.
“I think with just about all of our places we have honey bees on them, and they prefer that kind of rotational system because their honey production is really good,” he added, noting that he sees more varied stages of blooming throughout the seasons now.
Kalie Rider, a nutritionist who lives on her brother’s regenerative ranch near Trenton, North Dakota, said she also sees Phillips research as a “necessary way forward” to show that cows are part of the carbon cycle and that ruminants are meant to be on the land.
“The opposite is what’s being pushed right now in the mainstream media and with certain policies that say we need to get cows off the land,” she said. “But it’s one of those things where cows can degrade land or they can make it epically better, and we need those distinctions being made.”
For the past decade, Rider has also worked with the North Dakota Grazing Lands Coalition and given talks about the nexus between cattle health and human health and the growing consumer interest in that.
Projects like what Phillips is developing that add layers of value — carbon sequestration, soil health, species diversity, bird and pollinator increases, increased productivity — all potentially create a higher nutritional profile for the beef produced on that land.
“If we can prove the value that’s added from the human health side, when our human health across the world is deteriorating, and prove that grass-fed ruminant animals are a huge benefit to human health, then it all makes sense, and it’s all just working with nature to let nature do its thing,” Rider said. “We eat the cows that are managed correctly, and we reap the health benefits.”
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