Climate FieldView underpins Bayer carbon program

MONMOUTH, Ill. — With the help of modern technology, Bayer is dipping a toe into the waters — or more accurately, the soil, of carbon sequestration and carbon markets.

The company ventured into the carbon market space last fall with a pilot carbon program that gathered farmers interested in instituting carbon-capturing farming practices and being compensated for using those practices.

“We see this as a triple win,” said Chad Bilby, North America Commercial Innovation Experimentation Lead at Bayer Crop Science.

For everyone involved, the pilot program has been an ongoing learning process that stresses the use of digital technology — particularly the company’s Climate FieldView platform — to gather, store and analyze data surrounding carbon capture practices.

“We have a lot of data here and it’s helping us identify things like where’s the field located, because that has an impact on our carbon modeling. It’s really simple stuff that we can glean from FieldView, all with the consent of the farmers in sharing their information with us, that’s a choice they get to make. That’s where making this connectivity to the cloud and capturing this information, making it seamless, so all your information is in one place, is really important going forward,” Bilby said.

He said the company sees carbon markets and carbon sequestration as an opportunity for farmers to add value for on-farm practices that sequester carbon. It also offers ag companies, like Bayer, an opportunity to produce or to purchase credits to offset their carbon emissions.

“There is an additional revenue stream that could come out of this for farmers and the practices that they do, that turns into additional carbon sequestered. By being able to measure that and assess the amount that’s sequestered, there are companies — Bayer is one of them — that are very interested in meeting commitments so that we can be carbon neutral in the future,” he said.

The response to the pilot program, which was rolled out in August, was surprising.

“We had an end date for enrollment around the end of October. All of us were surprised by the interest and demand. We had to move the close date for sign-up up by two weeks because we started exceeding sign-ups versus what we had intended,” Bilby said.

He discussed the program during the Asgrow DeKalb central and northern Illinois virtual agronomy meeting, hosted from the Bayer Learning Center in Monmouth.

Bilby said the pilot program was the result of several years of research and work. The program was focused on corn and soybean farmers.

The program offered farmers a $10 per acre payment to adopt and carry through a season carbon-sequestering field practices including no-till, strip-till and cover crops. Farmers also needed to be using Climate FieldView.

“A lot of the data and information that was already in FieldView that farmers are using to help make decisions is the same type of data that helps feed into some of the carbon modeling so that we can be more accurate in our predictions of carbon sequestration and validate some of the practices that were done,” Bilby said.

He said that plans for the 2021 program are being finalized and that the company expects to have an enrollment period soon for farmers to sign up.