Expanding Opportunities for Evidence-Based, Climate-Smart Grassfed Beef by Enhancing Income Streams through Retail Food Channels and Carbon Markets for a Producer Network Spanning the Rockies to NE US

This project aims to expand the climate-smart regenerative grassfed beef market with market incentives for producers to address the regenerative cost differential, product promotion activities to increase demand at the higher premium-price, and participation in a carbon-credit project to pay producers for carbon sequestration ecosystem services. The project would employ a model-based approach to capture the soil carbon dynamics of grazing practices, which requires calibration with locality-specific measurements of precipitation, temperature, soil, vegetation, etc. for statistical validity and high confidence level. The project plans to develop a simple, low-cost program for measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MMRV) that farmers can easily and inexpensively administer to quantify management impacts on soil and biomass C stocks and GHG emissions for grazing land systems and climate-smart beef, employing on-the-ground measurement of soil carbon stocks, producer-sourced management information, and process-based models of grazing land carbon dynamics.