199 “If you just let a pasture grow up and it gets harvested one time, there’s less carbon being sequestered than if it’s continually grazed and regrowing,” Marty said. The imagery insights help identify and monitor carbon sequestration capacity related to grazing, which could be a future source of revenue in a practice known as carbon farming. In addition to putting actionable tools in the hands of dairy farmers and helping their grazing systems be more efficient and effective, optimizing carbon capture on working lands holds great promise to return more value from the effort. This is part of a larger effort to facilitate climate smart farming across the cooperative. Organic Valley was selected for an approximately $25 million grant from the US Department of Agriculture to establish and measure on-farm practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The funds will finance 1,200 new carbon reduction and removal projects on approximately 500 Organic Valley member farms over the next five years, and these projects will be monitored and analyzed to report on progress. “Sustainability and carbon sequestration are things we should all be working on,” Marty said. “We’re happy to discuss what we do, it’s in our cooperative mentality. We look forward to meeting and collaborating with others in this space.” Sustainability The satellite-derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) image, left, quantifies vegetation health, with the healthiest plants shown in green, because they reflect green and near infrared light but absorb more red and blue light. The red-edge band, right, highlights stress and disease with great sensitivity to catch trends before lasting damage is done. Image courtesy of Organic Valley. “It’s a volatile supply and demand problem, so we’re doing lots of vehicle routing, looking at volumes.” Grazing is a fundamental pillar in organic dairying. With regular refinement to monitoring and measuring efforts, Organic Valley is helping farmers innovate and steward the planet. One of its next aims is to quantify the amount of carbon that’s being sequestered through rotational activity and perennial pasture systems.
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