Small and medium size farmers in the United States have gone through decades of economic changes that have left them with little control over how value is generated on their farms. With the exception of all the financial risks associated with farming and any land they may own, farmers have little control over the value or use of inputs, seeds, animals, and everything else on their farms. This dissertation finds that even land management decisions are heavily influenced by a farmer’s economic position relative to larger market forces. Farmers’ lack of control over implementing farm stewardship practices becomes clear through analysis of grain farmers involvement in greenhouse gas (GHG) markets.
Carbon offsets derived from no-till agriculture are one of several practices to mitigate GHG emissions on the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). CCX is a voluntary cap-and-trade market in the United States, where there is little political pressure to regulate GHGs. To generate offsets using environmental markets both carbon and the practices to sequester carbon are abstracted. This abstraction hides the difficulty in commodifying carbon due to its fluid biophysical properties, which allow it to move in and out of sequestration easily. This abstraction also hides that although farmers asked to be part of CCX, it represents the type of land management program that constrains farmers’ ability to implement land management practices ideal for their situation. Farmers are constrained in part out of a concern for additionality, which is an accounting metric to address concerns over the legitimacy of credits. To meet the new requirement both the action taken to sequester carbon and the timing of that action are standardized, which creates tension between additionality and on-farm stewardship in voluntary GHG markets.
This tension also highlights the complicated relationship farmers have between their farms and the market. At the same time farmers are seeking multifunctional payments for stewardship, those stewardship options are constrained by the additionality metric and by a lack of financing for stewardship options other than those approved by the United States Department of Agriculture. Additionality is constraining because farmers who wish to be compensated for their on-farm stewardship must make sure their actions are one of a few pre-selected land management options, and are done only after a program is implemented. These constraints contradict the claim that markets lead to innovation and highlight the exploitation of those who generate credits for environmental markets.
Farmer participation in voluntary GHG markets underscores the ways in which land management decisions are controlled off farm. Despite the fact that farmers get paid for these actions, this control over stewardship is similar to the control multinational corporations have over seeds and other inputs for which farmers pay. Stewardship decisions are taken out of the hands of farmers and placed into the hands of larger market forces. Understanding the ways in which these markets are exploitive should be taken into account to create less exploitive policies, especially given that the U.S. has no official GHG mitigation policy.