Carbon credits
Carbon credit farming
Excerpts from The Soil Grab Greenwashing by Agribusiness[1]:
"The corporate interest in carbon farming extends beyond simply greenwashing industrial agriculture or offsetting emissions. It provides a powerful incentive to draw farmers into the digital platforms that agribusiness corporations and big tech companies are jointly developing to influence farmers on their choice of inputs and farming practices."
"And then, there is the issue of the greenhouse gases these carbon credit farming programmes generate. Nearly all the programmes focus narrowly on quantifying carbon sequestered in the soil and do not consider the overall emissions that industrial farming produces. They do not factor in the amount of chemical inputs a farm applies or the amount of fossil fuels burnt running tractors and other machinery, or the increased emissions that can result from the first years of transition to no-till.[16]They do not account for the emissions produced by their remote verification systems either– from the energy needed to store the data these systems generate to the aeroplanes or satellites they use to monitor farms. And they are based on tweaks to a model of industrial agriculture that depends heavily on chemical inputs and that supplies a hugely wasteful and polluting corporate food system.[17]"
The article addresses Cargill and Microsoft explicitly and references other corporate players in citations.