Sponsors (6)
Introduced August 1, 2025 by Eric Sorensen · Last progress August 1, 2025
The bill creates standardized measurement methods, datasets, tools, funding, and assistance to help farmers, researchers, and government better quantify and manage soil carbon — but it also creates costs, equity and privacy risks for producers and may require more funding or tradeoffs to implement fairly and effectively.
Farmers, ranchers, researchers, and USDA get standardized soil‑carbon measurement methods, interoperable data standards, and a national dataset and modeling tools, improving monitoring, research, transparency, and the potential for verifiable carbon accounting.
Socially disadvantaged producers and other landowners gain multilingual, digital and analog technical assistance and user-friendly tools to measure and report soil carbon, lowering access barriers to participation.
The bill authorizes dedicated federal funding for research, demonstrations, datasets, and a modeling/decision tool—supporting method development, on‑farm trials, dataset creation, and tool maintenance/updating.
Measuring, reporting, and complying with standardized MRV protocols can create extra time, equipment, and administrative costs that disproportionately burden small and mid‑size producers.
Despite published safeguards, collecting and sharing farm data (including partnerships with private companies or aggregated reporting) may raise privacy, proprietary, and market‑impact concerns for participating landowners.
Some authorized funding levels (e.g., modest yearly amounts in a few programs) may be insufficient for comprehensive nationwide implementation, risking uneven technical assistance, delayed updates, or lower model/data quality.
Based on analysis of 6 sections of legislative text.
Creates a national soil carbon inventory, standardizes direct soil carbon measurement, funds demonstrations and MRV research, and builds a predictive modeling tool for soil carbon and greenhouse gases.
Creates national programs to measure, monitor, and model soil carbon and related greenhouse gases on U.S. cropland, rangeland, pasture, and wetlands. It directs USDA to develop a standardized, interoperable methodology for directly measuring soil carbon, set up a national soil carbon inventory of repeat sampling sites with five‑year reporting, fund on‑farm demonstration projects and research priorities on measurement/reporting/verification, and build a user‑friendly predictive modeling tool that estimates impacts of land management on soil carbon, methane, nitrous oxide, and atmospheric carbon. Supports voluntary reporting, requires owner consent and privacy protections for sampling, directs multilingual technical assistance, mandates periodic updates and reporting to Congress, and authorizes modest annual funding to carry out measurement methodology and modeling work.