READ TIME: 2 minutes
By: Bin Peng, Ph.D, Lead HabiTerre Scientist

Grazing lands represent one of the largest opportunities—and most significant challenges—for climate change mitigation in agriculture. HabiTerre is proud to offer a new pilot to bring scientific rigor and scalability to measuring, reporting, and verifying (MRV) greenhouse gas (GHG) outcomes on managed grazing lands.

1. The Potential: Big Land, Big Emissions, and the Path to Lower Carbon Beef

The beef sector is a major source of GHG emissions. Livestock production contributes about 12-19.6 percent of global GHG emissions, with beef alone constituting 44 percent of that figure^1-4. The primary emissions from beef production systems include enteric methane (CH₄) (from the cattle’s digestive process), N₂O from manure and fertilized feed production, and CO₂ from soil organic carbon and land use change¹.

The sheer scale of grazing land underscores its importance for climate solutions. In the US, grazing land accounts for over 659 million acres and 29% of the total U.S. land area⁵. This expansive acreage provides significant potential for Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) sequestration and GHG emission reduction when managed sustainably. Improved management practices like Adaptive Multi-Paddock (AMP) grazing can potentially achieve a significant reduction in net GHG emissions. Quantifying this climate benefit is key to supporting sustainable beef with a lower carbon intensity.

2. The Challenge: Fragmented Solutions and Data Gaps

Accurately quantifying the full climate impact of grazing practices is notoriously challenging:

• Incomplete and Fragmented Solutions: Existing approaches are often incomplete, focusing on a single GHG component like SOC sequestration or enteric CH₄ emissions. A truly credible carbon outcome or beef emission factor calculation requires an integrated approach that can integrate all three soil-based GHGs: SOC change, soil CH₄, and N₂O emissions with other non-soil emissions and beef production for a life cycle analysis.
• Animals as “Nature’s Engineers”: The interaction between grazing animals and the environment is complex and dynamic. Representing the grazing impact on vegetation dynamics and manure deposition from cattle is critical for quantifying soil-based emissions.
• Data Scarcity Across Extensive Lands: Grazing systems cover large, extensive land areas, leading to significant data gaps that are costly to fill. Collecting a high density of physical soil samples for SOC change is often cost-prohibitive at large scale. Accurate quantification relies on site-specific inputs, but long-term data sources for vegetation and management practices are often lacking.

3. HabiTerre’s Solution: SYMFONI™ for End-to-End MRV

To overcome these barriers, HabiTerre is excited to pilot its advanced modeling and MRV platform, SYMFONI™, for grazing lands, built upon its great success over cropland. The system is purpose-built to quantify high-resolution GHG outcomes with scientific rigor and operational scale.

• Integrated GHG Quantification: SYMFONI utilizes the process-based Ecosys biogeochemical model to simulate the sub-daily flows of carbon, nitrogen, water, and energy, capturing the full scope of GHGs: SOC change, CH₄ production/oxidation, and N₂O fluxes. This delivers a comprehensive net GHG emission (t CO₂e/acre/year) for each paddock.
• Advanced Model-Data Fusion (MDF) and Remote Sensing: SYMFONI implements AI-based Model-Data Fusion (MDF) using ground-measured and/or remotely-sensed data as constraints to improve model accuracy and reduce uncertainty of quantification. Our advanced remote sensing capacity lowers data collection costs and enables program-scale deployment.
• Scalable and Auditable: The system’s architecture supports asynchronous simulation processing and programmatic delivery of results for use in carbon programs and Scope 3 accounting. It aligns with the requirements of the Climate Action Reserve’s Soil Enrichment Protocol (SEP) v1.1 for offsetting and Land Sector and Removals Guidance (LSRG) for Scope 3 accounting.

By integrating our advanced remote sensing, process-based agroecosystem modeling, and artificial intelligence capacities, HabiTerre is working towards  providing a scalable MRV solution for managed grazing lands. A key piece of this work will be our continued prioritization of collaboration, working with industry partners to optimize our services for a commercial offering in the near future.

To learn more about the SYMFONI grazing pilot or explore if you have a project that might be a fit, reach out to sales@habiterre.com.

About Bin Peng, Ph.D:

Dr. Bin Peng, leading scientist of HabiTerre, specializes in process-based modeling, remote sensing, and environmental data science. In addition to his role at HabiTerre, he is an assistant professor on the nexus of agriculture and environment at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the complexities of water, nutrient, and carbon cycles in agricultural landscapes and their connection to agricultural productivity and environmental sustainability. He utilizes field measurement, computational modeling (hydrological, cropping system, ecosystem, earth system), remote sensing, geospatial big data, model-data integration, and AI. Bin is passionate about developing innovative technologies for sustainable agri-food systems and environmental preservation amid land use intensification and climate change.

Sources

¹ FAO. 2023. Pathways towards lower emissions – A global assessment of the greenhouse gas emissions and mitigation options from livestock agrifood systems. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/cc9029en.

²https://foodandagricultureorganization.shinyapps.io/GLEAMV3_Public/

³ https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1634679/ 

⁴ https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environment/livestock-dont-contribute-14-5-of-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions 

⁵ https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2024/december/ers-data-series-tracks-major-uses-of-u-s-land-with-a-focus-on-agriculture