A Closer Look at Yard Stick’s Climate-Smart Commodities Partners, Part 2
On September 14, 2022, the USDA announced 70 projects that will receive up to $2.8 billion combined in grants from its Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative. Yard Stick PBC was included as major partners in six successful project bids with $225 million in grants combined.
Part one of this series discusses the USDA initiative and the first two partners we’ve highlighted: Organic Valley and the Colorado Department of Agriculture. In this article we highlight two more exciting partners — Global Clean Energy Holdings and Gevo, Inc.
Climate-Smart Camelina, with Global Clean Energy Holdings
Global Clean Energy (GCE) is looking to unlock the power of camelina, a nonfood feedstock crop that holds great promise for low-carbon biofuels because it grows quickly, produces seeds high in oil content, and is already grown as a cover crop on fallow land by farmers.
The crop requires very little water, uses existing agricultural infrastructure and can be winter-seeded, so GCE sees it as a great potential revenue source for farmers when fields would normally lay fallow.
The biodiesel produced from camelina is also much more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels. According to GCE’s website, “renewable diesel and other renewable fuels produced with [GCE’s] proprietary camelina varieties have the potential to achieve a Net Zero or below CI score.”
GCE was selected for a grant up to $30 million by the USDA, and is expected to run in 10 states and tribal lands. Here’s the project description:
This large-scale pilot project aims to measure and validate the climate-smart advantages of camelina sativa (L.) in both rotational and winter cover crop production systems and build associate climate-smart biofuels markets. The project will accelerate farmer adoption of camelina as a non-food crop grown on idle acres to produce more plant-based feedstock for renewable biofuels and chemicals with low carbon intensity and no land-use change while increasing carbon capture in the soil.
In the press release announcing the grant, GCE CEO Richard Palmer said, “Camelina is a nonfood crop grown on fallow land between traditional crop cycles so as not to contribute to land use change, while producing ultra-low carbon renewable fuels that act as a drop-in replacement for their petroleum-based alternatives. This funding from the USDA will help us accelerate farmer adoption of camelina, which will improve soil conditions on existing farmland and help reduce the negative impacts of climate change.”
Climate-Smart Farm-to-Flight Program, with Gevo
Gevo is focusing on using low-carbon intensity corn to create sustainable aviation fuel, natural gas, plastics and other products currently created by fossil fuels. The company is setting its sights on eliminating or even creating negative carbon dioxide emissions across the carbon cycle.
At the core of this effort is sustainable farming. The company has been practicing low- or no-till farming and soil carbon sequestration around its Luverne, Minnesota facility for several years, and in 2021 announced its Net Zero projects to produce sustainable fuels with a net-zero greenhouse gas footprint across the entire lifecycle, based on the Argonne National Laboratory’s GREET model.
The USDA awarded a grant to Gevo for up to $30 million under the Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities, and will kick off in four states and tribal lands. Here’s the project description:
The project aims to create critical structural climate-smart market incentives for low carbon-intensity corn as well as to accelerate the production of sustainable aviation fuel to reduce the sector’s dependency on fossil-based fuel. This project includes an immediate market opportunity to sell climate- smart, low-climate-impact corn.
In order to reach its goals for both the CSC grant and its own Net Zero projects, Gevo has made MRV a focus in its operations. The tip of that spear is measuring soil organic carbon as accurately and efficiently as possible, which is why they’ve partnered with Yard Stick. They’re also bringing in other partners like Verity Tracking, a block-chain enabled platform for carbon tracking, to focus on “the importance of immutable tracking and tracing of carbon-intensity scores beginning at the farm level, through the production of SAF, all the way to the purchase by an airline,” according to Gevo’s website.
