Regenerative Practices

Quick Guide for practices that increase soil organic carbon

Nori issues NRTs based on soil organic carbon stock changes (“SOCSC”)  between historic practices and recently adopted regenerative practices. While regenerative practices are important for many ecosystem services benefits (e.g. improved water quality, reduced erosion, improved weed management, etc), Nori is currently focused only on practices that increase SOC.  Therefore, certain regenerative practices – such as a reduction in synthetic fertilizer, or organic farming with increased tillage passes – do not have a measurable difference in increasing SOC in the process based model used by Nori. 

Additionally, because NRTs are issued based on the change in SOC from old to new practices, additional regenerative agricultural practices may not result in large enough incremental carbon sequestration when there has been high carbon sequestration in historic management (also known as the baseline), this may result in low or negative NRT projections.  In general, the less disturbed the soil and the more plant biomass left on the soil, the more carbon sequestration takes place on that piece of land. 

Below is a limited list of agronomic practices that are highly effective in sequestering carbon in the soil. These practices are important in both your baseline and future switches to help understand the project’s potential SOC gain: