Turning Conservation into Market Opportunities with USDA’s Advancing Markets for Producers (AMP) Initiative

This third analysis was produced by Robert Parkhurst and Rebecca Wright of Sierra View Solutions, in collaboration with AFT’s Water Initiative Director Michelle Perez and Research Scientist Jennifer Tillman.

Decisions on a Weekend Morning

Imagine it’s the weekend, and you are planning to build a new planter bed for your fall vegetables. Before you go to the hardware store, you need a good breakfast. You get out your Rainforest Alliance Certified Coffee, grass-fed milk, and scramble up some cage-free eggs with organic greens from your local farmers market. After breakfast, you head off to the hardware store and notice there are many options for supplies. You decide to buy wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council and head home to build those garden beds.

In this brief example of a weekend morning, you made choices to consume or use five different certified agricultural and forestry products. And you selected these products because each displayed marketing information signaling to you that they had social, environmental, or animal welfare attributes that appeal to you. While you are not familiar with the details of these labels (e.g., what farm or forestry practices are actually required by the certification, what outcomes are actually achieved, or if there is a 3rd party verification system in place, etc.) you assume smart, well-intentioned stakeholders, representing relevant interest groups (e.g., agricultural, forest, environment, animal welfare, etc.) collaborated to create a label that does right by people, the environment, and animals.

Previous and Current Analysis

Prior to this analysis, we’ve released two blog posts exploring (1) “why conservation practices matter” for the Advancing Markets for Producers (AMP) redesign of the Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities (PCSC) initiative and the federal budget and (2) how climate-smart conservation practices also address soil, water, air, plant, animal, and energy (SWAPA-E) resources concerns.

As a reminder, USDA identified 54 of its existing farm and forestry conservation practices as being “climate-smart” because they reduce greenhouse gas emissions or sequester carbon, in addition to what they may have been initially designed for: improving air quality, water quality, and water quantity; providing wildlife habitat; and increasing the productivity and resilience of crops and livestock. The 10 most popular climate-smart practices selected by the majority of PCSC projects are, in descending order: cover crops, nutrient management, residue and tillage management – no till and reduced till, prescribed grazing, conservation crop rotation, pasture and hay planting, tree/shrub establishment, soil carbon amendment (e.g., compost, biochar, etc.), and conservation cover.

In this third installment of our series, we analyze the labels, marketing channels, and environmental markets the PCSC projects proposed to pursue to attract customers who value farm and forest climate-smart conservation practices. We found that half the projects were planning to use labels to market their products, 90% discussed using marketing channels, and about a quarter were planning to use environmental markets.

As USDA selects farm conservation projects for the Advancing Markets for Producers (AMP) initiative, we hope our analysis sheds light on how some projects proposed labeling, marketing channels, or environmental markets as part of their PCSC agreements. We also hope the USDA finalizes negotiations with many PCSC projects so they can proceed under the new AMP initiative. These AMP projects will encourage producers, buyers, and consumers to do their part to produce, distribute and market, and use many more products that have an improved environmental footprint.

Background

The AMP initiative builds on the work from the PCSC initiative, whose priorities included:

• Increasing markets for climate-smart commodities,

• Testing and evaluating traceability through supply chains from production of commodities to delivery to the consumer,

• Understanding the market advantages for a variety of farm types implementing new conservation practices,

• Empowering farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners to implement new markets and practices, and

• Developing additional public-private partnerships to foster and develop new markets.

In January 2025, the PCSC was composed of 135 projects from all 50 states as well as several Native American tribes and U.S. territories and over 1,000 partners. Following a redaction of sensitive information, the agreements between each project and USDA were posted on USDA’s website and, in all, 115 of these agreements have been publicly available. The first of these projects started operating in February of 2023 and, before projects were terminated on April 14, 2025, they had enrolled 21,000 farms and more than 5.2 million acres (USDA Summary Report, September 2024). We can learn a significant amount about the markets these projects were developing from these agreements.

Our Process

All agreements were required to contain “a plan to develop and expand markets.” We reviewed this section of each agreement, which was often several pages long, and summarized the key information with a focus on three market elements: the labels under consideration, the marketing channels used, and the environmental markets in which the products or their associated environmental benefits would be sold. When we could, we differentiated between existing and new labels, channels, and markets. Note that we did not distinguish between labels backed by certification standards developed and agreed to by multi-stakeholder collaboratives, and labels that do not have such a foundation.

For marketing channels, we used the definition of the “people, organizations, and activities necessary to transfer the ownership of goods from the point of production to the point of consumption”. We intended to categorize the type of market channel that was planned using the PCSC Data Dictionary, which was published by USDA in February 2023. The Dictionary contains all the data elements that projects were required to collect periodically. While the Data Dictionary listed 12 marketing channels, because it was published after the initial drafting of the proposals and subsequent agreements by the projects, there was not always a good fit between the categories in the Data Dictionary and the marketing plan in the agreement. Therefore, we prioritized our analysis on the following seven categories (listed in alphabetical order), which better reflected the information we found:

• Biofuel Refineries
• Brands and Retail
• Direct to Consumer (including farmers markets and community supported agriculture)
• Direct to Institution
• Distributor
• Food Hubs*
• Wholesale

(Food hubs bring farmers and suppliers together, with 81% of food hubs focusing on increasing opportunities for local farms and allowing smaller producers to pool their products and fulfill larger contracts. Learn more about food hubs).

What we found

Labels

Of the 115 contracts reviewed, 56, or just about half (49%), planned to use labels to differentiate their commodities from others. Of the label-focused projects, 39 or most of them (70%) were working to implement a new label while 17 (30%) planned to use existing labels.

For the new label projects, 26 of the 39 intended to include the term “climate” in the name of their new label. Five had label names that did not mention climate-smart, instead using terms such as “agroforestry produced”, “ultimate beef”, and “regenerative agriculture”. Another eight projects listed their label as “to be determined” or did not provide more details.

For the projects planning to use existing labels, 5 of the 17 planned to use the USDA Organic label, and some mentioned interest in more than one label. Note that two of the 17 PCSC projects didn't name the existing labels they would use. A complete list of the 13 existing labels planned for use by 15 PCSC projects is in the table below. See that more than half of them use the word “regenerative” in their label name or description.

It’s important to note that most of these labels were created in the past six years, and many of the labels are still in their pilot phase. And, depending on which “climate-smart practices” they encourage producers to adopt (which can be hard to find on their websites), they likely will offer soil, water, air, plant, animal, and energy (SWAPA-E) benefits as well as climate benefits.

Marketing Channels

About 90% (103 of 115 projects) of the project agreements had information on the type of marketing channel they planned to use while 10% of projects did not provide sufficient details.

Of the eight Data Dictionary marketing channels that we used for classification, the most commonly identified marketing channels was brands and retailers, which was mentioned by 47 (41%) projects. While the names of actual brands and retailers were not disclosed in most of the agreements, 11 (9%) PCSC projects name-dropped the following regional brands and retailers: Fareway Food Stores, Jungle Jim’s, Tscuela de Café y Baristas de Puerto Rico, and the following national brands and retailers: Anheuser Busch, Campbell’s, Costco, Del Monte, Driscoll's, General Mills, Kroger, Mars, Organic Valley, PepsiCo, Target, Unilever, Walmart, and Whole Foods.  

About a quarter of the projects (26%) said they would market directly to consumers. Examples of the Direct-to-Consumer marketing channel that were mentioned include farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture (CSA’s), online sales, U-pick events, and cultural festivals.

Slightly more than 12% planned to include wholesalers as one of the marketing channels for their climate-smart products though none of the projects listed examples of wholesalers with whom they would partner. However, we did find the mention of the following companies that can be regarded as wholesalers: Cargill, Drax, and Heartwood Biomass.

After wholesalers, the marketing channel mentioned by 6% of the projects included distributors (no distributors were specifically called out in the PCSC agreements), and institutions (examples mentioned by the projects include: hospitals, childcare centers, senior services agencies, schools, universities).

At the bottom of marketing channels were sales to biofuel refineries (4%) (such as Kansas Ethanol, LLC and ExxonMobil) and food hubs (3%), such as The Black Belt Marketing and Innovation Center in Selma, AL and the North Valley Food Hub in Chico, CA.

Environmental Markets

Environmental markets were the least referenced approach to market climate-smart commodities by PCSC projects. A fifth (20%) or 24 of the 115 projects planned to use new or existing environmental markets to sell the environmental benefits of the climate-smart practices implemented by the project. Though no specific markets were named, the most common generic market term cited by 8 projects, was an offset or voluntary carbon market, and another 7 projects planned to sell to inset or Scope 3 programs. Six projects mentioned selling climate-smart commodities into the transportation fuel markets and did name the California Low Carbon Fuels Standard and companies like ExxonMobil, Pratt Energy, or Kansas Ethanol. A few organizations mentioned institutions like Finite Carbon or IndigoAg, which develop credits for environmental markets.

To help farmers evaluate environmental markets, we assembled a list of 10 questions farmers may want to ask when considering participation.

The environmental markets mentioned above have many similarities, for example each requires an established set of accounting rules for the quantification of environmental benefits. However, there are significant differences around concepts of additionality and verification that make each of these markets or programs unique. Below are descriptions of four main types of ag-related environmental markets and a few examples we chose to highlight within each.

1. Voluntary Carbon Offset Markets – Over nearly 30 years, more than a dozen agricultural and forestry carbon offset programs (such as Agoro Carbon Alliance and CIBO Technologies) and 4 offset registries or exchanges (such as the American Carbon Registry and Gold Standard) have been created. These programs offer an array of options for producers to voluntarily generate credits for companies and individuals to purchase. The methodologies include practices that credit GHG emissions from manure management, use of feed additives, soil carbon sequestration, and grassland preservation.

2. Regulatory Carbon Offset Markets – There are currently four compliance offsets markets operating in the United States. They are California’s Cap-and-Trade Program, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in the northeast, the Washington Cap-and-Invest Program, and the International Civil Aviation Organization’s Carbon Offset and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA). Each of these programs offers opportunities for producers throughout the United States to implement practices that reduce GHG emissions and generate credits that can be sold to companies that must comply with requirements in one of these markets.

3. Renewable Fuels Markets – For nearly 20 years, there have been markets for alternative transportation fuels derived from agricultural feedstocks. These markets have continued to expand and now include California, Oregon, Washington, and New Mexico. Beyond ground-based transportation, the United Nations Sustainable Aviation Fuel Program also supports these efforts. These markets credit fuels based on the carbon intensity of the feedstocks that are used to generate the fuels. The lower the carbon intensity of the feedstocks — i.e., feedstocks grown using climate-smart conservation practices — the more credits are generated.

4. Scope 3 Company Programs – Many food and beverage companies have adopted goals to reduce their indirect GHG emissions associated with the farm and forest raw materials they use to manufacture their products. To do so, many companies have created their Scope 3, supply shed, or insetting programs to encourage adoption of regenerative practices. In addition, many companies have formed multi-stakeholder programs such as the Ecosystem Services Market Consortium or the Value Change Initiative. Some of these programs have more flexible rules around concepts of additionality and verification and can be less transparent than others.

Takeaways

Projects that were part of the PCSC initiative aimed to communicate specific environmentally related attributes about their climate-smart commodities through labels, marketing channels, or environmental markets. In our analysis of the 115 publicly available agreements, we found the following:

Half the projects were planning to use labels to market their products.

• Twenty-six projects (23%) planned to develop new labels that included the term “climate-smart.” This is likely because many projects expected the USDA Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative to support the development of labels that used the term or concept of climate-smart.

• USDA’s Organic label was the most frequently cited existing label (5 projects or 4% of all projects).

Almost all (90%) projects mentioned a marketing channel they planned to use to market their products.

• Selling to brands and retailers was the focus of 41% of projects, followed by 25% that planned to market directly to consumers.

Just a fifth of the projects planned to use environmental markets to market their products.

As the USDA considers how to implement the AMP initiative, we encourage the agency to build on the work of the over 1,000 farm, forest, and conservation PCSC project partners to increase demand for and supply of products grown with conservation practices that offer multiple environmental benefits. That way, we hope there will be more label options to choose from that are credible and transparent when shopping at the grocery or hardware store, allowing you to show your support for farm and forest practices and outcomes that matter to you.