Opinion: Soil health is common ground — let’s build on it to revitalize American ranching

Something changes when we stop talking about climate as an ideology and start talking about America’s grasslands and soil health as one of our most important and undervalued assets.

The politics disappear, and the conversation gets practical very quickly.

I have seen this firsthand in conversations with people as far apart politically as Al Gore and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They may disagree on plenty, but when the conversation shifts to working land, cattle, drought, soil health and the future of rural America, the partisan friction starts to fall away.

That is where a rare bipartisan opportunity comes into focus: how do we help ranchers unlock the value of America’s 655 million acres of grazing land while protecting the working lands our country depends on?

Those acres are not marginal, yet they are often overlooked. They are the foundation of the American cattle industry and our rural economy. Yet for too long, the public conversation has treated livestock and ranching on one side and conservation and climate on the other.

If we invest in grazing practices that improve ranch productivity by rebuilding soil organic carbon, we can improve water retention, restore plant diversity, support biodiversity, store carbon underground, and help make ranchers more profitable.

Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. When grasslands are poorly managed, the damage is both economic and ecological. Degraded soils have less carbon and hold less water. Less water means less grass. Less grass means fewer cattle per acre, more supplemental feed, higher costs, and more pressure on ranching families, sometimes forcing the difficult decision to sell the ranch. Drought and degraded soil do not care whether a county voted red or blue.

At Grassroots Carbon, we work with ranchers to implement and scale regenerative grazing practices that help their operations become more productive, profitable and resilient. While the environmental outcomes are real and measurable, they are not separate from the business case. More grass means more flexibility. Healthier soil means better drought resilience. Better water infiltration means less runoff. Stronger root systems mean more carbon stored deeper in the soil.

That matters because healthy grasslands store carbon underground through deep perennial root systems, with the most durable carbon stored deeper in the soil, where it is protected from drought, heat, wildfire, erosion, and other disturbances. Some of that carbon can remain stored for hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of years.

The problem is that while soil health is bipartisan, public policy recognizing healthy soils has not caught up.

One critical opportunity is federal tax policy. Today, incentives such as 45Q provide significant support for engineered and industrial carbon capture and sequestration. Those technologies have an important role to play. But if the purpose of policy is to reward durable carbon storage, then the question should be simple: did the carbon get stored, and will it stay there?

If the answer is yes, then why are we leaving ranchers out when they durably store carbon in their soils? A ton of durably stored carbon should be treated like a ton of durably stored carbon, whether captured by a machine or built by deep rooted grasses on American working lands.

Ranchers should not be excluded because their infrastructure looks different. Their infrastructure is living soil, perennial grass, grazing animals, fences, water systems and management decisions made every day across millions of acres. It may not look like an industrial facility, but it is already operating at landscape scale.

Unlike industrial carbon solutions that often require enormous upfront capital and lengthy permitting before they can deliver outcomes, improved grazing can begin delivering value now. It can put money directly into rural communities, improve the productivity of the land and build measurable carbon storage. We know this firsthand, having distributed more than $40 million back to ranchers for carbon stored in healthy soils.

That income matters to ranchers.

A fair federal tax approach would make it easier for ranchers to access technical assistance and transition financing, support rigorous measurement standards and create the regulatory clarity needed for private markets to scale with confidence. Public programs and private markets could then build on this common ground and work together to reward outcomes that strengthen land, livestock, rural communities and the environment.

Soil health is not a partisan idea. It is the common ground under our feet and a bipartisan opportunity we can build on. It is time to regenerate America’s grazing lands for generations to come.

Brad Tipper is the CEO of Grassroots Carbon.