Montana State University

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Consortium members at Montana State University include faculty from the Agricultural Economics and Economics Department, the Land Resources and Environmental Sciences Department, and the Extension Service. The agricultural economists at Montana State University are leaders in research on the economic potential for sequestering soil carbon and mitigation of greenhouse gases. Their research has focused on the development of site-specific economic production models for integration with biophysical models to assess the impacts and efficiency of alternative policies for sequestering carbon. This integrated assessment methodology builds upon a nationally recognized research agenda in the area of climate change and carbon sequestration through a five-year collaboration with ecologists and soil scientists at Colorado State University and University of Nebraska. This collaboration has shown that the efficiency of carbon sequestration is sensitive to the policy design and to the site-specific characteristics of the land. In addition to the integrated assessment research, the soil scientists at Montana State have been conducting pilot studies of building and measuring soil carbon through the use of alternative tillage and cropping practices. The scientists have access to historical records of tillage and crop rotation as a result of high levels of participation in the Conservation Reserve Program and previous cropping practices surveys. Their research on measuring soil carbon is being conducted in collaboration with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the EPA, and the Montana Carbon Offset Coalition, a nonprofit coalition to provide information to stakeholders on market-based carbon sequestration programs. In addition, they are collaborating with scientists in Saskatchewan who are researching soil carbon increases in the Canadian prairies.

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