Goats, gardens and carbon credits 

Innovative carbon program offers new opportunities for landowners in the Adirondacks

By Chloe Bennett

Janine Van Norman plunged her hands into soil nurturing carrots, grown among beds of spinach, cabbage and other edible plants.  

She and her husband Tim employ permaculture in the gardens surrounding their home in Stony Creek. The land practice emphasizes mirroring natural ecosystems. 

A lush hardwood forest with remnants of logging days borders the back of the house, stretching across 600 acres. The trees represent more than just the family’s property. Most of the land is now part of a carbon program aimed at offsetting emissions from polluting companies. 

The Family Forest Carbon Program, a partnership of The American Forest Foundation and The Nature Conservancy, targets landowners with at least 30 acres to participate.  

The program started in 2020 to give landowners without thousands of acres a chance to participate in the global carbon credit trade. The Van Normans were the second landowners in the Adirondacks to sign up after the program expanded to the region last year.  

Foresters were preparing to draft a management plan for the land to store more carbon dioxide by next year, said Sierra Giraud, northeast senior forestry manager for the program. Additional tons of carbon stored from the implemented plan will generate carbon credits, which are bought by companies to offset their emissions. 

The couple said they initially questioned carbon credit markets. Many projects have been found by researchers to have little climate benefit. “There was obviously a lot of greenwashing going on,” Tim Van Norman said.  

Still, preserving forests to offset carbon emissions has value if done correctly, he said. 

The pair ended up in the Adirondacks in 2018 after visiting just once to scope out the expansive property. The Van Normans took a buyout deal after working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for almost 30 years each. After living in the Virginia suburbs, they moved to Warren County’s smallest town to escape rising temperatures and adopt a rural lifestyle.  

Now their closest neighbors are three goats, two pot-bellied pigs, a llama, an alpaca, chickens and turkeys.  

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Around 1 million private acres in the Adirondacks, including the Van Normans’, are eligible for the Family Forest Carbon Program. Credits derived from the program are sold on the voluntary market, which does not have government oversight. 

Instead of following protocols set by an external registry, the partnership created its own methodology for measuring carbon storage. The process was approved by Verra, a large voluntary market certifier responsible for millions of dollars in carbon credits.  

By monitoring sets of enrolled land and comparing them to similar forests outside of the project’s boundaries, the carbon program measures the health of each forest to determine the change in the amount of carbon stored.  

“That dynamic baseline methodology, that is what we are viewing as a real gold star methodology,” said Michelle Brown, TNC’s senior conservation scientist in New York.  

The project arose after the conservancy and other projects in the voluntary market received critical national coverage for potentially overestimating carbon storage. 

Using the dynamic baseline is a step toward correcting flaws in offset protocols, said Charles Canham, a senior scientist with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and a member of the Adirondack Explorer’s board. Canham has analyzed global offset projects for several years.  

Janine Van Norman, 61, learned of the carbon program while scrolling through Facebook. The family had weighed options for their land, including light harvesting and managing under terms of the state’s forest tax law. A couple of offers from timber companies rolled in, including one to obtain rights to drive trucks across the couple’s land. 

“That was not the sustainability that we wanted,” Tim Van Norman, 63, said. “We were looking for biological diversity and sustainability that way.” 

Under the carbon program, landowners receive between $200 and $300 per acre over a 20-year period, meaning the Van Normans could bring in more than $100,000 by the end of the two-decade contract. 

Without the payments, the couple said they wouldn’t be at risk of losing the land, though the income helps pay for state taxes. The potential climate benefit of enrolling their land was the main draw.  

“I don’t think we’re under the illusion that this was suddenly going to change the world,” Tim Van Norman said. “But it’s those little incremental bits.” 

Walking in an overgrown garden, Janine Van Norman said she was intentional about its layout to attract pollinators. Goldenrod shot up above thick vegetation around the plot, the family’s nearby solar panels in view. 

“We want to be good stewards,” she said. “Ideally, long after we’re gone.”