Farm Data May Become Agriculture's New Asset

A new product may soon emerge for farmland owners across the United States: their data. At the 2026 TopSoil Summit June 10 in Riverside, Iowa, speakers emphasized the importance of watching updates on the Section 45Z federal tax credit.

By using conservation practices and keeping good records, farmers and landowners can tap into an emerging asset.

Mitchell Hora, who created the summit and is also founder and CEO of Continuum Ag, said there was a lot of uncertainty when he first looked into carbon markets with not much value to show for it. The standardization for the market had not been established. Then, the 45Z tax credit came along.

Section 45Z federal tax credit benefits

Hora said, “For me, that was the light bulb moment. Where it's like, man, I have been trying to figure out this carbon market for multiple years, and I didn't understand why it was not really a carbon market. It was about paying for practice change.”

RELATED: Mitchell Hora explained on the American Farmland Owner Podcast why he decided that 45Z should be a primary focus for farmers and investors from across the country at the 2026 TopSoil Summit. 

Hora ran his farm through the available models and saw an actual carbon intensity (CI) score. However, he found the government files to be clunky and realized the market was not going to happen at scale. When the Biden administration announced the 45Z tax credit, it made Hora to decide to go all in. He flipped his business to managing farmer data.

IRS proposed rules for 45Z

It was a bet that may soon pay off. Earlier this year, the IRS proposed rules for the 45Z tax credit and confirmed it would include farmer and feedstock CI scores. 

Hurdles of Data Gathering

As the CI markets expand under 45Z, record keeping is expected to become a larger part of farm operations.

Hora predicted audits could begin as early as 2027. “And those auditors will be going out to farms, trying to put together all the data for the 2026 fuel, which was grown with the 2025 crop, where some of those practices occurred in the fall of 2024,” he said.

An audit on top of harvest is already a challenge, according to Hora. He was not confident a farmer could quickly find three-year-old data.

“As farmers, we got a lot of data in a lot of different places. And to be able to, at the last minute, try to pull it all together…just scares the crap out of me,” he said. “I believe in this 45Z program in the data rigor, but not if we're going to skip out on all that part and then try to backtrack into it at the scale of the biofuel market. I just don't think it's going to happen.”

Now his focus is to start with documenting practices and collecting evidence now, creating CI certification. This would establish better credibility for future buyers.

Building Trust, Adding Value

Markets run on trust according to Dominic Sutton-Vermeulen, an economist with MillPont. At the TopSoil Summit, he said his team had a system to establish and verify the data they get from the soil.

“We're excited because we're building the trust layer that helps this data go from environmental data and reports to environmental assets. Our system helps normalize that,” said Sutton-Vermeulen. “It's not easy to bring this data all together, get it streamlined, and manage it efficiently.”

He does not want data gathering to become a burden but instead to create value.

Carbon intensity data records

Sutton-Vermeulen calls it a sustainable exchange. “We're creating that system making sure that provenance of data is secure, compliant, and exclusive. Just like any other asset or bank account that someone might share,” he said.

They would like to see a place where data from farmers is seen the same as other mature markets, like the finance and commodity sectors. However, given the nature of modern supply chains, there are many challenges in tracing data through complex food and fuel systems. 

“But we can trace back to something we all share, which is Earth,” he said. “The world is moving from data as ‘nice-to-have,’ to data ‘is the asset.’ We need to have systems that actually recognize that.”

The value of farmland is normally measured by what it grows. At the TopSoil Summit, there was a vision of farmland adding value by measuring how it grows.