LandYield Carbon Program Review: Easy Money or Climate Theater?

If you own forestland, you’ve probably seen LandYield’s pitch: earn $25-50 per acre annually just for not harvesting your trees. No upfront costs, quarterly payments starting in months, and a slick online platform that estimates your revenue instantly.

Sounds pretty good, right? Well, the payments are real and the platform genuinely works. But here’s what they’re not telling you: you’re probably selling carbon credits that independent scientists say don’t actually help the climate. Multiple peer-reviewed studies suggest these credits are over-credited by 20-30%, and you’re likely getting paid for conservation you’d do anyway.

Let’s break down what you’re really signing up for—and whether that matters to you.

At a Glance: What You Need to Know About LandYield

What LandYield Pays:

• $25-50 per acre annually during the 20-year crediting period
• Quarterly payments starting within 5 months of enrollment
• Years 1-3: Fixed pricing (around $11/credit)
• Years 4-20: Market-linked pricing with potential upside
• Zero upfront costs—they cover all project development and verification

What You’re Committing To:

• 40-year contract: 20 years of no commercial harvest + 20 years of monitoring
• Contract follows the property if you sell (new owner must agree to continue)
• Early termination requires repaying current value of all carbon credits
• Can still hunt, hike, cut firewood, do salvage logging after disasters
• Must maintain carbon stocks for entire term

The Good:

• Significantly higher payments than competing programs ($10-15/acre typical)
• No upfront costs—they handle everything
• Keep full land ownership
• Instant online revenue estimates
• Can enroll specific parcels, not entire property

The Bad:

• You’re locked in for 40 years (seriously, think about that)
• Independent research shows 20-30% systematic over-crediting
• Partnership with Finite Carbon, whose projects faced documented fraud allegations
• If you weren’t planning to harvest anyway, these credits lack “additionality”

The Verdict: If you’re a conservation-minded landowner who wasn’t planning to harvest, this is essentially free money for doing what you’d do regardless. Just understand you’re enabling corporate greenwashing—the credits you’re generating probably don’t deliver real climate benefits. For timber-focused landowners, the 40-year commitment isn’t worth it.

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The Money: What You Actually Get

LandYield targets family forest owners with 40-5,000 acres across 26 states in the Southeast and Northeast. The platform uses satellite imagery and LiDAR to instantly estimate how many carbon credits your forest could generate, then translates that into dollar amounts.

For most properties, you’re looking at $25-50 per acre per year during the initial 20-year crediting period. On a 100-acre property, that’s $2,500-5,000 annually, or $50,000-100,000 total over 20 years. Payments arrive quarterly and start within five months of enrollment.

The payment structure has two phases. Years 1-3 offer fixed pricing to provide revenue certainty—sources suggest around $11 per carbon credit. Years 4-20 shift to market-linked pricing, where you get a fixed percentage of whatever carbon credits are selling for. Recent US forest carbon credits have traded at $29 per ton, so if prices rise, you benefit. If they crash, you’re exposed.

Here’s what’s genuinely good about LandYield: you pay nothing upfront. They cover project development, verification by third-party auditors, American Carbon Registry fees, and 40 years of monitoring and reporting. Traditional carbon projects required thousands in development costs and took up to two years before first payment. LandYield handles the complexity entirely behind the scenes.

For perspective, that’s roughly 2.5-5x higher than the Family Forest Carbon Program ($10/acre/year) and significantly better than most conservation programs. The quarterly payment structure beats annual payments elsewhere.

But let’s talk about what you’re committing to.

The Catch: That 40-Year Contract Is Serious

This isn’t a casual agreement. You’re signing a legally binding 40-year contract: 20 years where you cannot commercially harvest enrolled timber at all, followed by 20 years where you must maintain the carbon stocks you built up (limited sustainable harvesting allowed).

If you sell your property, the new owner must agree to continue the contract. If they won’t, you have to pay LandYield back the current market value of all carbon credits associated with your land before closing. If you die, your heirs inherit the contract. Early termination for any reason requires full repayment.

Think about where you were 40 years ago—1985. Would a decision you made then about your property still make sense today? Because that’s the time horizon you’re signing up for.

The program specifically targets properties with “merchantable timber” that’s “physically accessible for harvest”—meaning timber you could sell if you wanted to. That’s important, because it gets to the heart of the carbon credit integrity problem.

The Big Question: Were You Going to Harvest Anyway?

Close your eyes and imagine someone enrolling in a forest carbon program. What do they look like? How do they think about their land?

I’m guessing you’re picturing someone who views their forest primarily as wildlife habitat, scenic beauty, or a legacy to pass down. Someone who probably already has strong conservation values. Someone who wasn’t planning aggressive timber harvests anyway.

And that’s exactly the problem with these carbon credits.

The Science Problem: Over-Crediting and Additionality

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: multiple peer-reviewed studies published in leading journals have found that Improved Forest Management carbon credits—the exact type LandYield generates—don’t actually represent real climate benefits in the quantities claimed.

A 2022 study in Global Change Biology by researchers at CarbonPlan examined 65 forest carbon projects and found systematic over-crediting of 29.4%—representing $410 million in excess credits. The problem? Projects exploited statistical loopholes by clustering in naturally high-carbon forests, then claiming credits for simply maintaining what was already there.

A 2023 comprehensive review in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change examined all major forest carbon protocols, including the American Carbon Registry methodology that LandYield uses. The conclusion: these protocols “diverge from good practice across three major factors affecting carbon credit quality—additionality/baselines, leakage, and durability.”

The American Carbon Registry is specifically named as having “yielded a number of projects shown to ‘over-credit.'”

Here’s how the gaming works: LandYield establishes a “baseline” representing what would happen without the carbon project—typically assuming aggressive harvest. Your actual forest carbon is measured periodically. The difference generates credits. But if you were never planning to harvest aggressively in the first place, that difference doesn’t represent real climate benefit—it just represents the gap between what you’d naturally do and a hypothetical aggressive harvest scenario.

This is called the “additionality” problem. Carbon credits should only exist for actions that wouldn’t happen without carbon market incentives. But family forest owners often manage for wildlife, recreation, aesthetics, and legacy—not maximum timber revenue. Many weren’t planning aggressive harvests regardless of carbon payments.

If everyone enrolling in LandYield was already planning to let their forest grow without heavy harvesting, then paying them to do what they were going to do anyway doesn’t create additional carbon storage. It just generates credits that corporations buy to “offset” their emissions without actually reducing atmospheric carbon.

As Dr. Charles Canham of the Cary Institute concluded after reviewing forest offset markets: “I have concluded that offset deals provide little if any true ‘additionality’… and that the majority of credits sold on those markets provide no real offset to greenhouse gas emissions at all.”

The Partnership Problem: Finite Carbon’s Track Record

LandYield isn’t just using questionable methodology—they’re partnered with Finite Carbon, the company behind their CORE Carbon platform and technology. And Finite Carbon has a documented history of integrity problems.

In 2023, investigations by The Guardian and other outlets examined Finite Carbon’s projects. Independent raters found that approximately 80% of credits from reviewed Finite Carbon projects should not have been issued. Investigators discovered projects had drawn boundaries around individual trees, small islands, inaccessible ravines, and terrain that was never at risk of logging—claiming “protection” for forests that couldn’t have been harvested anyway.

Finite Carbon has been majority-owned by BP (yes, the oil company) since 2020. The same BP that needs carbon offsets to claim carbon neutrality while continuing fossil fuel production. That’s… not exactly confidence-inspiring for credit integrity.

LandYield uses the exact same developer, platform, and underlying methodology as these problematic projects. While small family forests differ from large institutional projects, the structural incentives for gaming baselines remain identical.

The Permanence Problem: 40 Years Isn’t Forever

Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels stays in the atmosphere for centuries. A ton of CO2 from your car will warm the planet for generations. LandYield offers 40 years of carbon storage in exchange—20 years of harvest deferral plus 20 years of monitoring.

This fundamental mismatch between permanent atmospheric CO2 and temporary forest carbon storage is a major integrity concern. What happens after 40 years? The contract ends, and there’s nothing preventing harvest or conversion. Credits are issued upfront based on 100-year projections, but actual benefits accrue slowly over decades and disappear if the forest is eventually cut.

The American Carbon Registry tries to address this through “buffer pools”—insurance against wildfires, disease, and storms. Projects contribute 2-4% of credits for fire risk and 3% for disease. But wildfire risk is projected to increase dramatically with climate change. A 2022 study found that if wildfire trends continue, buffer pools will be depleted well before their intended lifetime—meaning the insurance becomes inadequate precisely when it’s needed most.

Should You Do It? The Practical Take

Let me be direct about this. Whether LandYield makes sense depends entirely on what you were planning to do anyway—and whether you care that the carbon credits probably don’t deliver real climate benefits.

You’re a good candidate if:

• You view your forest primarily as wildlife habitat, natural beauty, or legacy land
• You weren’t planning any significant commercial harvest in the next 20 years
• You’re comfortable with a 40-year commitment
• You want supplemental income without changing your management plans
• You can rationalize participating in a system independent scientists describe as deeply flawed

In other words, if you’re conservation-minded and were going to manage lightly anyway, this is essentially free money. The carbon credits might be questionable, but the quarterly deposits are real.

You should probably skip it if:

• You view your timber as a financial investment
• You might need harvest income for major expenses in the next 20 years
• You’re actively managing for timber production
• Your family situation might change (kids wanting to develop, financial needs, etc.)
• You actually care about climate integrity over convenient cash

The 40-year commitment is no joke. That 100-acre property generating $2,500-5,000 annually in carbon payments might have $50,000+ in harvestable timber that you’re completely locked out of touching for two decades.

Basic Eligibility: Can You Even Enroll?

Before deciding, here are the basics:

Property requirements:

• 40-5,000 acres of forestland
• Private, non-industrial ownership
• Merchantable timber that’s physically accessible for harvest
• Must be in eligible states (26 states in Southeast/Northeast)

You’re automatically disqualified if:

• You have conservation easements preventing harvest
• You’re already enrolled in another forest carbon program
• Your property is primarily plantation forestry

The enrollment process is genuinely easy: use their online tool for instant revenue estimates, apply if interested, they verify eligibility remotely, and if approved, you sign the contract and start receiving quarterly payments within five months. No costs to you at any stage.

My Take: Know What You’re Selling

I’ll be completely honest with you. The scientific evidence is pretty clear that these forest carbon credits are, at best, significantly over-valued and, at worst, corporate greenwashing with numbers attached. If you’re enrolling because you think you’re personally saving the climate, you’re likely wrong.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean enrolling is unethical or wrong for YOU as a landowner.

If you were already going to manage conservatively—already planning to let your forest grow, already prioritizing wildlife and aesthetics over timber revenue—then accepting payment for doing what you’d do regardless makes rational economic sense. You’re not causing additional harm by enrolling. You’re just accepting money from a system that’s going to generate credits whether you participate or not.

The corporations buying these credits would purchase offsets from somewhere. At least LandYield puts money directly in family landowners’ pockets rather than having it all flow to brokers and middlemen.

Think of it this way: if someone offered to pay you $50,000+ over 20 years to keep doing exactly what you were planning to do anyway, would you turn it down on principle? Most people wouldn’t.

Just be honest with yourself about what you’re really selling. You’re not selling verified climate benefits. You’re selling credits that help corporations claim carbon neutrality while continuing to pollute, based on a methodology that independent scientists say significantly over-credits, for carbon storage that’s temporary, from forests you were probably going to manage conservatively anyway.

If you can make peace with that—if you need the income and can rationalize that at least your specific forest is being protected even if the climate math doesn’t work—then LandYield delivers on its financial promises.

The Bottom Line

LandYield has genuinely innovated by making carbon markets accessible to small family forest owners. The technology works, the payments are competitive, and the user experience is smooth. For conservation-minded landowners who weren’t planning to harvest anyway, it offers legitimate supplemental income with zero upfront costs.

But innovation in market access doesn’t solve problems with market integrity. When the underlying carbon credits likely don’t represent real climate benefits—as multiple peer-reviewed studies strongly suggest—making those credits easier to generate just makes greenwashing more efficient.

The program works as advertised: you will get paid. The question is whether the carbon credits you’re generating actually help solve climate change. The scientific evidence suggests they don’t.

If you’re okay with that—if you can rationalize that at least your personal forest benefits even if the climate accounting is sketchy—then LandYield offers competitive terms for conservation-minded landowners. If you actually care about climate integrity over convenient cash, better options exist: direct ecosystem service payments, or simply managing your forest for conservation because it’s the right thing to do.

Just don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re a climate hero. You’re accepting payment from a system that’s helping corporations avoid reducing their actual emissions.