Planting Crops — and Carbon, Too

by Gabriel Popkin (Washington Post) President Biden says farmers can adopt agricultural methods that
help fight climate change. Maryland farmer Trey Hill has been trying. ... As the winter cover crops grow, they will feed microbes and improve the soil’s health, which Hill believes will eventually translate into higher yields of the crops that provide his income: corn, soybean and wheat.

But just as importantly, they will pull down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in the ground. Hill is at the cutting edge of what many hope will provide not just a more nature-friendly way of farming, but a powerful new climate solution.

In early 2020, he became the first seller in a privately run farmer-focused marketplace that paid him $115,000 for practices that, over the past few years, had sequestered just over 8,000 tons of carbon in the soil. The money came from corporations and individuals who want to offset carbon dioxide produced by their activities. Hill used the proceeds to buy equipment he hopes will allow him to squirrel away even more of the planet-warming gas.

If farmers throughout the world adopted similar “regenerative” methods, experts estimate they could sequester a sizable chunk of the world’s carbon emissions. The idea has been endorsed by soil scientists, a slew of food industry giants and, recently, President Biden.

But some doubt that farmed soils can reliably store carbon long enough to make a difference for the climate — or that changes in soil carbon can be accurately yet affordably measured. Others worry voluntary measures such as soil sequestration could make a polluting food and agriculture industry appear environmentally friendly while forestalling stronger climate action.

Researchers and companies are now racing to reduce the scientific uncertainties and win over skeptics.

Many scientists are confident that farming can be adapted to build carbon into soils, said Deborah Bossio, a soil scientist at the Nature Conservancy, an environmental organization. “We know how to do it,” she said.

Maryland has paid farmers to plant cover crops since the 1990s to stanch the flow of nitrogen into the Chesapeake Bay. Some livestock producers rotate animals on pastures of grasses and legumes, whose roots pull carbon underground. And though rare in the United States today, farmers elsewhere in the world mix trees into fields and pastures.

Hill, who farms 10,000 acres, admitted he got into cover crops purely because the state paid him. “We had no intent of doing it for climate,” he said.

There are barriers that keep more farmers from following his lead, Hill said. He has had to buy specialized equipment, and climate-friendly farming hasn’t yet translated to higher yields or premium prices.

“It’s a b---- to farm this way,” he said. Turnips can get stuck in his planting equipment, costing his team valuable time, for example. “It makes life a lot more difficult, and not necessarily more profitable.”

Hill sells most of his corn to the chicken producer Mountaire Farms, which pays him the same market price other suppliers get. If farmers were paid for the carbon accumulating in their soils, they would have greater incentive to adopt climate-friendly practices, Hill said.

Backers of new, private-sector carbon markets hope that computer models fed by data from farm fields, satellites and handheld carbon sensors can measure and predict soil carbon gains more cheaply and reliably.

“They are relatively inexpensive, relatively easy to adopt, and have a huge area of land where they’re suitable, and they have tremendous momentum and provide huge benefits to farms,” said Eric Toensmeier, a consultant with Project Drawdown and author of a recent report comparing the climate benefits of dozens of farming practices. “Cover cropping is one of the lowest hanging fruits.” READ MORE

Excerpt from Wall Street Journal: If you wanted to produce food at the lowest cost to the environment, what methods would you use? Would you select modern farming methods (large-scale, specialized, mechanized and increasingly digital), or would you opt for traditional farms that are small and low-tech? Environmentalists often prefer the latter, having seen the damage that modern farms can do.

But the sustainability of traditional American farming was mostly an illusion. Farm production in the U.S. has nearly tripled over the past 70 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and trying to pull that off using the low-tech methods of the past—which delivered lower yields per acre—would have meant that more forests would have been lost, more fragile lands plowed and more natural habitats destroyed.

Modern farming is better because it uses low-impact, “precision” techniques that require less land, less energy and fewer chemicals for every bushel produced. The secret has been to incorporate tools that use sensors, information and communications technology, big data, and even machine learning to reduce farming’s dependence on material resources.

Traditional farming had already failed as a protector of the environment nearly a century ago—and scientific advances have long offered new ways to help the planet. In the 1930s, after low-yield cropping was extended onto the drought-prone Southern Plains, the soil blew away, creating the disastrous Dust Bowl. Cropland expansion could finally be halted in the 1950s, once scientists had developed higher-yielding hybrid seeds. In the 1970s, engineering advances allowed farmers to plant seeds in unplowed fields, which reduced erosion, conserved soil moisture, sequestered carbon and saved on diesel fuel. READ MORE