Carbon Farming

What a concept! Grow plants especially good at sequestering carbon in the soil, and sell the carbon credits as one of your crops! How cool!

Snips from a provocative article:

The next step is to add carbon farming as a core or foundational element of this industry.

Let’s speculate about a small urban farmer. She is targeting both the food and ornamental markets [vegetable, micro-livestock and potted flowers]. If she can gear up to be paid on a regular basis for her carbon sequestering, she will have a base cash flow. She will then select her crops partially based on their government certified carbon return capacity and the seasonal measurement of her soil’s carbon content.

So, she might chose to grow a root and vine and shrub crop mixture rather than only one of them; thereby creating a diverse roots and foliage capacity.

And snips from an interview very clever Vermont Farmer who heads the Carbon Farmers of America:

We are an all-grass, organic dairy – one of a growing handful of dairies in the United States doing no-grain dairying. We have created a new company, Carbon Farmers of America, to advance the idea that soil building can reverse climate change, and that the planned grazing of livestock on perennial grasslands is the single most-effective way to rapidly create new topsoil. On our dairy farm, we are using a number of methods in addition to planned grazing that allow us to build topsoil even faster by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and putting it back into the soil as various forms of organic matter.

If society chooses to pay farmers $25 dollars per ton of carbon dioxide transformed into soil organic matter, then we humans can reduce atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases to pre-industrial levels within a decade. We will also eliminate most water-quality problems and biosecurity issues, we will restore economic prosperity to our rural communities, and we will not have a farm-viability crisis on our hands any more.

WOW!!!

Posted By Jill to All Along The Edge