Carbon farming is the hot (and overhyped) tool to fight climate change

A growing number of farmers are exploring the potential of capturing and storing greater amounts of carbon dioxide in soil as a way to combat climate change. Soil naturally stores some amount of carbon, much of it from decaying plants and animal matter. The National Academy of Sciences estimated in a study last year that global farmland could capture and store as much as 3 billion tons of additional carbon dioxide if farmers adopted a number of improved practices, including adding organic matter like manure or compost, shifting cultivation to favor crops that contribute more of their carbon to the soil, or using off seasons to plant cover crops that will then break down. (See “One man’s two-decade quest to suck greenhouse gas out of the sky.”) California has started providing small grants from the state’s carbon cap-and-trade fund to farmers who employ techniques that promise to store more carbon. Meanwhile, a Boston startup known as Indigo AG recently announced a plan to pay farmers to pursue similar practices and then sell carbon credits to companies or individuals looking for ways to offset their climate impacts. Noah Deich, executive director of Carbon180, a think tank promoting carbon removal and recycling, said that since the onset of agriculture, the planet has released about 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide from soil—about 14 times the amount released from all fossil-fuel energy sources globally last year. It’s a huge pool that could potentially be refilled, if those ecosystems can be made to take up higher levels of carbon dioxide. “But from that basic premise it gets much, much more complicated,” he said...MORE