Can Farming Provide a Solution to Climate Change?

Farming is one of the few human activities that can pull CO2 from the atmosphere and store it safely

Farming is one of the few human activities that can pull CO2 from the atmosphere and store it safely

When the heavy rains came to Iowa this spring, corn farmer Dave Miller tilled the rolling portions of his 255-hectare plot. Cutting into the soil slows runoff and, particularly, prevents water from gouging big gullies in the fertile but softly held land. A few years back such tilling would have cost him money, thanks to an attempt to pair farmers improving the carbon management of their soils and companies looking to reduce pollution.

“We know that raising soil organic matter is good for soil, good for society and good for climate,” says Miller, whose day job is as an economist for the Iowa Farm Bureau (IFB). He once ran the nation’s largest agricultural carbon credit service. The idea is simple: The soil is one of the best places to put the carbon dioxide causing climate change, which has reached new highs in the atmosphere. Plants help put the carbon into the soil through photosynthesis—knitting CO2 and water into carbohydrates using the power of sunlight. And farmers can boost the process further by turning some of those plants into charcoal—or biochar, as advocates of the approach like to call it.

But farmers need incentives to adopt such practices. One of the few efforts to encourage farmers across the U.S. to tend to their land and the atmosphere alike was the now defunct Chicago Climate Exchange(CCX), a trading outfit that brought together a set of companies that volunteered to adopt a cap on CO2 pollution and traded carbon credits to meet that goal.

With the CCX, Miller set out to craft a climate program that would also “work for agriculture,” as he puts it, rather than being designed by “suits in Chicago.” In short, a program like CCX is put in place that establishes a limit for greenhouse gas emissions by a set of companies, such as electric utilities. Polluting companies in the program would have to reduce their own emissions or buy pollution-reduction credits from others. The farmers—represented by the IFB—would provide some of those extra CO2 reductions to the CCX market.

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