For the past 20 years, my mother has been dedicated to building a small farm in upstate New York. I’ve had a front-row seat to the trials and glories of raising loads of chickens, starting an orchard, and cultivating a vast vegetable patch. Waking up with the sun, raking manure, weeding, outwitting pests and predators, praying for rain, but not too much all at once. (Obviously, growing food is hard enough without having to deal with climate change, changing seasons, and the extreme weather that comes with it.)
My mom’s retirement is not exactly a relaxed one, but it’s certainly satisfying. She’s obsessed with the concept of growing her own food as an earth-friendly patriotism. It’s amazing how much food you can grow on an acre of land. We have the most beautiful chickens in the world (in my biased opinion), scurrying among the fruit trees and shade trees, eating bugs, comfrey, scraps, and vegetables pilfered from the raised beds, fertilizing the soil with their waste, and laying perfect eggs.
Like many people, I am the descendant of farmers and fishermen going back several generations. A time when food was real, local, and fresh, and the word “organic” was unnecessary. Today, instead of integrating diverse crops and animals to feed each other and cultivate soils where microbiomes thrive, we have a highly pesticide-laden, far-flung, highly processed, mostly monoculture scenario. This is unhealthy for us and for ecosystems. Some vegetables have nutrient levels as low as they were in the 1950s (you have to eat them to get the same amount of calcium!). We are heading in a similar direction in the oceans, where habitat destruction through overfishing and aquaculture has left a horrifying record.
This is partly a cultural problem: Americans spend a higher percentage of their income than people in other rich countries, we expect food to be cheap, and we subsidize all the wrong things, like fossil fuels and corn ethanol, while producers race to drive prices down, to the detriment of farmers, consumers, and biodiversity.
Research shows that, globally, the food system is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, and that this is the way we have to feed the planet. But there is clearly plenty of room for improvement.
Soil, the backbone of agriculture, is an incredible substrate that can capture gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere—but only if it’s alive, with roots and teeming with microorganisms. Restoring agricultural soils requires a reintroduction of regenerative organic farming practices, which include reducing tillage and planting cover crops and perennials that keep roots in the ground and exposed to erosion. We need to increase crop diversity, rotate crops, use compost to replenish soil nutrients, and eliminate fossil-fuel-intensive chemical pesticides and fertilizers.
Reintroducing these regenerative agriculture practices will foster healthy soil and healthy plants that collect carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. This carbon dioxide is used not only to build plant tissue, but also to provide carbon for root-dwelling microorganisms (aka microbes) that deposit carbon in the soil. Along with earthworms and other creatures, these microorganisms (like bacteria and fungi) help increase water absorption (rather than runoff), break down organic matter, and transfer minerals from the soil to plant roots. It’s good for the water cycle, the carbon cycle, and biodiversity. It’s a benevolent symbiotic relationship that prepares the soil for future seeds.
Some form of “back to the land” has to be part of the solution to climate change: more people farming again. Leah Penniman and her family started farming in upstate New York in 2006. They embody that vision, growing food in a way that’s grounded in community, justice, and food sovereignty. I first heard about Penniman in December 2016, when my mother sent me an email with a link to an hour-long video of Penniman speaking at the Northeast Organic Agriculture Association conference.
When I interviewed Penniman for my book, she shared with me how agriculture and our food system can and must be transformed. Among her striking insights was how to treat carbon not as the enemy, but as an element of nature that has been left behind.
We’ve blamed carbon for climate change, but carbon is the building block of all life. It’s just in the wrong place. Carbon exists in the atmosphere as methane and carbon dioxide, causing the greenhouse effect. Carbon is needed in the soil and in living organisms.
Or, as Penniman puts it, “carbon is life, it goes back into the soil ecosystem and does incredibly beneficial things, like nourishing us when the water comes and stabilizing the soil.”
I was further inspired by something Larissa Jacobson of Soul Fire Farm told Penniman: “Our job as farmers is to bring carbon back and bring life back into the soil. That’s our No. 1 duty as farmers.”
He is a marine biologist, policy expert, and co-founder of a non-profit think tank. He is a distinguished scholar at Bowdoin College and co-editor of the bestselling climate anthology All We Can Save.This work is adapted from the novel on which it is based, Days of Love and Sorrow.
