Eric Becker is chief investment officer at Clean Yield Asset Management. He has been engaged in social and environmental investing since 1993. Eric co-founded Slow Money Boston and Slow Money Vermont, as well as the Vermont Food Investors Network. He is a founding board member of Soil4Climate. Eric serves as a Trustee of Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vermont. He was also a founding board member of The Carrot Project.
In my day job, I’m a money guy. I manage socially and environmentally screened investment portfolios for people who want to align their money with their values. I got involved with Slow Money because of a personal interest in organic agriculture, but also because I had clients who wanted to channel some of their assets into sustainable food systems. But soil? I didn’t know anything about soil.
That was about to change. Through my involvement with Slow Money, my appreciation for and understanding of soil has continually grown and deepened. I remember first learning from a Woody Tasch talk that there were upwards of a billion microorganisms in a teaspoon of fertile soil. I learned from farmers and others at Slow Money gatherings about the myriad benefits of healthy soils, from nutritious food to water quality. Meanwhile, wearing my climate activist hat, I met biologists who explained that one of the most powerful tools we have to mitigate climate change is to put the excess carbon in the atmosphere back in the soil through restorative grazing and agriculture.
Increasingly I found myself in the company of soil advocates who view restorative agriculture as a key component of any scenario in which humanity effectively addresses the climate crisis. Now a few of these folks have formed a Vermont-based non-profit organization called Soil4Climate to advance the soil carbon narrative within the larger climate movement. I’m honored to be one of the founding board members of the organization, and further pleased that Woody Tasch has joined our advisory board.
Soil4Climate is inspired by innovative farmers, ranchers and other land managers who are increasing soil carbon while providing environmental and health benefits. As it turns out, nature is our most powerful ally in the fight against global warming. The ability for soil to capture atmospheric carbon is awe evoking. When we work to enhance this natural process, we get nourishing food and biodiverse spaces while also helping to assure a livable future.
Soil4Climate evolved out of an understanding that the climate crisis has reached a point where even eliminating the use of fossil fuels would not prevent an oncoming calamity. Research from NOAA showed that climate change from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was largely irreversible for at least a thousand years, even if our campaign to end fossil use was 100% successful. The planet doesn’t care. It will continue to warm from the carbon we’ve already pumped into the air.
The one silver lining in all this, however, is soil. In conjunction with essential emissions reductions, soil restoration may provide the extra ingredient needed to avert the worst climate disruptions that are otherwise already locked into the system. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated, it will take “a large net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period” to do so.
Where does this “large net removal” come from? For decades scientists have recognized that soil provides an important sink for atmospheric carbon. Esteemed Ohio State soil scientist Rattan Lal is considered by many to be the leading authority on the carbon drawdown potential of soils. In a paper from 2010, he estimated that the implementation of soil restoration practices may capture upwards of 3.8 gigatons of atmospheric carbon per year – fully a third of all global carbon emissions. However, a new paper by Richard Teague of Texas A&M, with Lal and others as co-authors, suggests the total drawdown in soil may be much higher when including the restorative potential of livestock managed for grass and soil health on prairie. Teague showed that Adaptive Multipaddock (AMP) grazing, a new type of grazing management that focuses on ecological goals, if employed on all available rangeland in North America, could, on its own, drawdown 730 million tons of carbon per year. When combined with “conservation cropping,” North American agricultural and grazing lands could pull down approximately one eighth of all global emissions. If the drawdown potential noted in Teague’s paper were realized on all cropping and grazing lands worldwide, the total yearly carbon capture would nearly offset the entire output from fossil fuel emissions.
Clearly, soil restoration through proper cropping and grazing practices is a valuable goal for us to work toward. We may never know with clarity what the yearly or total cumulative potentials for carbon capture in soil are, but we are certain that the quantities are large, and that movement forward in this direction is an essential course of action with multiple benefits. Combined with emissions reductions, soil restoration provides optimism for a livable future.
Soil4Climate supports all modes of engagement with citizens, scientists, policy makers, and practitioners to enhance soil carbon while meeting environmental and human needs. We are attempting to build a movement in the model of 350.org, while also supporting practical measures to help land managers employ regenerative practices. Our activities include writing white papers, organizing forums, encouraging policy, highlighting stories of success, encouraging sustainable investments, hosting online discussion groups, and even writing music and poetry. We stand with the emissions reductions communities that are doing essential work to phase out fossil fuels, and we employ an “all-of-the-above” strategy to engage stakeholders of any age or interest.
Good stuff Eric.
A few thoughts… Not all lands currently being grazed by domestic livestock are actually suitable for grazing. That’s especially true in the Western US where many of the native bunch grasses did not evolve with large bovines as the rhizomatous prairie grasses in the Midwest did with buffalo. Out here in the West where much of the land is in the hands of the public (National Forest, BLM and state land trusts), populations of native game still exist in sizable numbers. If the sacred cows were removed from these lands, native game populations would explode and produce much more meat per acre than cattle ever will – with less input. Few people realize that the Western US only produces about 3% of the beef Americans eat. Most of the cattle out here are cow/calf operations with the yearlings going to industrial CAFO’s to be fattened up for markets elsewhere. My farm is surrounded by cattle on public lands but it’s not available locally – unless it has made the round trip from a CAFO in the Midwest back to Safeway here in Arizona.
Plus, native game is already adapted to foraging on the native bunch grasses here and those grasses are already adapted to being foraged by native game. As the fourth photo shows, putting cattle on these native bunch grasses is like throwing a monkey wrench into a finely tuned piece of equipment.
With a revived native game population, economically pressed folk living in rural food deserts could hunt for much of their own protein. If the PRIME Act is passed (HR 3187) rural folk would be able to process game meat for local markets.
Another additional benefit is that game animals have a much better nutritional profile than domestic livestock.
A proposal for sequestering massive amounts of CO2 into the soil by turning the Western Commons back into a cornucopia of native game and other wildcrafted food can be read here – http://erdakroft.com/Erdakroftfarm/Blogs/Entries/2015/7/26_go_native.html
Thanks so much for the thoughtful response! As you know, I’m relatively new to this arena and have so much to learn from folks on the ground like you. I will check out your link.
Best,
Eric
Thank you so very much! This is very exciting. All over the world, wonderful people are growing forests in former destroyed lands with the main inputs of time and intention. See http://www.agendagotsch.com for one example of how what one man began on hundreds of acres in the ’80s can be implemented anywhere. With governments looking for the solution, this is it, and it can be done very quickly and joyfully. Question: Do you think that governments should implement programs to employ citizens to do this funded by tax dollars the same as the military, or something else? I’m not very educated about the pros and cons of policy.