Back to the Soil

Efforts to control carbon output create opportunities in agriculture.

By Anna King | December 2009 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Photograph by Jed Conklin

Palouse farmer Dan Wolf (with his son Ben Wolf in the background) has begun no-till planting, a practice catching on for its environmental benefits, and which he hopes will be rewarded in new carbon offset legislation.

Dan Wolf's neighbors have been laughing at him since 1997.

That's when he stopped plowing his wheat fields on the Palouse and started growing no-till crops.

"I was tired of watching all the dirt run down the creek," Wolf says.

But nowadays, some of the locals' chatter has died down. Wolf's shaggy-looking fields produce the same yields as those of his neighbors, there's hardly any erosion-and he's helping to save the planet by sequestering carbon in the soil.

No-till farming means not plowing or turning over the soil. Usually, Palouse wheat growers plow their fields before sowing new seeds. But farmers like Wolf use a sophisticated drill that injects both seed and fertilizer into the ground, and only disturbs a few inches of earth. By using this system, Wolf doesn't introduce a lot of oxygen into his fields. That means microbes don't break down organic matter as fast, and some carbon is trapped beneath the surface. No-till planting also helps reduce erosion by wind and water because the soil is kept in place by the old roots and stalks of the previous year's crop.

Wolf and other farmers may soon be paid for their no-till efforts though a government cap-and-trade program. Legislation in Congress seeks to reduce carbon emissions and pay those who take the pollution out of the atmosphere, with the House already passing a bill and the Senate working on another.

The legislation would require carbon emissions to be cut to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. But it's unlikely that power plants, transportation companies and other industries can cut their emissions this quickly. So the plan would allow those businesses to buy "carbon offsets" or support other carbon sequestration programs.

Alexia Celly is the senior associate in the climate and energy program for the Washington, D.C.-based think tank World Resources Institute. Her organization helped draft the bill. Celly thinks that, because of global warming, a shift to a lower carbon economy is overdue in the United States.

"There is no doubt that this is a pretty fundamental shift," she says. "The rest of the world has been doing this for 10 years and we are late to the party."

Celly says under the current legislation, farmers like Dan Wolf could be compensated, but many of the big details aren't worked out yet.

She explains that what practices will count as carbon offsets and how much those people will be