Happy Earth Day!

 

Over the past few years, I've read several books about farming, especially no-till farming. Part of the reason is because my husband and I have started doing the no-till system on our small farm. Part of the reason is just because I find it so interesting. Growing up, I thought dirt was just dirt, an inert medium into which you put the seed or transplant. Come to find out, it's swarming with life of the microbial kind (or should be). I've seen statistics saying there are more living beings in a teaspoon of soil than on the surface of the earth. 

So far, some of my favorites have been Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown, which is the story of how regenerative agriculture practices transformed his ranch; The Living Soil Handbook by Jesse Frost, which is a very practical resource for no-till farming with a ton of information; and The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, which is a collection of his research findings  after a career caring for trees in a German forest (spoiler alert - trees communicate with each other!).

At first I thought Grass, Soil, Hope by Courtney White was going to be just another one of those collections of research and projects, and it was. White talks about his visits to different types of environmental projects such as urban rooftop gardens and ranches that use nontraditional grazing practices. What made this book catch my attention, though, was that White looks at it all through the lens of carbon sequestration (capturing carbon from the air and storing it in the soil). White focuses on how plants--specifically grass--capture carbon through the process of photosynthesis and transfer it into the soil, where it feeds the microbial life and is stored long-term, as long as the soil is not disturbed (as by plowing). All of the projects and research he visited for the book are connected to how plants can be a low-tech solution to climate change--and easy to implement.

I sort of knew this already. I had seen a YouTube video that showed a cartoon explanation of how photosynthesis works. Jesse Frost talks a lot, both in his book and in his YouTube videos and podcast, about how plants convert sunshine to liquid "exudates" that are traded with microbes for minerals and nutrients the plants need. But I had never made the connection to carbon. But of course carbon would be something valuable plants could bring to the microbial marketplace.

Climate change is another of those sources of existential worry (I have a lot of those, ha ha). But there was something so comforting about White's book. Maybe, just maybe, there is something we can all do to impact climate change - plant something! Of course, the scale needed to make a significant difference is huge, but maybe, just maybe, even small actions can add up.

If nothing else, White's book gave me a gentle reminder that my existential worry doesn't have to take over my life. As he said, "It's an inspiring and hopeful time to be alive--if we choose to make it so...we can't be spending all our time looking at our feet. We need to be looking up, at the clouds, at a world that is infinitely beautiful."

And it is....