Is there a way to enrich farmland soil, grow better crops, and at the same time sequester Carbon Dioxide? It could be as simple as using Compost and Manure.

Soil power! The dirty way to a green planet

Jacques Leslie is a Los Angeles Times contributing opinion writer and the author of "Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the ...

From article. (carbon sequestration in soil and vegetation is an effective way to pull carbon from the atmosphere that in some ways is the opposite of geoengineering. Instead of overcoming nature, it reinforces it, promoting the propagation of plant life to return carbon to the soil that was there in the first place — until destructive agricultural practices prompted its release into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That process started with the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago and accelerated over the past century as industrial farming and ranching rapidly expanded.

“Putting the carbon back in soil is not only mitigating climate change, but also improving human health, productivity, food security, nutrition security, water quality, air quality — everything,” Mr. Lal told me over the phone. “It’s a win-win-win option.”

The techniques that regenerative farmers use vary with soil, climate and crop. They start from the understanding that healthy soil teems with more than a billion microorganisms per teaspoon and the behavior of those organisms facilitates hardy plant life.

To fertilize their fields, regenerative farmers use nutrient-rich manure or compost, avoiding as much as possible chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which can kill huge quantities of organic matter and reduce plants’ resilience. They don’t like to till the soil, since tillage increases carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

California began in 2015 to incorporate soil health into the state’s farm and ranch operations. Some of the pioneering studies showing regenerative agriculture’s benefits have been carried out at the Marin Carbon Project on a self-proclaimed carbon-farming ranch in the pastoral reaches of Marin County, 30 miles northwest of San Francisco. A four-year study there showed that a one-time application of compost caused an increase in plant productivity that has continued ever since, and that the soil’s carbon content grew year after year, at a rate equivalent to the removal from the atmosphere of 1.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide per acre annually.

Whendee Silver, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of California at Berkeley who is the project’s lead scientist, calculated along with a colleague that if as little as 5 percent of California’s grangelands was coated with one-quarter to one-half inch of compost, the resulting carbon sequestration would be the equivalent of the annual greenhouse emissions of nine million cars. The diversion of green waste from the state’s overcrowded landfills would also prevent it from generating methane, another potent greenhouse gas.)

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