By Hunter Lovins, president of Natural Capitalism Solutions
Forget politics. Here are proven ways we can sequester carbon and save ourselves.
No kidding folks, we’re in a climate crisis. Just look at the intensifying weather extremes. Warming drives it, but it’s “global weirding.”
Save the Earth? The Earth will be fine, eventually. It’s we humans who are in trouble, even if many of us haven’t recognised that yet.
Here are two numbers to illustrate why: In 1990, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels were 22.4 billion metric tons of CO₂ equivalent (GT CO₂e) each year. By 2024, humans emitted 42.4 GT CO₂ e per year. We nearly doubled our CO₂e emissions in one generation.
Most of our emissions have been absorbed by the oceans (the world’s largest carbon sink), the grasslands (the second largest sink), then forests, wetlands and various other sinks. So the increase each year in the air has been only about 18 to 19 GT CO₂. But we’re nearing the limits of that adaptation. In our warmer world, the oceans are near to becoming a carbon source, not a sink. Forests, including the Amazon, are also at risk.
And adding so much carbon to the atmosphere is creating more unnatural disasters, species die-offs and more. Forget the politics. This is just fact.
Yes, we should stop emitting. But however we do it, it is imperative that we begin removing carbon from the atmosphere. We need to remove ~20 gigatons CO₂e each year just to stay even. To return to safety, we need to pull out much more.
Wild ideas for removing carbon
Peter Fiekowsky wants to increase the ability of the ocean to absorb more CO₂. Ocean Iron Fertiliser would require millions of dollars to test it. If this works, many believe that it could remove two GT to dozens of GT a year.
Hugo Hinrichsen of Positive Polar wants to mimic one of nature’s ways of sequestering carbon: whale poop. Creating artificial whale poop out of organic waste and dropping it into the ocean where whales used to put theirs can remove somewhere between 2 and 64 GT per year. But at a cost.
Both of these options are far superior to mechanical carbon capture and storage (CCS), which if it even works—not a given—is horribly expensive. CCS clocks in at $600 to $1,000 per ton for direct air capture. Proposed geological storage costs an additional $2 to $58 per ton.
And the whole scheme is inadequate to the task. Total planned global CCS capacity for 2030 is approximately 435 million tons per year. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that in 2024 CCS removed a grand total of 50 million tons of CO₂. Not even close to the billions of tons we need.
No doubt these schemes are worth testing, but what if there were already a way to remove carbon profitably?
There is: regenerative agriculture, and believe it or not, cows.
Whoa, don’t we always hear that cows are the problem?
As Russ Conser says, “It’s not the cow, it’s the how.”
The way industrial farms feed cows with corn and soy rather than the grass that their systems were built to digest worsens the methane and other problems. If you don’t want to eat something with a face, that’s fine. But the fact remains that without vast herds of animals grazing the land, we will not solve the climate crisis. And when cows are on grass, the methanotrophic bacteria solve the methane problem. It’s fossil methane that is the problem.
Industrial agriculture is responsible for up to 30% of greenhouse gases, and it causes a lot of other harm, too. But regenerative agriculture, and particularly the holistic grazing of animals, reverses the harm and can sequester more CO₂ than humans now emit. And it can do so profitably.
Removing vast amounts of carbon—it’s been done before
Peter Fiekowsky says we’ve spent years waiting for the cavalry, but now we are the cavalry. (And remember, a cavalry requires horses, those other big grazing animals.)
The best comprehensive study of how grazing can sequester the needed amounts of carbon in the soil is by Professor Greg Retallack. Sixty million years ago the earth was at 1,000 parts per million (ppm) concentration of CO₂. When humans evolved, it was at 280 ppm. Where’d the carbon go?
Retallack shows that it largely went into the soil, driven by the co-evolution of grazing animals (initially pre-horses, which appeared about 30 million years ago—here came the cavalry). They were joined by vast herds of billions of grazing animals across the globe: antelope, bison, elk and deer in North America; as well as ancient cattle in Europe, wildebeest, zebra, giraffes and elephants in Africa, and Saiga antelope across Eurasia nibbling grass at the edges of forests. By the way, the atmosphere held 1,000 parts per million [ppm] concentration of CO₂—more than three times the amount present when humans evolved—even though the Earth was carpeted in forests. Which is to say, trees are great, but they are not the solution to the climate crisis.
Grazing animals and grasslands spread, sequestering vast amounts of the CO₂ from the atmosphere, and delivering an environment capable of nurturing human life. This is why the Great Plains of the US had 10 feet of black soil when the pioneers first came across it. That black was carbon. And nutrient-rich. It is an “existence proof” that massive amounts of carbon can durably be sequestered 3 meters deep under a biome of holistically grazed prairie grass.
We can do it again, replicating the Earth’s natural process of carbon removal. Agriculture-based sequestration is far more effective than planting trees, which, in a hotter, drier world, forests are dying and burning.
This is where the cows come in (or sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, horses…) When a grazing animal eats grass, or any plant, the roots slough poly-saccharides (sugars) which feed the mycorrhizal fungi, which mineralise the carbon in the soil brought in by roots, plant decay, manure, etc.
Before human agriculture, vast herds of grazing animals, dense-packed to protect themselves from predators, ate everything in front of them, trampled everything under them, fertilised everything behind them, and didn’t come back ‘til the grass regrew. They sequestered massive amounts of carbon in the soil. Managing animals this way—called holistic planned grazing—is a vital element of solving the climate crisis. Why carbon in the soil protects us
Capturing one extra ton of carbon per acre on all the world’s grasslands would sequester 3.5 GT of carbon. Regenerative agriculture experts believe that a sequestration potential of 10 GT carbon removal a year is feasible, and more is possible if land that is currently desertified is restored using holistic grazing.
This would sequester all current emissions and begin to remove the excess CO₂ now in the atmosphere. A back of the envelope calculation by scientists at Tufts University shows that using holistic grazing on ALL the world’s grasslands ( a big ‘IF’, but remember, regenerative grazing is more profitable) could return the earth to a far healthier and more stable ~300 ppm within 60 to 100 years.
Rodale Institute has calculated that if we used compost-based, organic vegetable production, it could absorb, on an annual basis, all of the anthropogenic carbon emissions. This is in addition to the carbon removal possible from regenerative grazing.
Organic farms are more productive, more profitable. The Soil Health institute studied 100 farms in the part of the US where 71% of corn and 67% of soy is grown. More than 97% of organic farmers reported increased resilience to extreme weather; 67% reported higher yields. They cut the cost to grow corn by $24 per acre. They cut the cost to grow soy by $1 per acre; farm profits increased on average $52 per acre for corn, $45 per acre for soy.
Projections by various analysts of how much carbon can be sequestered range from a lot to a huge amount. The difference is determined, in part, by whether scientists are measuring only to 30 cm depth, as many, including Dr. Rattan Lal, conventionally do, or, as holistic grazers do, to three meters. According to Lal, the best practices for agriculture can absorb 333 billion tons of carbon from 2020 to 2100, or about 4 gigatons of carbon per year. He estimates that carbon removal could decrease atmospheric carbon by just 157 ppm. However, Lal’s estimates do NOT include the best findings from regenerative grazing.
Dr. Richard Teague estimated that North America alone could sequester 0.8 GT of carbon per year just using holistic grazing . Although he did not make a global estimate, his calculations on carbon removal show a rate of 1.2 tons of carbon per acre per year. At 52.5 million square kilometers (roughly 21 billion acres) the world’s grasslands cover 54% of the earth’s land surface.
Basic math shows a global potential of over 25 GT per year—just from grazing. The world’s 200 million pastoralists, whose livelihoods depend on breeding and herding livestock, may be the real climate heroes.
The people proving it works
Ranchers stumbled into this almost by accident.
Gabe Brown, a commodity corn and soybean farmer in North Dakota, was going broke. Starting in the early 1990s, to cut his costs and survive, he adopted five practices that now define regenerative agriculture:
- Minimal disturbance of the soil—no-till and low till
- Cover on the soil year around—no bare soil
- Living root in the soil year around
- Diversity of cover crops/ cash crops
- Animal impact
Brown was just trying to cut costs. So when he turned his cows out to eat down the cover crops on his farm to clear the fields and save buying winter hay for feed, he wasn’t trying to mimic the process the earth uses to decarbonise. When the animal impact jump-started the sequestration of carbon and nutrients in his soil, he was astonished to find that his fields went from under 2% soil organic matter to over 6%. Native prairie soil is 7%.
He was equally surprised to find that carbon in the soil dramatically increases water holding capacity. This has major implications not just for productivity, but also for withstanding increasing extreme weather. Every 1% increase in soil organic matter (SOM)—the increase of which is now thought by many as the defining hallmark of regenerative agriculture—adds ~10 tons of carbon per acre and 20,000 gallons of water holding capacity. These two factors drive the increased efficiency of regenerative agriculture.
More carbon and organic matter mean greater ability to absorb water. This helps keep intense rains from causing floods. It also helps keep soil moist and plants alive in a drought. At Brown’s farm, in 1993, infiltration—the ability of soil to absorb water—was .5 inch per hour. In 2023, it was 32 inches per hour, meaning the richer soil became far better able to absorb and hold onto water. That’s why a key solution to the growing prevalence of drought is putting more carbon in the soil.
Brown’s Ranch now averages an extraordinary 96 tons of CO₂ e per acre in the top 48 inches. He started with 3 inches of topsoil; he now has over 4 feet, increasing every year. As Brown profiles in his book, Dirt to Soil, industrial farms are fields of dirt, largely sterile ground that requires chemical fertilisation to grow anything. Healthy soil, in contrast, is alive, its microorganisms delivering nutrients to the plants, in a symbiosis of fertility.
One ton of topsoil per acre is as thick as a sheet of paper. A dime’s thickness is roughly five tons of soil. And fragile. Uncovered soil washes away, blows away, stripping fertility and any carbon that has accumulated in it. Ploughing exposes soil to sunlight, killing the beneficial microbiology that could otherwise sequester the carbon, and driving the emission of oxides of nitrogen, further losing fertility. Brown’s five principles were evolved through necessity, but they are integral to what makes this practice regenerative. Not ploughing, keeping cover on the ground, ensuring diversity of plant types and especially regular animal impact is what protects soil. It pulls carbon dioxide out of the air into the soil to become mineralised carbon that is durably sequestered. It also drives profitability.
In 1993 Brown was making $17 per acre. By 2014, his regeneratively grown corn required no fertiliser or other chemicals to deliver 142 bushels per acre. This cost him $1.44 per bushel, which he sold for $3.50. Brown’s neighbour fertilised corn at 100 pounds of 46-0-0 chemical fertiliser per acre at a cost of $3.25 per acre, to achieve 114.6 bushels per acre. That’s nearly double the cost, with nearly 20% less production—and less nutritious production.
Brown jokes he’d rather sign the back of the check than the front of it. By 2023, his profitability was $158 per acre. Today, Brown’s Ranch is a highly successful 5000-acre enterprise with crop yields 20 to 25 percent higher than the average yields in his county.
As Brown shared how and why the regenerative approach works so well, people noticed: General Mills hired him to help develop their regenerative agriculture principles. The film Common Ground profiled what Brown and many other regenerative farmers have accomplished.
From North Dakota to India
There are 570 million farmers in the world, 90% of them are small-holder farmers, many of them women. They produce 80% of the world’s food. Development experts have found that women, especially, tend to build social capital, without which scaling does not happen. That makes them a good investment, especially in value chain financing, and delivering value for ecosystem credits.
This finding is corroborated by the work of Vijay Kumar, an Indian agricultural extension agent. Kumar realised that the women he was tasked with empowering had, first, to find ways to feed their families. He took Gabe Brown’s five principles and added four more:
- Use only indigenous seeds;
- Use no poisons, such as herbicides, pesticides, or industrial fertiliser;
- Use instead biostimulants home-made from cow manure and other local materials;
- Coat the seeds with home-made mycorrhizal inoculants.
These practices tripled productivity and doubled revenues. As the increased carbon in the soil increased water holding capacity, farmers could plant and harvest year around, not only right before the monsoons. Kumar is enabling India to repurpose the $57 billion a year of subsidies that the government had been paying for fertiliser.
Kumar’s Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) found that there is a tipping point when 10% of farmers switch to these methods. Now spread to more than a million Indian farmers across nine states in India, the practices are scaling steadily due to their economic benefits. APCNF’s goal is to reach the 6 million farmers throughout Andhra Pradesh by 2035, demonstrating the potential of “natural farming” as a solution that can be used globally to deal with the fertiliser crisis immediately, the climate crisis and the urgent need to feed the third of a billion people now at risk of starving.
From India to Zambia
Scalability and profitability garnered global attention. Representatives from over 50 countries expressed interest in adapting the model to their regions. Kumar and the organisation he leads, Rythu Sadhikara Samstha (RySS) have joined with NOW Partners Foundation (NOW) to adapt the practices to countries in Africa and Asia. These sites are already showing promising results.
In Zambia, NOW and RySS joined forces with the Zambian Ministry of Agriculture, the Salesian Sisters and the Jesuit brothers—organisations with well-established farmer networks—to establish pilots throughout the country. After a first year of operation, the model has been successfully adapted and implemented in local conditions, in some cases increasing productivity seven-fold.
As in India, the process enabled farmers to grow, for the first time, during the dry season—traditionally seen as unsuitable for agriculture. This delivered consistent food sources from the multiple crops harvested throughout the year, rather than dependence on a mono-crop. In several pilots, natural farming crops survived storms that caused heavy damage to the immediately adjacent, chemically-farmed fields.
From Arizona to you
Now the scientists are stepping in. Peter Byck at Arizona State University worked with teams of scientists to produce the film: “Roots so deep you can see the devil down there.” It documents research on five pairs of farms separated by a fence line. In each case, on one side of the fence is a holistically managed farm. On the other side is a “conventional” farm using chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Both have the same soil type, same climate. Byck did the same research on each farm over four years. Teams of scientists studied soil carbon, soil nitrogen, water infiltration, microbial life, insects, birds, forage and nutrient density, greenhouse gas cycling: CO2, CO2e, nitrous oxides, methane, animal wellbeing and farmer family wellbeing.
They found that the holistic farms are 4 times more powerful as a carbon sink. The scientists measured temporal carbon flows and stocks over a 2-year period with eddy covariance flux towers, which continuously measure gas exchange between the land surface (soil and vegetation) and the atmosphere. That means they can track greenhouse gas movement over extensive ranges. One holistic farm sequestered 15.5 tons CO2 vs 1 ton sequestered by its conventional neighbour. There were 25% more active microbes on the holistic side, and more insects. On chemical farms growing a monoculture, this might be a problem, but what drives life above ground is the life below ground. For every insect that is a pest there are 17 beneficial insects.
The holistic farms needed no artificial fertiliser, saving them costs every year. There was 9% more soil nitrogen on the holistic side, but with no cost for synthetic nitrogen. How can that be? There is abundant nitrogen in the air. The diversity of plant life, combined with animal impact, pulls it into the soil. One farmer who used to pay $90,000 each year for synthetic nitrogen now pays nothing. He commented, “I wish I had the money we spent over the years before we went holistic.” After the Ukraine war drove up prices, many big conventional farmers paid $150,000 a year. Today fertiliser is completely unobtainable in many areas.
The holistic farms averaged water infiltration of 3.5 inches each hour vs 1.5 inches on the conventional farms. That might not sound like a big difference. But one acre inch is 27,000 gallons of water. On a 1,000-acre farm, that equals 54 million gallons of water gained on the holistic side of the fence compared to conventional. When water infiltrates, rather than run off or even flood, it is not washing away soil, nutrients and carbon. Instead, this improves water quality.
Adding up all the flows of carbon, methane and nitrous oxide, the holistic farms removed more than 8 tons of carbon per acre per year. The conventional farms still sequester carbon but less than 2 tons of carbon per acre.
Regardless of how hot the planet gets, we all need to eat. And as the Kentucky writer and farm advocate, Wendell Berry said, “Eating is an agricultural act.”
Higher nutrient density
Regenerative agriculture delivers more food, and food with higher nutrient density. Dr David Montgomery’s highly regarded recent study showed significantly higher nutrient density in regeneratively grown crops: Regenerative crops delivered 64% higher vitamins, 290% higher essential fatty acids, 76% lower oxidative stress markers:
“Averaged across all nine farm pairings the regenerative farm crops had 34% more vitamin K (10% more to 57% more), 15% more vitamin E (11% less to 70% more), 14% more vitamin B1 (17% less to 2 times more), and 17% more vitamin B2 (17% less to 3 times more).
The crops from the regenerative farms also had 15% more total carotenoids (6% less to 48% more), 20% more total phenolics (14% less to more than twice as many), and 22% more total phytosterols (25% less to more than 2 times more).
In addition, regeneratively grown crops had 11% more calcium (1% less to 43% more), 16% more phosphorus (10% less to twice as much), and 27% more copper (16% less to twice as much).
Cabbage from the regenerative farm had 20%, 41%, and 70% more vitamins C, K, and E, respectively, as well as more than twice the phenolics and phytosterols, and 48% more carotenoids than cabbage from the conventional field.
Corn, soy and sorghum grown under regenerative practices respectively, had 17%, 22% and 23% more zinc. In addition, peas and sorghum grown using regenerative practices had more vitamins, and regenerative soy and sorghum had more copper.
However, averaged across all crops the regenerative ones also had less vitamin B6 and manganese, and regenerative soy had less vitamin C and several B vitamins (B1, B3 and B6). Overall, more substantial differences were observed in cabbage, peas and sorghum than in corn and soybeans.”
The Montgomery study, in sum, confirmed that farms that use regenerative agriculture practices such as no-till farming, cover crops and diverse crop rotations and animal impact produced crops with higher levels of vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals than farms using conventional practices:
“Regenerative farms produce crops with higher soil organic matter levels, soil health scores, and levels of certain vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals…
Crops from regenerative no-till vegetable farms, one in California and the other in Connecticut, had higher levels of phytochemicals than values reported previously from New York supermarkets…
Wheat from adjacent regenerative and conventional no-till fields in northern Oregon found a higher density of mineral micronutrients in the regenerative crop….
A comparison of the unsaturated fatty acid profile of beef and pork raised on one of the regenerative farms to a regional health-promoting brand and conventional meat from local supermarkets, found higher levels of omega-3 fats and a more health-beneficial ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats.” Grass beef is higher in omega 3s, and fatty acids than wild caught salmon.
You are what your food ate.
No kidding folks, we’re in trouble
We know how to solve the climate crisis. It’s just not happening fast enough.
There are two halves to solving the climate crisis at a profit: cut current emissions by replacing essentially all fossil energy with renewable energy (now everywhere cheaper than fossil fuels). Do this and the challenge gets a lot easier. Then we remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere by organic farming and holistic grazing, rolling climate change backwards at a profit.
The transition from fossil fuels to renewables is happening—far too slowly, but the business case and the inevitability are clear. Now almost all new generating capacity being built is renewable. Electric vehicles will increasingly replace fossil cars because they are superior. Over their lifetime they are cheaper, and soon will be cheaper to buy. The Chinese BYD Gull costs only $7,000and has a 300-mile range.
Regenerative agriculture is the fastest growing form of agriculture.
Despite this, official forecasts show the world breaching the aspiration to hold additional warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels perhaps as early as this year. Preserving a climate safe future for humanity will require not only displacing fossil emissions, but removing the excess CO2 from the atmosphere.
The economic costs of global warming were made clear by a piece by Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, when he wrote: “Entire regions are becoming uninsurable.” No government will realistically be able to cover the damage when multiple high-cost events happen in rapid succession. If multiple high-cost events happen within short time spans—as climate projections expect—then no government can realistically cover the damages without either austerity or collapse. A systemic risk “threatening the very foundation of the financial sector,” because a lack of insurance means other financial services become unavailable: “This is a climate-induced credit crunch.”
Thallinger wrote that climate damage cannot be insured against, covered by governments, or adapted to. “That means no more mortgages, no new real estate development, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.”
“This applies not only to housing, but to infrastructure, transportation, agriculture and industry,” he continued. “The economic value of entire regions—coastal, arid, wildfire-prone—will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice, rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like.”
This is what your future looks like. Despite this, politicians say we shouldn’t talk about climate: people don’t want to hear about it. Policymakers say there is no political will.
In the face of such a challenge, people struggle for hope.I find hope a vacuous emotion.
We need courage and conviction. We do not know what the future holds, but still we must act.
Become a climate hero…join us at COPx.
A footnote on industrial agriculture’s impact:
Human activity emitted 42.4 billion metric tons (gigatons or Gt) per year of CO₂ in 2024, and that number continues to rise. The industrial food system is responsible for roughly a quarter of those emissions. Agriculture has pulled 133 gigatons of carbon from the soil since humans began farming, or roughly as much as has been lost through deforestation. Some estimates put the loss at 6.8% of all soil carbon. In contrast, Gabe Brown built his soil carbon from essentially nothing to over 8% over about 20 years using regenerative agriculture, including minimal tillage and fertiliser, diverse crops and the use of grazing animals.
Industrial, chemical agriculture is a large carbon emitter. Fertiliser use: In 2023-2024, global fertiliser consumption was projected at 195 million metric tons. Between 1.9 and 2.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced for every tonne of ammonia made from gas; shipping and distribution of fertiliser can add another 2 to 5 tonnes to the tally. Regenerative agriculture requires no artificial fertiliser, so that burden goes away.
Industrial confined animal feeding is a massive emitter of carbon. But regenerative animal grazing is the opposite. Remember, cows were never intended to eat corn and soy — it makes them sick. So feedlot operators load them with antibiotics, which makes us sick. Cows were intended to eat grass, and when they do, they become a climate solution. Yes, cows burp methane, but when cows are on grass, the methanotrophic bacteria solve this problem.
First published by Climate and Capital Media.
