Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
H
OLISTIC
C
OWBOYS AND
C
ARBON
F
ARMERS
I
n his book,
The Carbon Fields
, under the heading 'No More Climate Change', Graham
Harvey writes:
Our food supply hides a big, fat life-denying secret. It's something no one in the food
and farming business ever wants to talk about. Yet it has the potential to transform the lives
of everyone on this planet as well as the lives of future generations. It's the power of soils to
take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and to end for all time the threat of global warm-
ing.
Harvey is the agricultural story editor of the British radio soap opera
The Archers
, and
if you are wondering why David and Ruth Archer spent the winter of 2008/9 fencing their
pastures off into small paddocks, then this chapter on grass farming and the sequestration
of carbon in the soil offers an explanation. Be warned, however, that this may be all that is
successfully explained. The carbon fields, I have discovered, are a minefield, and of all the
chapters in this topic, this is the one that has given me most trouble and that delivers the
most verbiage for the least amount of solid conclusion. You can safely skip it without im-
pairing your understanding of subsequent chapters. On the other hand, if you are intrigued
by the agricultural heresies that can be loosely grouped under the heading 'grass farming',
read on. Harvey continues:
Though you'll seldom hear it mentioned, the world's soils are the largest terrestrial
reservoir of carbon. A sizable part of the damaging extra load of greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere today comes from soil carbon released when we switched from tradi-
tional farming to intensive grain growing. The good news is that it is a process we
could easily reverse. By moving to sustainable ways of growing our food - particularly
through the use of grazing animals - we could quickly put the excess carbon back in
the soil.
1
Harvey's promise of instant eco-salvation, through what is known as carbon sequestra-
tion, sounds a bit too good to be true; and the odour of conspiracy theory with which he
surrounds it makes it seem all the more suspect. It is manifestly untrue to say that this mat-
