Excellent piece in the Valley News this weekend about some farmers trying to figure out how to make agriculture part of climate improvement instead of climate degradation:

Farmers are envisioning ways to harmonize the production of food and the sequestration of carbon:
“Given how much of our environment we’ve degraded, sustainability isn’t even enough of a goal — we really need to focus on regeneration.”

The immediate push: “carbon farming” (getting to the soil to absorb more); solar power and eventually electric tractors when they get better. The whole article is here.

On a related note, the Interchange podcast had an excellent interview recently about fertilizer production, which is a MUCH bigger contributor to the climate emergency than I realized, not to mention a badly designed industry that is incredibly unsafe, as the Beirut port explosion demonstrated. It focuses on an interesting company working on a technology that allows fertilizer production right at the farm rather than in giant factories – distributed fertilizer production! Here it is.

By the way, check the bottom of the Valley News Article and you’ll see this in the reporter’s ID: “Claire Potter is a Report for America corps member.” Report for America is an interesting non-profit that helps pay for reporters to be based at newspapers around the country. The Concord Monitor has a couple positions partly supported by it. It’s a very effective way to help stem the collapse of local journalism in the U.S.