Organic Farmers are Climate Farmers!
As the foundation responsible for all our tasty, nourishing food, soils are of the utmost importance to us at Joyfully Organic Farm. We study, labor for, and replenish our soils. We know them by name, study their chemical composition, their structure, their strengths and weaknesses. Much of our work contributes to soil health in one way or another. That focus on the foundation of it all is one of the major reasons why Vermont organic farmers are, frankly, climate heroes. Soils are powerful matrices–complex ecosystems with the potential to fight climate change in a number of ways, namely by sequestering greenhouse gasses.
Soils are the basis of food production not just because they are the substrate in which our food grows, but because they play an important role in the cycling of many things: water, nutrients, and life itself, to name a few. Greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, well-known for their role in climate change, move in and out of soils at varying rates depending on soil health. Robust soils sequester these gasses in biological processes. When gasses are captured in this way, these otherwise dangerous compounds actually serve as nutrients for a rich web of life present in healthy soils, further improving soil health.
How do you get robust soils? Organic practices like composting, avoiding disturbance, encouraging on-farm biodiversity, and cover cropping all invigorate soil health.
And nothing succeeds like success: once the soil’s capacity to sequester gasses is strengthened, it sets off a virtuous cycle of healthier soil→more sequestration→healthier soil→more sequestration, which raises the soil’s ability to sequester gasses at an exponential rate.
To boil it down: when greenhouse gasses are emitted into the atmosphere, they accelerate climate change; when they’re sequestered in healthy soil, they slow it. Now that’s climate-friendly farming!
Wendell Berry once famously wrote that “eating is an agricultural act”. When you eat with our farm, that very act supports the sequestration of greenhouse gasses, and in so doing, reduces climate change. As conscious stewards of Ontario soils, your local organic farmers take pride in sequestration, a feat we couldn’t perform without your support