Solutions

Following is a brief description of the strategies and processes that Carbon Farmers of America will deploy in our work to grow new topsoil and reverse global warming.

Holistic Management

   Holistic Management is a decision-making framework and set of planning procedures (financial, grazing and land planning) developed by Allan Savory and many thousands of ranchers and farmers over the last fifty years. Holistic Management has a decades-long track record of increasing land health, social well-being and farmer profitability around the world. Holistic Management is especially noteworthy in that practitioners are consistently able to reverse desertification in environments with seasonal rainfall, also called “brittle” environments

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  Originally a grazing planning procedure that grew from Savory’s work to reverse desertification, Holistic Management has grown into a framework for making decisions that are ecologically, socially and financially sound in the short and long term.

  Allan Savory’s critical breakthroughs have been translated on the ground into living proof that grassfarmers are the front line in reversing desertification, restoring biodiversity, creating new topsoil, stabilizing global weather change and ushering in a new era of solar economics.
The grazing and animal impact of our livestock, along with holistic decision-making, are the primary tools we have to do this.  The planning procedure called Holistic Planned Grazing that Allan developed is a singularly simple, comprehensive aid in profitably restoring the topsoil that sustains us all.

For more information, please see:
www.holisticmanagement.com and www.managingwholes.com 

The Keyline Plan

  P.A. Yeomans discovered over 50 years ago in Australia that using a subsoiler plow to aerate and mechanically loosen grasslands after grazing and prior to rain or irrigation led to astounding rates of topsoil formation.  The principle is that the grazing of pastures prunes off large amounts of carbon-rich roots, which compost readily in the high oxygen, moist environment of land that has been subsoiled.  As the plants re-grow, nightly carbohydrate exudates from plant roots nourish soil biology. After the grassland plants have re-grown their root systems, the process is repeated. Creating multiple biological climaxes in the soil through grazing and increasingly deep subsoiling yields new, stable, high organic-matter topsoil.
 Three years of twice yearly subsoiling, in concert with good grazing,
can create 18”-24”of new topsoil that is easily maintained through
continued planned grazing.  This new topsoil contains vast quantities of captured atmospheric carbon dioxide.  It also makes for very productive land.

  Further, P.A. Yeomans developed a planning procedure, The Keyline Plan, for developing agricultural and urban landscapes that are based on the water shapes of the land. In addition to being physically beautiful, Keyline landscapes make full use of the water that falls on the land to create and maintain highly fertile topsoil indefinitely.

  P.A.’s son Ken Yeomans has an excellent web site offering Keyline design services at www.keyline.com.au . Water For Every Farm, The Keyline Plan, can also be purchased there.

  Another of P.A.’s sons, Allan Yeomans, is the owner of the Keyline Plow Company, and the author of Priority One:  Together We Can Beat
Global Warming.  The entire book can be downloaded for free from http://www.yeomansplow.com.au

  The central message of this important book is this:  excess atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and consequent weather instability are the primary threats to humanity's future. New topsoil can be created simply and quickly.   Carbon sequestration through the rapid formation of high organic matter topsoil is the backbone of a strategy to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to pre-industrial levels within a decade.

  Allan Yeoman’s book and our practice of Keyline soil development have served as primary inspiration for the founding farmers of Carbon Farmers of America. 

Further strategies for rapidly increasing soil organic matter and growing new topsoil include:

• Biological subsoiling (using root crops and deep tap-rooted plants)
• Composting
• Compost tea
• Microbial innoculants
• Microbial stimulants
• Pasture cropping/double cropping
• Charcoal soil amendments (e.g. Amazon dark earths and the Eprida Process)
• Paramagnetic rock dusts
• Biodynamic preparations
• Soil mineral testing and balancing, rock dusts and sea minerals
• Viktor Schauberger’s insights into soil fertility
• Cover crops
• Green manures
• Mulches
• Seaweed products
• Recycled green wastes
• Biosolids
• Humic substances
• Earthworm and dung beetle re-introduction

Carbon Farmers of America will employ all of the above strategies, and more, in differing combinations and sequences, depending on the unique circumstances of each farm.