The New Agricultural Revolution

There is a new agricultural revolution breaking out, as dramatic as the first one. This one sparked not by the Black Death, the bubonic plague that swept through Europe killing one third of the population in the 14th century, but by environmental disasters triggered by Global Warming.
The New Agricultural Revolution will see the ideology of soil health and cooperation with natural processes become the dominant paradigm as the old 'scientific agriculture' paradigm is swept away rapidly. The Spirit of Capitalism, the profit motive turns a whole generation of farmers into stewards of the soil. Instead of chasing diminishing returns, they are making more money by NOT ploughing and spraying and sowing and supering and spraying then harvesting, then burning the stubble.

We could be at one of those turning points of history, like the American Revolution or the storming of the Bastile. This is an incredible convergence of circumstances. Against a backdrop of widespread acceptance of the reality of Global Warming and the concept of sequestration... We have revelations about Carbon in Soil. We have world's-best-practice zero till methodologies in pasture cropping.. We have rotational grazing becoming common knowledge. We have a fifth column of regenerative farmers who are reaching critical mass. We have a wave of tree-change families, refugees from the city who are open to new ideas. We have government bodies tasked with saving the nation's greatest living asset, the soil. We have farmers hungering for returns that reflect the risks they take, holding properties that are valued far beyond their productive capacity under current management, distorting the economics such that it could be more attractive to those who inherit to sell than to go on working the land. And we have a generation of young people who don't want to inherit the title 'farmer' or 'grazier'.

We have catastrophic weather patterns creating a sense of urgency and soon to be near panic.

Suddenly we have this left of field solution. Soil Carbon Sequestration. It's madness. Impossible. Can't be done.

Remember the Mayor of New York consulting the Archbishop in the movie Ghost Busters? While ghosts terrorised the City and the EPA guy ranted "You're not going to believe these people. They are charlatans, frauds..." Mayor: "Get him out of here." The Mayor's thinking: "They're our only hope." And he's right.

There will be lots of EPA GUYS trying to convince the Mayor that we are charlatans. The EPA GUYS have got no answers. They have failed. So everyone else has to fail.

If we can focus the money energies sequestered in bank accounts of multinational polluters on the people responsible for managing our soils all around the world, especially impoverished countries who can come off such a low base and for whom the dollars would do so much good. If we can harness that energy to turn back the tide of destruction of soils and start a new paradigm. We can make history. We may only need to give it a nudge. Like the butterfly flapping its wings causing a tidal wave on the other side of the world, via quantum mechanics.

"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when serves,
Or lose our ventures."
Julius Caesar, IV,iii,217

That's one vision of what we could be starting now. Even something smaller would be good to achieve.

And I believe when it's all done and dusted, they'll erect a statue to each one of you somewhere in the world. But that won't matter to you, because you'll always have mother nature whispering her thanks in your ear.