Gear News: The North Face Launches New Carbon-Offsetting Beanie

Author: Hayley Helms | Published: November 13, 2017

The North Face has come up with a unique way of offsetting the carbon effects that are associated with modern farming by implementing new practices at the ranch that produces the wool for their “climate beneficial” Cali Wool beanie ($45).

One of the brand’s suppliers, Bare Ranch, located in Sunrise Valley at the border of California and Nevada, has implemented methods that, according to Fast Company, “sequester around 4,000 metric tons of CO2, offsetting the emissions from roughly 850 cars” per year.

The process started when Fibershed, an organization that focuses on regional textile production, reached out to Bare Ranch as part of its research; they then worked with The North Face to help develop a “carbon farming” plan.

In all farming, carbon is produced. It’s part of the natural cycle of growing crops. The key in reducing the effects of carbon emissions isn’t to completely get rid of carbon – that’s just not possible. Instead, farms and ranches can redirect that carbon, and make sure that it stays in the soil, not in our atmosphere.

Methods of removing more carbon from the air than produced at Bare Ranch include planting intermittent, short term crops between crops that need to be replanted every few years, avoiding bare soil where carbon can escape, adding complimentary crops to fields that help enhance soil, planting trees that will lock carbon into the soil, and managing where sheep graze all help keep carbon in check.

For The North Face, they determined that the most environmental impact of its products happened in production and manufacturing, which is why they switched to wool, which has a lower impact than other materials.

The North Face plans to add more wool into their 2018 line, but acknowledges scaling the program to produce more, while remaining sustainable, will be a challenge.


How Carbon Farming Can Help Solve Climate Change

Author: David Burton | Published: November 9, 2017



Soils are traditionally rich in carbon. They can contain as much as five per cent carbon by weight, in the form of soil organic matter — plant and animal matter in various stages of decomposition.



Plowing breaks apart soil aggregates and allows microorganisms to eat the soil organic compounds. In the short-term, the increased microbial activity releases nutrients, boosting crop productivity. In the long-term the loss of structure reduces the soil’s ability to hold water and resist erosion. Ultimately, crop productivity drops.

How can we make soil organic matter?




Evolution of Organic


EVOLUTION of ORGANIC is not just a history, but looks to exciting and important futures:

•     The next generation who are broadening organic into no-till and urban farms; Latino growers and eco-fashion; even raising salmon in flooded rice fields
•     Carbon farming as a climate solution, taking carbon dioxide out of the air and putting it in the ground where it belongs – “the best news on the planet”
•     What lies “beyond organic,” from soil microbiology as the new frontier to visions of regenerative agriculture. As interviewee Kelly Mulville says,



Nature’s Stewards

U.S. Rice Farmers Embrace Sustainable Agriculture and Earn First-Ever Carbon Credits for Rice Production


 -from Leroy Isbell’s obituary in the Stuttgart Daily Leader, 2014

Chris Isbell didn’t set out to make history.  He was just following in his father’s footsteps.  

But on June 14, 2017, Chris Isbell and six other farmers – two from California and five from Arkansas and Mississippi – did just that. The first ever carbon credits generated from rice farmers were sold to Microsoft, all because these pioneers tested out a radical idea – that by implementing conservation practices on their crops, rice farmers could reduce methane emissions and thereby generate a carbon credit that could later be sold on the carbon market. Their voluntary conservation practices not only generated carbon credits but also reduced energy consumption and water use, critical to both regions.

The sale of the carbon offset credits, managed by Terra Global Capital, to Natural Capital Partners on behalf of its client Microsoft, rewards the farmers for their activities and demonstrates credibly measured environmental benefits. “Being the first of a kind emission reductions from sustainable rice production, Microsoft valued the innovation by farmers and the investment in technology to catalyze measuring and monitoring emission reductions,” said Rob Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist, Microsoft.  Read the joint press release by Terra Global Capital and the American Carbon Registry.


About agricultural sustainability, Mark Isbell – Chris Isbell’s son and fourth generation innovator – says that “It’s a combination of something we do with others, i.e., we can’t do it alone, and building on the knowledge our ancestors have passed down to us.”


Green in the Desert: Local Farmer Captures Carbon to Grow Food, Feed Community

Author: Chilton Tippin | Published: October 7, 2017

Shahid Mustafa is the first to admit his farm might not look as orderly as those you see while driving down the highway.

At Taylor Hood Farms, you won’t find manicured rows or flood-irrigated fields. Nor will you notice bed after bed of a single crop like alfalfa, commodity cotton or chile peppers.

To hear Mustafa say it, there’s a little bit of chaos in nature. Some of that chaos reflects in the appearance of his farm, where red amaranth grows tall and sweet carrots fill beds near lemon cucumbers and artichokes. But embracing nature’s way, according to Mustafa, could offer key solutions to some of the region’s most urgent environmental and health difficulties—even if some chaos is part of the package.

“The regenerative way is to work with nature, instead of against it,” he said. “Our philosophy is that the best food comes from the best soil, so most of our focus and attention is on enriching or enhancing the soil that we have.”

In the Paso del Norte region, Mustafa is pioneering an innovative approach to farming called regenerative agriculture. The practice could help restore topsoils degraded by conventional farming techniques, to say nothing of its implications for ensuring residents have consistent access to healthy foods.


Importance of Working Landscapes to California’s Economy and Climate Change

Author: Stephanie Larson and Adam Livingston | Published: September 27, 2017

To accelerate California’s policy leadership in the face of global crises like water scarcity, climate change and uneven economic development between urban and rural areas, it is essential to recognize of the importance of the state’s natural capital, especially in relation to working landscapes and rural economies.

The California Economic Summit defines working landscapes to include farmland, ranches, forest, wetlands, mines, water bodies and other natural resource lands, both private and public. Carbon is the energy currency of most biological systems, including agricultural ecosystems. All agricultural production originates from the process of plant photosynthesis, which uses sunshine to combine carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air with water and minerals from the soil to produce plant material, both above and below ground.

Agriculture is the ONE sector that can transform from a net emitter of CO2 to a net sequestered of CO2.

There is no other human-managed realm with this potential. Common agricultural practices, including driving a tractor, tilling the soil, grazing, result in the return of CO2 to the air. However, all farming is “carbon farming” because all agricultural production depends upon plant photosynthesis to move carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into the plant, where it is transformed into agricultural products, whether food, flora, fuel or fiber.

Agriculture contributes only 9 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions in the US (EPA); and agricultural landscapes, particularly grassland/rangelands, have great potential to function as a sponge for carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. The maximum capacity of soil to store organic carbon is determined by soil type (percent clay); management practices implemented to maximize plant growth and minimize losses of organic carbon from soil can increase organic carbon storage in soil. Keeping working lands “working” can result in long-term carbon storage (decades to centuries or more) in soils.


Carbon Farming: An Introduction

Author: Tobias Roberts | Published: July 7, 2017 

As we struggle to find ways to deal with the excess amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, much attention has been given to high-tech solutions and cutting fossil fuel use. While these are good and worthy discussions to have, carbon farming offers an opportunity to revolutionize the agricultural sector to improve soil and store excess atmospheric carbon where it belongs: in the ground.


We hear all of the time about the dangers that come with excess amounts of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. During the last century or so, our civilization has released enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the air through the burning of fossil fuels, the deforestation of our forests, and the degradation of our soils.

Plants breathe carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. That seems like a pretty good compliment to us humans who do just the opposite. As our human quest for domination of the planet has increased, however, we have thrown that balance into turmoil.

Plants can take carbon dioxide floating around in the atmosphere and turn it into plant biomass. As those plants eventually die, their organic material decomposes into fertile top soil which is filled with carbon. The carbon dioxide that was floating around in the atmosphere causing global warming and climate change, is thus placed back into the soil through the process of healthy soil growth.

The main problem with this apparently simple and reasonable solution is that our current, industrial agricultural methods do nothing to promote the storing of carbon in the soil. Instead of promoting the growth of diverse and abundant plant biomass, we clear cut forests (the ecosystem with the densest biomass) for pasture lands. Instead of growing cover crops to add biomass to the soil, we use glyphosate and other herbicides to kill off any and all plant growth that “threatens” our monoculture grain crops.

The excessive tillage of soils year after year actually takes carbon out of the soil and sends it into the atmosphere. Farming, then, instead of taking carbon out of the atmosphere and placing it into the soil is one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
What is Carbon Sequestration and Carbon Farming?

Carbon Sequestration is a fancy scientific term that denotes the storage of carbon in a stable solid form. In other words, the opposite of carbon dioxide gas that is floating around our atmosphere in excessive quantities. Carbon sequestration occurs when plants have chemical reactions that turn the carbon dioxide gas into inorganic compounds such as calcium and magnesium.


Regenerative Agriculture Initiative Seminar: Rebecca Burgess

Published: February 9, 2017 

Rebecca Burgess, executive director of Fibershed, speaks at the Regenreative Agiruclture Initative at Chico State University in Febuary of 2017. Fibershed, a non–profit organization, develops regional and regenerative fiber systems on behalf of independent working producers, by expanding opportunities to implement carbon farming, forming catalytic foundations to rebuild regional manufacturing, and through connecting end-users to farms and ranches through public education.


A Farm in Mexico Is Growing a Solution to Climate Change

Published: April 26, 2017 

Ricardo Romero inherited a former cattle ranch in Veracruz, Mexico, from his father decades ago. Since then, he’s turned the land into the Las Cañadas Farm Cooperative, a place that’s at the forefront of a new agriculture technique called carbon farming.

When plants grow, they draw carbon from the air and deposit it in the soil. Carbon farming is a simple way to grow crops and manage soil that encourages the buildup of carbon in the ground. Over 200 food companies, nongovernmental organizations, and scientists have endorsed the technique for countering rapidly warming temperatures around the world due to greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.


Local Farmers Sowing Seeds of Carbon Farming

Author: Stephanie Hiller | Published: April 5, 2017 

This year, the third warmest in recorded history, spring has come a month early, with regions all across the United States experiencing May temperatures in March. While warmer temperatures are welcome after a cold, wet winter, the cause is not.

Oceans are warming and rising, and last year was the fourth consecutive year of mass seal pup strandings along local beaches due to reduced populations of anchovies and sardines. Glaciers are melting and collapsing at record rates. Heat waves and fires are likely to threaten our placid summers. Worse disasters loom in our children’s future.

Despite what the Trump administration says, climate change is here. As Naomi Klein pointed out in a 2011 article in The Nation, climate deniers know its consequences full-well: Addressing climate change means not only ending the flow of their black gold—it’s the end of their entire way of life.

“To lower global emissions,” she writes, “can only be done by radically reordering our economic and political systems in many ways antithetical to their ‘free market belief system.’” Hence, oil companies have invested billions to convince much of the voting public that climate change is a hoax and accomplished the ultimate coup d’état with the installation of a like-minded government that will raise the temperature, and the consequences, even more.

But we still have a chance to pull back from our race to the edge. There is a climate-change solution that can take root at the local level which can actually reverse climate change by at least 40 percent. By changing the way we grow food, we can actually draw down carbon from the atmosphere and put it to good use where it belongs: In the soil. Call it carbon farming.

Healthy Soils

North Bay farmers have led the way with these techniques, and with the help of climate-advocacy groups, they won state support to promote a program that just might save the world.

The California Healthy Soils Initiative (CHSI), launched on January 11 in Sacramento by the National Resource Conservation Service and the California Department of Food and Agriculture, encourages farmers to adopt carbon-friendly farming methods by offering grants and training assistance. Grant applications will be accepted later this spring.

Judging from the number of people who turned out for the September “Building Partnerships on Healthy Soil” summit—more than 200 for the conference itself and many more via webcast—interest in this carbon-friendly “regenerative” soil-management program is growing. It can’t come too soon: The very existence of topsoil is at risk.

The World Wildlife Fund reports that more than half of the topsoil worldwide has been lost over the past 150 years, mostly due to industrial agriculture. Some sources say that the loss is more like 70 percent. It’s possible that in 60 years, the topsoil on heavily grazed and monocropped farmlands will be gone, leaving nothing but an impervious layer of hardpan in its place, conditions that led to the Dust Bowl phenomenon in parts of the United States and Canada in the 1930s. Without its thin skin of topsoil, fertile land turns to desert, a process that has been accelerating all over the world in large part because of intensive industrial agriculture.

But David Runsten, policy director of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), says that agriculture can be part of the solution. He began working with the California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN), a nonprofit that advocates for climate-friendly agricultural policy, in 2009 to get state officials to embrace carbon farming.

“Finally, the governor said he would support Healthy Soils,” Runsten says.

The legislation passed last summer and allocates $7.5 million for the program, $3 million for demonstration projects and up to $4 million in grants of up to $25,000. Governor Brown is sold on the program. He originally asked for $20 million once he embraced the idea.

Funding for the program comes from the California Air Resources Board’s Cap-and-Trade Program.

California’s Cap-and-Trade Program generates money from big emitters who are required to buy permits to emit greenhouse gases, says Renata Brillinger, executive director of CalCAN.

“The Legislature and the governor decide how much [of that] money to spend and on what,” Brillinger says. “It’s billions of dollars that we can influence through a democratic process.”

Healthy Soils projects must be directly linked to climate change, she says. “Farmers are getting money to do things on their farm that draws down carbon or reduces emissions. It is the only source of funding in the United States that will pay farmers to do that.”

One of the pioneers of carbon farming is the Marin Carbon Project (MCP). The nonprofit took it upon itself to provide scientific evidence to substantiate the benefits of carbon farming. Working in concert with Whendee Silver, professor of environmental science, policy, and management at U.C. Berkeley, the MCP found that adding a half-inch of compost to the soil increased soil carbon by one ton, or 40 percent, per hectare.

Most dazzling was the discovery that the amount continued to increase by the same rate year after year without adding more compost. This research demonstrated that carbon farming “can improve on-farm productivity and viability, enhance ecosystem functions and stop and reverse climate change,” explains Torri Estrada, executive director of the Carbon Cycle Institute, a Petaluma-based organization partnered with the MCP.

The Carbon Cycle

Plants sequester carbon from atmospheric CO2 by photosynthesis, using the airborne carbon to create carbohydrates and relaying the excess sugars to microbes in the soil. In turn, microbes return carbon to the soil. The more microbes, the more carbon is taken up, the stronger the roots and the more productive and resilient the plant. Adding organic matter to the soil feeds the fungi and bacteria, and enhances the effect.