Regenerative farms fight climate change
Growers adopting methods to help trap carbon in soil
It was the best hay crop dairyman Steve Perucchi had seen in his 60 years in Sonoma County. After he mowed the grass on his neighbors’ sheep ranch, it lay in thick, honeycolored rows deep enough to lose a child in.
The hay belonged to Bodega Pastures, a lamb and wool producer in the town of Bodega that had added compost to its field for the first time in 2019 when growing food for its animals. The results inspired Perucchi, who mows and bales as a side business, to apply for a grant to do the same on one of his pastures.
“When you see it over there, it makes you think more about it,” said Perucchi, a thickarmed man with a silver goatee, as he greeted visitors at his family’s dairy, which supplies organic milk to Clover Stornetta. A blackandwhite Holstein bellowed loudly behind him and an employee used a forklift to stack bales of hay in an old red barn.
A secondgeneration farmer whose father founded Perucchi Dairy in 1952, Perucchi had stumbled into regenerative farming. Also called carbon farming, it involves agricultural methods that remove carbon from the atmosphere and put it back in the soil, such as managed grazing, planting perennials and cover crops, and adding compost to farm fields or rangeland. If done at a wide enough scale, regenerative farming could more than just offset the greenhouse gas emissions from farming — it could fight climate change overall.
“There’s tremendous potential to help dairy and and beef cattle producers to be part of the solution as opposed to just part of the problem,” said Whendee Silver, professor of ecosystem ecology and biogeochemistry at UC Berkeley, who studies the carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emission rates of different soil amendments. “But that involves giving them the opportunity to