“There is a delight in the hardy life of the open. There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm. The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value. Conservation means development as much as it does protection.” Theodore Roosevelt

A climate change solution that will enrich farmers and safeguard the nation’s coastal communities, that’s the main goal of this policy. Setting aside a significant portion of our nations row crop land and pasture land for carbon capture would allow us to increase the number of family farms and create a new economy.

The idea here is simple and doing it at scale is something farmers and ranchers are primed to do. Roughly 90% of dry plant matter is carbon from the atmosphere, traditionally this carbon is captured in plants during the growing seasons and is released when the plant decomposes or is burned. If decomposition could be prevented the carbon would be removed permanently from the environment which would reverse the heating impact of greenhouse gasses, in basic terms it’ll reverse climate change.

The plan, again, is straight forward to anyone familiar with farm and ranch work. By collecting this dry plant matter in the same way we already bale hay and cut silage we can take this material from our farmland down to the mouths of our major rivers using our existing transportation infrastructure and use the material as the base to wetland expansion projects.

Submerging these “bales of carbon” into the coastal waters and then blasting dredged sediments on top of the bales till a landmass that can sustain grass and trees (coastal wetlands) would put the carbon into a state where it cannot decompose thus removing it from the atmosphere while increasing the size of the coastal wetlands which provide the best solution to absorbing storm surges which cost the nation tens of billions of dollars every year.

The land set aside for the carbon capture would also reduce the land area used for row crops. That will shrink the supply of grain which will increase the value fallowing the basic law of supply and demand. This new economy will increase the profitability of farmers and ranchers to collect carbon using the tools and methods we already know.

The land set aside for the conservation economy will increase the habitats of local wildlife. This is not only good at making our ecology more resilient but offers the potential of expanding our hunting tourism. This isn’t a free lunch or a hand out, we will still have to put in the work it’s just growing and raising crops for a different purpose