Starting this summer, the state of California will pay farmers to return nutrients to their soil that were lost to monocultures and tillage. The first of its kind in the country, California’s Healthy Soils Initiative will give growers grants to add “compost on rangelands or [seed] fields between harvests with so-called cover crops such as grasses and mustards, which add organic matter to the soil,” says The New York Times.
Storing carbon-rich organic matter in the soil has the added benefit of taking it out of the atmosphere, and so helps mitigate climate change.
For now, the initiative has $7.5 million to spread across the state’s 76,000 farms, covering a quarter of California’s total landmass. That’s a relatively small budget, but even so, “state officials say such measures could eliminate from the air the equivalent of millions of tons of carbon dioxide a year,” by adding it back to the soil, reports the Times.