Plants and soil, needless to say, are not the Earth’s crust. They are not capable of trapping carbon for millions of years. The Earth’s crust is where we found most of the carbon we continue to pump into the air. The soil cannot hold all the carbon we found in the crust, and a few-month-old field of radish or rye cannot hold anywhere near the same amount of carbon that the forest that it replaced did. In other words, cover crops are at the very bottom of the list of practices that are good for climate, literally just one step above absolutely nothing. And the idea that we’re planning to start rewarding farmers with hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing it is madness.
