It's a wonderful tale of just how quickly and powerfully Nature can bounce back, even from ex-industrially thrashed farmland. One of the key things is the section on mycellium and carbon sequestration, most of which was news to me. The world's soils, "hold more carbon as organic matter than all the vegetation on the planet, including rainforest". 82% of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere is in the soil. There's a fascinating passage about glomalin, something I hadn't even heard of, which coats the hyphae of mycorrhizal fungi and has amazing potential for carbon sequestration and the enhancement of soil structure.
I see one of our main objectives on our future farm is to explore and develop carbon sequestration through encouraging fungi back into the soil, measuring carefully as we go. There's a lot to read... check out the report on Glomalin in Nature here. I have a feeling we're going to be reading as much as we can then making some small scale experiments.
There's much more that can be done to draw down carbon, check out the amazing work of Ricardo Romero on his farm in Mexico.
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