He is seen here cleaning the Sundance disk which is our primary cultivation tool when we break up pasture after the chickens. There is so much root growth this year that he has to clean out the disks every time he gets to the end of the rows. This is good because it means that we are creating lots of organic matter and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. Farmers, through their farming practices, it has been said, could be responsible for 35 to 50% of the increase in carbon dioxide in the air. A farmer from North Dakota, Gabe Brown, writes in Acres USA that his soils were almost 8 to 12% organic matter when they were first farmed in the nineteenth century. When he took over his farm in 1993, they were less than 2%. That carbon was released into the air with excessive cultivation practices growing wheat and corn. Now with lots of cover crop and pasture mixes, and in his case, no tillage, he has been able to bring back some of his soils to 7%. Leaving the soil bare in the winter without a cover and lots of fertilizers and pesticides, he believes, is destroying soils. Gabe is not some small farmer. He tends many thousands of acres and is one of a growing group of large farmers pioneering a new way. Around our farm soil is laid bare eight months of the year and cultivated deeply and many times every year. Our continued existence here is being noticed by local farmers but none so far have chosen to copy our wayward farming ways.