Do you ever sit around your kitchen table and contemplate other crops you might like to grow? Here is a novel idea – grow carbon. What you ask? Growers across the country are becoming carbon farmers as highlighted in the documentary film Carbon Nation. The film touts itself as a “climate change solutions movie that doesn’t even care if you believe in climate change.” Yet this movie does care about climate change. The narrator says, “We thought we had time to figure things out. Trouble is there is no more time. Climate change is happening now.”
While the film covers the custom gamut of climate change solutions from renewable energy to energy efficiency, it enters new territory by featuring “carbon farmers”. How might you become one of these? By adding wind turbines to your land, or solar panels to your operations or add an algae farm interspersed within your fields.
One of the featured growers was Cliff Etheredge, a cotton farmer, aka wind farmer, in Roscoe, Texas. He along with 400 other landowners are sharing in the payment royalties from wind energy production. “Farmers really do appreciate these things,” he says. This is dry land. We sit out here and pray for rain and cuss the wind. Now what we’ve been cussing all these years turned out to be a blessing.”
