Quick Take
Climate and anti-pesticide activist Woody Rehanek remembers Santa Cruz of the 1960s and 1970s, when our county was on the cutting edge of agricultural innovation. He implores us to return to that mindset and to embrace using healthy, organic soils to cut greenhouse gasses via carbon sequestration. Other counties are doing it, he writes. Why not us?
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In 1967, I was living on a 7-acre farm on Western Drive at the edge of Santa Cruz. You could smell Juicy Fruit and Doublemint gum from the Wrigley’s factory across Mission Street/Highway 1. You could also go up to Crown, Merrill, and Stevenson colleges and find Alan Chadwick hand-tilling 3 acres of red clay soil, introducing organic, raised-bed French intensive gardening to the West.
By 1971, UC Santa Cruz was extending agricultural innovation on 30 acres that would become the agroecology farm. California Certified Organic Farmers emerged in 1973. According to David Stockton in a recent Good Times article, skunk cannabis, now famed the world over, was developed somewhere between 1974 and 1978 (details are hazy) by crossing Colombian sativa seeds with Acapulco Gold and Afghan indica. In 1996, Dick Peixoto founded Lakeside Organic Gardens in the Pajaro Valley, now the largest family-owned organic grower/packer/shipper in the U.S.
I say all this to point out how forcefully Santa Cruz County has been on the cutting edge of ag innovation for decades. But there is a notable and upsetting gap in this history.
Our county has not seriously promoted or embraced the enormous carbon sequestering potential of healthy, organic soils as a potential solution to climate change and greenhouse gas reduction.
It’s barely mentioned in the climate action plans of Santa Cruz, Watsonville or the county. We have no robust, granular analysis – with estimated metrics – of what healthy soils mean in the context of climate change. Almost all of our climate action plans are aimed at emissions reduction to net zero, hopefully by 2045 at the latest.
But reaching zero net emissions will not draw down the huge “overburden” of accumulated greenhouse gasses (880 gigatons) that have been building
since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Other approaches are needed.
We could be using Comet Planner’s Healthy Soils computer program – developed by the U.S Department of Agriculture and the Natural Resources Conservation Service — to estimate carbon sequestration by various climate-smart farming practices, such as compost application, hedgerow planting, cover cropping, mulching, reduced tilling, conservation crop rotation, grassed waterways and more.
The program gives estimates in metric tons per acre per year for each practice. For example, in 2023 Santa Cruz County had 8,000 organic acres. The fundamental first step for transitioning to organics, other than ending the application of toxic chemicals, is to apply compost in order to revitalize soil and inoculate it with carbon-sequestering microbes. Comet Planner estimates that an application of quality compost results in average carbon storage of 4 metric tons per acre per year – for those who like math, 8,000 x 4 = 32,000 metric tons of stored carbon, per year, for three years or more.
These metrics could, and should, be factored into all climate action plans.
The more climate-smart, on-the-ground practices applied, the more carbon is sequestered. For example, a mixed legume cover crop planted on 2,819 acres of county apples, wine grapes and miscellaneous fruit orchards calculates at 1.6 metric tons carbon dioxide per acre per year, or 4,510 metric tons per year. And so on. The Comet Planner is grouped into annual cropland, orchards and vineyards, and ranchland. Each category lists carbon sequestering practices and calculates carbon dioxide storage in metric tons per acre per year.
At the extreme wishlist end of things, if all 64,000 acres of Santa Cruz County’s farm and ranchland went organic at the wave of a magic wand, one compost application per acre would result in an estimated 264,000 metric ton per year carbon dioxide storage for one to three years. To put that in perspective, Watsonville’s Climate Action Plan estimates that the city in 2030 will be 100,000 metric tons short of carbon neutrality.
Santa Clara County is already beginning to quantify carbon sequestration estimates and to add them into the climate action plans.
Santa Cruz County could – and should – be doing the same.
Woody Rehanek was a farmworker in Washington state for 18 years and a special education teacher in the Pajaro Valley Unified School District for 18 years. He is a member of Safe Ag Safe Schools and a founding member of CORA (Campaign for Organic and Regenerative Agriculture).