Susan Moran is a freelance journalist who writes for The New York Times, The Economist, and other publications. She is currently on a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Excerpt:

“… I’m struck by the fact that Sayles, fifty-two, is as much an entrepreneur as an ordinary farmer. Or that “ordinary” farming looks a lot less ordinary as guys like Sayles scramble to keep the farms, and the towns they reside in, afloat by diversifying their income streams. Sayles, for example, is launching wind, biomass, and other ventures, and he is organizing farmers in the community to negotiate a lucrative contract with a large wind-farm developer that’s been scoping out the area. If necessity is the mother of invention, then
the people who work the land might be the ones to help us figure out how to save it. Just don’t go calling Sayles a tree hugger.

Sayles is among a small but growing subset of farmers and ranchers who are becoming part of the climate-change solution. Many of them are driven more by a desire to save the farm than save the planet. Some of them are generating renewable energy in the form of cooperative wind farms or biofuels production. Others, like Sayles, have entered carbon-trading markets, such as the voluntary Chicago Climate Exchange, as carbon-offset providers, as they’re called in industry parlance. In essence, they are reducing or sequestering carbon dioxide in the soil through practices and technologies such as conservation tillage and methane digesters—a way to capture this superpotent greenhouse gas on dairy farms. Still other farmers are planting forests or native grasslands where they had grown crops. The climate exchange, as well as other regional carbon-offset programs, are gaining appeal among farmers from Georgia to Oregon. …”