The north end of our ranch is part of a many thousand acre, level piece of ground known as Phiney Flat. By the county soil maps I know that the Flat is a fertile place for this part of the world and, in the places where the native, perennial grass still grows, it does extremely well. But people have been trying to farm other parts of the Flat since homesteading began in the early part of the twentieth century. For the most part, the efforts of these farmers were not successful. When we moved to this area, the neighbors with farming tendencies joked sheepishly that they only got a crop every three or four years, but that the federal government paid out for these “disasters” and so farming was profitable. Some of them would not meet your eyes when they talked like this but some actually winked. We are not crop farmers, we are farmers of grass. We know that plowing up native grasses destroys an ancient ecosystem of plants, animals, birds, and insects that have evolved here for thousands of years. Along with the plants, animals, birds, and insects goes the unique system that pulls CO2 from the air and, with the help of some microbes in healthy soil, splits the carbon (C) away from the oxygen (O2) and deposits it in the ground where it can’t create havoc in the atmosphere and cause climate change. As a happy side effect, the native grasses expire those two atoms of oxygen and make them available for us to breath. The reason that the native, perennial grasses do such a good job of this nifty trick is that sometimes 90% of a perennial plant’s mass is below the surface of the soil. It keeps growing every year and carbon builds with the root system. Of course, when someone plows up such a plant and root system and replaces it with an annual plant, which only lives for one year and has no time to build an extensive root system, the ability to sequestering carbon is reduced by a huge percentage. The fertility of the soil is hauled away in grain trucks each fall and the carbon is released into the atmosphere. Many people would disagree, but one of the lucky things about the American Great Plains is that, for the first hundred years of settlement, there was seldom enough rain to grow grain. The Great Plains was always considered one of the world’s greatest grasslands, but a poor place to farm. From the time of the buffalo right up through the era of the cowboy it has nourished countless herbivores. The buffalo, elk, antelope, cattle, and sheep grazed on the renewable grass and the fertility and the carbon stayed in the ground where it belongs. But now, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century all that is beginning to change. To get the whole picture you have to understand a few things about farming: Farming is about nurturing a single kind of plant and destroying all other plants that can compete with that chosen plant. In places where moisture is in short supply a farmer’s job is to make sure that the crop that he chooses to grow gets as much of the rainfall as possible. On most of the Great Plains, crops like corn, beans, wheat, and sunflowers do not get enough water to grow unless all the competition is killed. We call the other plants that try to grow in a farmer’s field weeds, and for generations the only way to get rid of them was to mechanically …