Kade Wilbourne pulls a lever, and several tonnes of volcanic rock shoot out onto the field behind us in a fan of blue-grey dust. We are sitting in the cockpit of a tractor on the Wilbourne Farm in Mecklenburg County, Virginia. Normally, soybean and corn yields are the metrics that matter most here. But today, what counts is carbon.
The soil on farms like this is already a major reservoir of carbon, contained in organic form in the bodies of microbes…
