New Year, New Baby, New Job

Our original mission for this blog was to document “our triumphs and our failures as we learn how to create Home in this modern world.” Almost two years later, “this modern world” looks quite different.

As with anybody’s quest of creating Home, the question of how to support and feed ourselves has always been front and center. There is no Home without sustenance. A growing part of that equation, we hope, will be satisfied by our food growing efforts and continued integration with our local community. But with privatized everything, air and water included, the “modern world” almost necessitates our participation in the monetary economy.

Adding a third to our family, a particularly helpless but adorable third, has intensified the question of sustenance. Our JuneBee’s time horizon is 40, 60, 80 years. We’re talking 2100. Our work is more than clothing her and feeding her today, but also building a world where sustenance will still be possible in her adult years. (A recent study suggests that upwards of 96% of Americans aged 27-45 are “very” or “extremely concerned” about the well-being of their existing or expected children in a climate-changed world.)

All this is a long-winded way of saying “I got a new job.”

I’ve always struggled in past jobs, knowing I contribute to the unintended consequences wrapped up in most modern industries. “Are iPhones worth the environmental cost, the dreadful labor conditions, the social disintegration?” is an impossible calculus. It’s easier to conclude “well, iPhones aren’t actually necessary,” and then to peel back the layers, asking, ok, what is necessary, searching for a foundation to stand on. We don’t actually need iPhones, but we do need food. I find more meaning in the moral questions of food production than that of iPhone production.

But my specialized niche in the modern economy is web development, almost as far from “food” as one can be. At least my new job takes me a few steps closer.

I now work as a software engineer for the Carbon project at Indigo Ag, a company with a stated mission to “harness nature to help farmers sustainably feed the planet.” A far cry from my previous job, “creating beautiful digital products engineered to drive growth for the world’s leading brands” (ew, gross).

“Harness nature to help farmers sustainably feed the planet” — each phrase is important to me in its own way, though I could pick bones with each in turn. “Harness nature”, not my favorite image. “Feed the planet”, my conception of “the planet” is probably different from the author’s intention. Our ontologies do not align perfectly. But my work does bring me closer to those moral questions of food production, hopefully helping to move the paradigm of agriculture away from one of war against the land (with most ag products originally designed for chemical warfare, with brand names like “Roundup”, “Machete”, “Prowl”, “Avenge”). 

So Indigo Ag’s Carbon project — first, some background. Because land can be a major carbon sink and because agriculture dominates an estimated 50% of all habitable land, agriculture’s potential as a carbon-negative enterprise has garnered a lot of attention. The question then is how to nudge private landholders toward carbon-negative practices.

Whether because of corrupt special interests or plain economic illiteracy, efforts toward regulated carbon pricing have been rebuffed for decades. Instead, nascent carbon credit markets have sprung up. Think of those little checkboxes at the end of buying a flight “Do you want to pay an extra $$ to offset your carbon emissions?” or of companies like Microsoft pledging carbon-neutrality going back to their founding. These companies buy “carbon credits” from parties that reduce atmospheric carbon in return. There are many problems with these unregulated markets, though they are maturing as third-party verifiers enter the scene.

The practices that sequester carbon in the soil are well-known. But measuring precisely how much carbon has been notoriously difficult and prohibitively expensive, making agriculture’s inclusion in carbon markets a non-starter. This large-scale measurement is the problem I’m working on. We hope that by making carbon a feasible “cash crop”, we’ll further incentivize farmers to shift to regenerative practices.

I’m under no illusions that I can single-handedly secure Juneberry’s future world, but I can choose to work in that direction. In any case, it’s less about the future for me. After all, “Man plans and God laughs.” It’s about the present. Truthfully, carbon reductionism scares me. But it seems that when it comes to agriculture, the practices that promote soil carbon — cover crops, polycultures, no-till, less fertilizer, and integrating animals — are generally pro-life, while those that destroy soil carbon are anti-life.

The ultimate vision is to develop the technology to a point where we can confidently suggest to a farmer “Planting a cover crop can earn you $$ / acre over the next five years in carbon credits, and chances are, it will increase your yields too.”

My exposure to growing food has so far been on the very small scale. Already, the new job has helped me better understand the challenges in sustainably feeding billions of humans without turning crop fields into war zones. I have so many misgivings about the tilt of policy and capital toward massive landholdings (1% of farms operate 70% of the world’s farmland) and I do fear this technology will only add to that pressure. Though again, these questions seem worth the struggle.

On a personal note, the fully remote job allows me to stay close to Lauren and little Juneberry. And it’s hard to overstate my gratitude for that. (My “office” doubles as her diaper-changing room. Lucky me! Sure livens up those Zoom meetings.)