Carbon Cowboys: The Answers In The Soil

How Peter Byck is using Breakthrough Markets thinking to help ranchers draw down one gigaton of carbon equivalent from the atmosphere.

Bird’s eye view of cattle grazing prairie (JE via Artiphoria)

When I was a child, and we had returned to England late in 1959, one BBC radio program my parents listened to assiduously was Beyond Our Ken—featuring the extraordinarily camp Kenneth Williams as Arthur Fallowfield. Whatever question was levelled at him, his answer was always the same, delivered in his attempt at a rich West Country accent: “The answer lies in the soil.” We laughed, but it turns out that he was right all along.

Still, the state of the world’s soils is now very far from a laughing matter. A UN report published back in 2022 estimated that up to 40 percent of all soils are moderately or severely degraded—a figure that could rise to 90 percent by 2050 if deforestation, overgrazing, intensive cultivation, urbanization, and other harmful practices continue.

In my own evolving quest for potential “Breakthrough Markets” that could help us tackle the world’s increasingly pressing unsustainability headaches, I keep coming back to the work of Peter Byck of Arizona State University. Happily, at his request, we caught up by Zoom on May 19—and I will try to capture here some of the reasons why the approach he promotes for soil carbon capture merits a place in what I’m beginning to think of as the Breakthrough Markets Hall of Fame—or Top 50.

But first, Peter. He’s a professor of practice at Arizona State University, in both the School of Sustainability and the Cronkite School of Journalism. Even more relevant here, he is the director, producer and writer of carbon nation, a film which the Volans team has long loved.

Beyond that, he is helping to lead a $10 million research project focused on Adaptive Multi-Paddock (AMP) grazing. In the process, he is collaborating with 20 scientists and 10 farm families, focusing on soil health and soil carbon storage, microbial/bug/bird biodiversity, water cycling and more.

And he has recently completed a 4-part docuseries, Roots So Deep (sub-titled “You Can See The Devil Down There”), focused on farmers and scientists involved in the study. Indeed, the original reason for our call was to discuss how we might help with the film’s launch in London on June 24.

And just in case you imagine that Peter became a filmmaker to promote the regenerative farming, the real-life story was very different. In a former life, for example, he directed shows for MTV starring people like Will Smith, John Travolta, Nicholas Cage, Drew Barrymore, Gwyneth Paltrow and David Duchovny. He also edited documentaries for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and King Kong, as well as documentaries and promotional shorts for the likes of Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, MTV, BBC, Disney and MGM.

Now these same skills are being devoted to the service of regenerative farming. His declared intent: to help cattle farmers and ranchers to draw down one gigaton of carbon equivalent by the end of the decade.

But how did he shift from Hobbits and mega-gorillas to ranchers? He explains: “Back when we were making carbon nation, it became clear to me (because I got to learn this stuff from a bunch of really smart people) that our soils offered a spectacular way to draw down carbon from the air, where it’s become a problem, and get it back into our soils, where it is sorely needed. The folks who were the best and fastest and most profitable at making this carbon shift (from air to soil), were the cattle farmers and ranchers in the carbon cowboys series of 10 short films.”

Time not to straggle

While he notes that the term is now sometimes used to people playing fast and loose with carbon offsets, Peter had something very different in mind.

“Carbon cowboys are the men and women who are inventing a new way to graze cattle that mimics how herds of bison grazed the Great Plains of North America,” he explains, “and built some of the world’s deepest and richest soils. The bison would roam in large herds, eat half the grasses and move on—just like we eat the top part of the asparagus, and move on. The bison would change their scenery for two main reasons, better forage across the plains, or wolves were picking off the stragglers. My science friends call that predation. I call it time to not straggle.”

Over tens of thousands of years, he says, “the grasslands and the bison co-evolved, creating a beneficial system. The bison ate half the grasses, stomped the other half down to give the soil a nice covering, holding in moisture—and the bison’s manure and urine fertilized the microbes in the soil. So—the bison ate, pooped and left—and the plants then went into photosynthetic hyper-drive, re-growing their shoots and stems, and sucking down carbon from the air (aka carbon dioxide, aka CO₂), exhaling the O₂ (aka oxygen), then mixing the carbon with water, concocting sugars that they then pushed down through their roots, into the soil, to feed the microbes.”

And so, what went around went around. “The microbes, in turn, mined minerals and nutrients and fed those to the plants. It was a beautiful system—bison, plants, microbes. Just add water.”

The carbon cowboys, Peter notes, “replicate this system with their cattle—breaking up their land into much smaller paddocks, and moving their herd frequently, sometimes daily, sometimes 4 to 5 times a day. It’s a heavy hit from the cattle, their hooves stimulate seed growth, their poo and pee bring the groceries for the microbes. The plants and microbes respond to the cattle just like they did to the bison. The farms greatly vary in size, from 110 acres to 20,000 acres—with herds of 80 to 5,000.”

You can see the Devil down there

So, what should we call this approach? That’s where things get just a little gnarly. “This type of grazing has many names,” Peter says, including “holistic management, mob grazing, strip grazing, management-intensive grazing (MiG,) rotational grazing, high-stock/short rotational grazing, bison biomimicry.”

Most people would have picked one of these tags—and stuck with it. Not so Peter. “A bunch of science friends and I got together and thought, sure, there’re a lot of ways of naming this new way to graze, let’s think of yet one more. The word we were missing was adaptive. So, we word-smithed Adaptive Multi-Paddock grazing. AMP grazing. We asked all the farmers and ranchers we filmed if they liked AMP as a term—all but one really liked it.”

The hold-out was Neil Dennis, the pioneering regenerative farmer to whose memory Peter’s carbon cowboys series is dedicated. (He died in 2018 and, for the record, he preferred “Mob Grazing.”)

And the film whose London launch we were discussing? It’s called Roots So Deep—and its tongue-in-cheek subtitle is, “You Can See The Devil Down There.” Since Peter’s team launched their social media campaign last August, it has attracted nearly 50 million views—and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from all sides. Here’s Bill Weir, CNN’s climate correspondent: “The characters are all so likable and captivating, the graphics are stunning, and I learned a ton about ecology... but none of that would matter without Peter Byck’s soul and empathy as the storyteller.”

And what about the role of big business in all of this? Peter has been working hard to engage companies like Exxon, McDonald’s and Shell. “I can see how this would be great for the planet,” said one powerful executive in an oil company, at a time when their own sustainability colleagues were showing real interest, “but I can’t see how it would good for us.” Still, as Peter noted wryly toward the end of our call, “I don’t give up!”

Good, but how does he see this potential breakthrough market evolving? “The 1GT CO2e would be drawn down across the Southeast US,” he explains. “That would require that we get all farmers in the Southeast to adopt AMP grazing—and that we get the same results on all 15.8 million hectares of their grazing lands in the Southeast US as we got in our southeast US study.”

A tall order, clearly, but exactly the sort of ambition we now need to see in play. And, finally, at a time when business leaders are more inclined to pluck promises our of the air than carbon, was the 1GT CO2e figure itself plucked out of the air? No, Peter answers. “It works out like this. 12.1 tonnes of CO2e per hectare per year times 15.8 hectares = 191 million tonnes of CO2e per year—so we would reach 1 GT CO2e in 5 years and 3 months.  For a profit.”

For more details on Roots So Deep and to view the trailer, click here. To see the published research, click here. And to learn more about the UK tour, click here.