Field of Dreams

An ambitious startup wants to pay farmers to store carbon. Is this the answer to climate change or just an illusion?

- By Maddie Oatman

The temperature has been dropping all morning, so by the time we reach Adam Chappell’s cornfield at the edge of the tiny town of Cotton Plant, Arkansas, it’s in the 30s. Cold for the Delta. Heavy clouds press down on a border of maple and oak trees. I follow Chappell into the field, where we pause amid piles of corn husks and a few abandoned mustard-color cobs. It’s December, and harvest is almost over, yet neat rows of oat grass, fernlike vetch, and radish leaves poke up through the detritus in a medley of growth and decay.

“I bet you my earthworms are down about a foot,” Chappell says through a coppery beard, his large hands hunting for warmth in the pockets of his sweatshirt. “You could probably dig ’em up yesterday, but right now it’s too cold. This place is covered in earthworms. And it didn’t used to be.”

Chappell’s 100-acre field once looked like his cousin’s across the road, an empty stretch of tilled dirt about as appealing to an earthworm as a parking lot. He used to clear his fields after fall harvest, leaving them barren all winter. But about a decade ago, after his farm’s battle with herbicide-resistant pigweed left him and his brother on the brink of bankruptcy, the fourth-generation farmer had a revelation after a late night of scouring YouTube. He phased out the herbicides and instead left the stems and stalks in the field and scattered rye seeds among them to grow through the winter.