This Oil Fights Climate Change (And We Can Prove It)

tl;dr: Our 30 acre regenerative olive orchard has pulled roughly 1,200 metric tons of CO₂ out of the atmosphere and into the ground. Here's the science behind how that works, why it matters, and what it could mean if farming broadly moved in this direction.

A soil organic matter percentage is an abstraction. Let's make it concrete.

Here's something that took us a while to fully grasp, even farming it ourselves. Almost everything we do is in service of one biological process happening below the surface. Plants pull CO₂ out of the air through photosynthesis, and some of that captured carbon gets pushed down through the roots in the form of what's called root exudates, essentially a liquid carbon feed for the soil's microbial community. The microbes eat it, proliferate, and in the process convert plant carbon into increasingly stable forms of soil organic matter. Some of that carbon ends up bound to clay particles and minerals in what soil scientists call mineral associated organic matter, which can persist for decades or longer.

The reason this matters so much is that it's fundamentally different from just spreading compost or mulch on the surface. Most of the carbon on top of the soil ends up getting cycled out relatively quickly and does not lead to significant long term increases in soil organic matter, as we've seen firsthand. You'd need to be importing hundreds of tons per acre of compost to move the needle that way. We haven't done that. What we've done is build a system that maximizes what the plants themselves are producing underground, and that's where real, durable carbon storage starts.

One of the most common mistakes people make when thinking about regenerative agriculture is imagining it as a menu of add ons you can bolt onto an existing operation. Add a cover crop here, throw in some microbial inoculants there, maybe cut back on nitrogen a bit. The thinking goes: do a few good things, cancel out a few bad ones, net positive.

It doesn't work that way.

You can't go to a conventional farm with heavy tillage, synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, and just apply microbial inoculants, plant a cover crop, or simply reduce nitrogen application and have a meaningful effect on soil organic matter. The practices work together because the underlying system is a living one. If you apply microbial inoculants while still tilling heavily and spraying pesticides, you're essentially feeding a colony of microbes and then poisoning them. You bulldozed their homes and sprayed them with toxins, of course they didn't thrive. The system has to be set up so that the conditions support microbial life with soil cover, living roots, minimal disturbance, and smart nutrition. Only when those things stack up together does something meaningful happen at the soil level.

The most fundamental piece is keeping living roots in the soil as long as possible. Every day that there are active roots in the ground, carbon is being pushed into the soil. Between them, the orchard floor stays shaded, which does something most people don't think about: it dramatically cools the soil. We've seen anywhere from 30 to 40 degree temperature difference between the soil under a living ground cover versus bare soil, even with measurements as close as 10 to 20 feet between bare and covered soil. That matters because high temperatures accelerate oxidation, when carbon in the soil gets oxidized, it forms CO₂ and off gasses. Keeping the soil cool keeps the carbon in.

In California, we get almost no rain from mid April to October, which means most plants either die or go dormant through the heart of the growing season. We're working on integrating more native warm season perennials into the orchard floor to push living root coverage further into the year. It's a slower process than planting annuals, the seed is more expensive, the establishment takes longer, but it's worth it.

This one surprises people. Grazing on a farm trying to build soil health sounds counterintuitive, given the negative impact most animal agriculture in this country has on the environment. But grazing done right is genuinely powerful, and the "done right" part is everything. Grazing can be done poorly, and in such a way that it degrades the soil and causes erosion, compaction, buildup of nitrogen compounds to toxic levels. What we do is keep the sheep grouped tightly and move them frequently. They graze a section relatively evenly and then leave, giving the plants a long recovery window.

That recovery window is where the interesting biology happens. When a plant has been grazed and then gets time to regrow, it enters a vegetative growth state, pushing carbon into its roots in exchange for nutrients from soil microbes. Research suggests that the saliva of grazing animals actually acts as a growth stimulant for the plants, most grasses and ground covers have co-evolved with grazing animals, so there's a metabolic signal in the grazing event itself that tells the plant to regrow vigorously. The more time a plant spends in that vegetative state, the more carbon it's sending underground. The goal with grazing is to extend that vegetative cycle as long as possible.

There's also the obvious: concentrated sheep dung and urine provide fertility, distributed evenly across the orchard because the flock is grouped tightly as they move. Natural fertilization at no additional cost, building the soil rather than bypassing it.

Here's where a lot of well meaning farmers quietly undercut everything else they're doing. Nitrogen is the most common culprit. The conventional playbook says apply nitrogen in the spring, often in large doses, and let the plants grow. The problem is that excess nitrogen doesn't just sit there, it turbocharges microbial activity in a way that burns through soil carbon. Think of a college town bar with peanuts and beer. If you make the beer free, the students are going to swarm the bar for the beer and they're going to eat all the peanuts faster than the bar can replace them. If there's excess nitrogen, the microbes will consume carbon in similar ratios. Apply too much nitrogen and the microbes run hot, respiring carbon faster than the system can replace it. All that carbon turns into CO₂ that goes right back into the atmosphere.

What we do instead is run intensive sap analysis on our trees every other week during the growing season. That tells us exactly what the tree is doing metabolically, and what it actually needs right at that moment - not what a rule of thumb says it should need for the whole season. Then we apply small, targeted amounts, mostly as foliar sprays directly to the leaves. We want to make the plant search for nutrients and then just give them a little top off only as needed through the leaves, so we're not disrupting the root-microbiome relationship. It's a much more labor intensive process than the conventional dump and pray in spring. But the tradeoff is that we maintain the integrity of the soil biology, while keeping tree health optimized and significantly reducing our total inputs. One helps the other.

This might be the piece that surprises people most. Our biggest lever for building soil carbon isn't the cover crops or the sheep, it's the olive trees themselves. The trees are the primary engine of carbon capture on the farm, and what we've found is that their capacity for photosynthesis is not fixed. You can meaningfully increase it by addressing micronutrient deficiencies that limit the photosynthetic process itself.

Take manganese as an example. It's an essential component of the enzyme that hydrolyzes water in the first step of photosynthesis, splitting H₂O into hydrogen and hydroxide to drive the whole reaction. Without sufficient manganese, the tree literally can't capture sunlight as efficiently as it could. This applies down the line with essentially every micronutrient: each one plays a role in the chain of reactions that converts sunlight and CO₂ into carbohydrates. When we address these deficiencies and keep them optimized throughout the growing season, we ensure that the plant is able to capture more sunlight. And when it does that, it's capturing CO₂ from the atmosphere and converting it into carbohydrates. More carbohydrates means more to work with, more for fruit production, more for olive oil quality compounds like polyphenols, and critically, more to push into the roots as exudates that feed the soil microbiome. That may be the single largest driver of the increase in organic matter on our farm. 

One thing that's often left out of conversations about soil organic matter is what it does to water. Higher organic matter improves soil aggregation, which opens up pore space, which dramatically improves how fast water infiltrates rather than running off. We also recently started addressing a calcium to magnesium imbalance in our soil that we'd been neglecting. High magnesium in clay soils tends to squeeze the clay layers together, making them denser and more impermeable. Calcium does the opposite, it opens the clay structure up and creates a crumblier, more porous texture. We only started correcting this balance in the last six months, so it'll take time to fully show up in our data. But we're already seeing encouraging signs.

Last month we got four inches of rain. There's an area of the orchard that's historically been slow to drain, flooding and staying flooded for weeks. After this rain it was still flooded Friday, but by Monday most of it had infiltrated. Inches of standing water absorbed in a couple of days where it would normally sit for a week. That's not luck. That's the aggregation improving. (For what it's worth: we didn't do a proper baseline infiltration test when we started. We didn't think we needed to. That was a mistake, and if we were starting over, we'd measure it.)

Skeptics sometimes argue that soil carbon gains are temporary or overstated. It's a fair challenge, and we don't want to wave it off. Carbon does cycle in and out of the soil, that's just how soil chemistry works. If we built up organic matter for ten years and then went back to conventional tillage and heavy synthetic inputs, we'd start chipping away at those gains relatively quickly.

But the criticism often misses what kind of carbon we're building. A lot of the skepticism is based on looking at systems where organic matter comes primarily from compost or plant litter on the surface. That carbon is relatively "fast", it cycles out quickly because it hasn't been stabilized. What we're building through root exudates and fungal activity is different. It goes deeper, it gets processed into more stable humic compounds, and it accumulates in ways that surface applications simply don't. 

The critics are likely looking at more conventional systems where organic matter comes from compost applications. They don't fully grasp what is required to operate a regenerative system and what processes underlie it. The soil organic matter gains we're seeing couldn't have come from the small amounts of compost we've applied, maybe a ton or two in the past few years. They're coming from roots.

That said: we'll be the first to say our carbon sequestration numbers are estimates based on soil sampling done primarily for agronomic purposes. Even rigorous carbon credit programs are measuring a dynamic variable in a complex system. We're transparent about that. What we're confident in is that the numbers have been going up consistently over multiple years, and that the underlying mechanism we're leveraging is real and well documented in the scientific literature.

People often assume that regenerative agriculture means accepting lower yields during a "transition period" while the soil recovers. We'd push back on that framing, but with nuance. There's a real cost, it just isn't measured in bushels. It's measured in management. 

A proper transition to regenerative management is likely to have immediate savings by simply taking a more active role in monitoring crop nutrition and only applying nutrients as needed. But if you're not matching the reductions in nutrient applications with an increase in management, you'll likely see a yield drop.

Running sap analysis every other week is expensive and time consuming. Our soil testing program is thorough. The knowledge curve is steep. What we've found is that when you increase management in proportion to reducing inputs, you don't lose yield, in our case, we've maintained and in some ways improved it while producing better quality oil with lower inputs. That's the deal: the tradeoff isn't between sustainability and productivity, it's between simplicity and complexity. Conventional agriculture offloads complexity to chemistry and industrial inputs. Regenerative agriculture takes it back in house and makes the farmer accountable for understanding the living system they're working with.

We'll note two genuine constraints we've run into. Our calcium to magnesium imbalance has slowed our aggregation progress, it's fixable, but it takes time. And the California dry season means most of our soil goes essentially dormant for the bulk of our growing season, since our drip irrigation only keeps a small footprint moist enough to support microbial activity. We're working on both. Neither of them invalidates the approach. If anything, they underscore that regenerative agriculture is context dependent and requires honest documentation of what's working and what's still being figured out.

Here's the honest version of the "voting with your dollar" argument: picking our bottle off the shelf doesn't directly inject carbon into our soil. We want to be straightforward about that. What it does do is make it possible for us to keep farming this way, and to do more of it, more acreage, more seasons, more data. By supporting us, you're supporting these efforts, and we are directly putting carbon in the ground in a measurable way.

The bigger picture is about market signals. Right now, organic farmland in the U.S. sits at about 1% of all agricultural acreage. Regenerative is a fraction of that. The practices that drive real soil carbon gains are farmer led and proven at scale, they're not niche science experiments. The main barrier to broader adoption isn't technical, it's economic. When consumers consistently choose to support farms doing this kind of work, the demand signal goes back up the supply chain. Other farmers see that there's a market for it. Adoption grows. Hopefully, the supply rises to meet the demand, and farmers will have incentives to pursue regenerative agriculture based on the demand created for purchasing from farms that are successfully rebuilding soil organic matter.

We can't influence every farm in California by sheer force of example. But we can document what we're doing, show the data, and make the case clearly enough that the conversation moves forward. That's what this is.

If you want to go deeper on any of this, the soil chemistry behind carbon stabilization is genuinely fascinating, particularly the role of mycorrhizal fungi in moving carbon into longer lived humic compounds, and how calcium to magnesium ratios shape whether soil can even form the aggregates that protect organic matter in the first place. The water infiltration story ties directly into climate adaptation in ways that go well beyond carbon. And if you're curious about what separates a defensible regenerative claim from marketing noise, how to read a certification, what soil test data actually means, what questions to ask, that's worth a post of its own.