High in the mountains of Veracruz, Mexico, a small cooperative is “farming carbon” — practicing agriculture in a way that fights climate change while simultaneously meeting human needs. Although these practices are used by millions of people around the world in some way, people in Western nations are largely unfamiliar with them, and there is little coordinated support to encourage farmers to adopt them. But if supported, implemented and developed on a global scale in conjunction with a massive reduction in fossil fuel emissions, these “carbon farming” practices — a suite of crops and practices that sequester carbon while simultaneously meeting human needs — could play a critical role in preventing catastrophic climate change by removing carbon from the atmosphere and safely storing it in soils and perennial vegetation.

The cloud forest region of Veracruz, Mexico, is a humid tropical highland ecosystem that combines a mostly temperate canopy of trees such as oaks and hickories encrusted with epiphytic ferns, orchids and bromeliads with an understory of mostly tropical vegetation such as cannas, wild taros, passion fruits and tree ferns. But the cloud forest is disappearing. Between 70 and 90 percent of it has been deforested, and what remains is highly fragmented, with only tiny pockets of old growth. Much of the former forest is degraded pasture.

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