Autumn, for our region's agricultural producers, brings a time of harvest, scaling back, and returning livestock from summer pastures at high elevations to their grasslands close to home. Tony and Barclay Daryani have farmed land in Norwood.

At their kitchen table in late summer, Tony Daryani shares a map of the property — Indian Ridge Farm.

“In the fall, when the cows come down from the high country and they start grazing off all this pasture here,” he says, “on plot 2d, we've been running an — I won't call it an experiment — it’s a demonstration plot of intensive rotational grazing.”

The map of the Indian Ridge is chunked out into different plots, which are being farmed with different techniques. On 2d, 300 head of cattle intensely graze — and then rest — the field in cycles, mimicking a natural process which took place on the Great Plains before the era of US expansion and industrial agriculture.

Daryani continues: “you had millions of bison going across the Midwest and leaving their manure behind, letting it get incorporated with their hooves, and building up soil. I mean, the Midwest was an amazing breadbasket for a long time because of the grasslands and because of the bison.”

The Daryanis enrolled Indian Ridge in San Miguel County's Payment for Ecosystem Services program, which got started in 2021 to bring regenerative farming practices to our region with the goal of fighting climate change. It turns out certain practices that are good for soil health and a farm's productivity can also sequester carbon, save water and mitigate climate change.

Chris Hazen came on board to manage the PES program as it got started.

The county, he says, “works with a local rancher or landowner. And we identify lands where they're interested in implementing new practices. And by ‘practice’ I mean a different approach to grazing or, maybe some intensive seeding to introduce more diversity into their cover crops…and we can run the math on what kind of carbon benefit there could be from the work they're proposing. Then we can structure a contract through the county to make a payment for that particular practice.”

The benefit for the county is essentially a local carbon offset.

“Rather than going to the carbon market to buy carbon offsets for the county's zero carbon goals,” says Hazen, “they're actually paying landowners in San Miguel County for that carbon offset.”

The county based its model on a program run by the state of California, and it's not acting alone. Governments large and small across the country are looking to help agricultural producers move towards regenerative farming techniques.

Colorado recently received a $25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to roll out its Regenerative Farming STAR program, or Saving Tomorrow's Agricultural Resources. Lexi Firth is a soil health researcher at Colorado State University who works with STAR producers in the state. Regenerative agriculture, she explains, comes back to working with the land to create healthier soils.

“And soil health is just the ability for your soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains life: first, whatever you're growing, but then in an agricultural ecosystem your economic and social health as well.”

That holistic mindset, explains Firth, ties certain farming practices to healthy soils, communities, and planet. While it may seem like big talk, the Daryanis show me out back to one of their fields. Tony points to the earth, running his hands through the long grass. “The fertility of the soil in here is second to none, and the density of the plant growth is second to none,” he says. “It’s incredible. The grass literally covers every square inch of this, of this pasture.”

For over a decade, Tony and Barclay rotated poultry across these few acres. In the heat of late summer, the soil now supports grass which is thick and green, pouring from the earth, when many fields on the mesa are parched, patchy.

For the Danyanis, joining the program was a no-brainer. They already had some of these practices in place.

“You know,” says Tony, “in our past, we did it to grow healthy food primarily. As it turns out, those same practices are found to be healthy for the entire climate picture.”

Adds Barclay: “one of the things we love to tell people that they may not be aware of is that grass sequesters carbon. It's not just rainforests and trees, but grass is a huge carbon ‘sequester-er’ as well.”

Their enthusiasm, however, remains the exception rather than the rule. The county budgets a hundred-thousand dollars annually for ecosystem payments. It has yet to find enough producers to disperse all those funds in any given year. But it's working to add more farmers. Hazen recalls a survey he circulated in the county's agricultural community.

“By and large, the responses to the survey talked about water supply and soil health as the two most critical issues the producer community was facing,” says Hazen. “So I think it's about providing more information and helping people make decisions for themselves. But thankfully, the science is there about soil health and these approaches that you can take.”

Firth says these programs cropping up come back to the changing needs of today's farmers. “I think we're at this very critical moment in history where we're realizing the problems with the current way our agricultural system is working,” she says, “and it's going to be really interesting to see how things kind of unfold in the next few years. We're at this peak point where our entire agricultural system is transforming and it's not going to look the same.”

The Daryanis, meanwhile, are wondering what the future of farming will look like right here on their land in Norwood.

“We want this place to stay a farm long after we're gone. We feel like growing food is an important part of a community and maintaining that agricultural lifestyle is important for our county too,” says Barclay.

On a changing landscape, the county's PES program carries forward that intention.