#HORIZON MILK SERIES#

Of course, the benefit of good farming is that it can produce high value, nutritious food while also taking care of the land. Second, trees are long lived, meaning the carbon stays put so long as the trees don’t rot or burn. First, it’s much easier to calculate the carbon stored in trees than carbon stored in soil, since trees put so much of their mass above ground where it can be measured. It’s actually very similar to the process by which regenerative farming seeks to sequester carbon, though its superior in two significant ways. By planting trees, we extract carbon from the atmosphere and store it in plant form. The logic goes like this: trees are mostly carbon. If you know of such a study, please send it my way! I’m not an expert, so maybe I’m just unaware. I am aware of no good study that comes close to proving carbon neutrality at any scale. To believe Horizon’s claims, I would want to see how they are measuring and modeling soil carbon sequestration. Even on the same farm what happened one year cannot predict what will happen the next.

#HORIZON MILK SERIES#

But as the article linked above and the others in the series should make clear, there are too many variables and nature is too adept at defying our expectations to model something as complex as the carbon cycle from atmosphere to plants to bacteria to soil and back. I’m reasonably confident it’s quite a bit. Believe me, as a farmer I’d like nothing more than to be able to confidently make big claims about the quantity of carbon good grazing management has sequestered in my pastures. But how much carbon, in what circumstances, and how long it stays there, are extremely contentious topics. I believe they can increase the amount of carbon stored in soil over the long term. The first problem is exactly what carbon capture number we ascribe to regenerative farming practices. The rest of the deficit would be made up by purchasing carbon offsets in the form of tree plantings. By encouraging its farmers to adopt a suite of practices like eliminating tillage, rotating crops, and managing grazing, some carbon could be returned to the soil in the form of organic matter. Still, there’s enough on the website to take a good guess at how Horizon is or was going about pursuing a goal of carbon positivity. Perhaps the whole Horizon website will soon be updated to make the carbon positive claim central. Perhaps Horizon has decided the target isn’t achievable and it’s just taking time to work through a backlog of packaging. The links in this press release from Horizon no longer work, meaning I can’t find the reports the carbon positive plan was based on. But Horizon’s website itself has general language about sustainability, regenerative practices, and reducing carbon emissions, I can’t find anything about aiming to be net carbon positive, except in reference to one niche line of milk. I can find a bit more detail about the project from old articles, like this one, that date from a few years back. But that has proved more difficult than expected. When I set out to write this post I planned on using Horizon as a case study. I aim to convince you that your default reaction should be skepticism. If so, I am here as the bearer of bad news. “Carbon Positive by 2025!” reads a line of text on a carton of Horizon Organic Milk, a claim I’ve been seeing more frequently on the products of both large and small companies.

Horizon milk