"Dirt First," by Jenny Splitter for Sierra Magazine, June 2022

Dirt First: Carbon farming sounds as all-American as apple pie. But does it work?

IN THE SPRING, the fields of flowers at Harborview Farms cause drivers to pull off the road to take pictures. "It's unbelievable the amount of people who will compliment me on my flowers," Trey Hill says as we walk through a field of rapeseed. A few weeks earlier, Hill tells me, this was all corn.

Like his father before him, Hill is a commodity farmer. He grows corn, soy, and wheat on 10,000 acres in northern Maryland, chasing yields with genetically engineered seeds and herbicides. Unlike his father, Hill also has one foot in an entirely different world: regenerative agriculture.

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