Steven Novella

But the important number is how much is in there, right?

Because that's the amount of carbon that's being sequestered from the atmosphere.

The other angle to this is that even—so, yes, there's a sort of carbon flux, right?

This flow of carbon through this huge sequester.

But that also is a conduit for carbon to get into other parts of the soil and into other plants, right?

The other thing I found out was that this is probably the main reason why agriculture, especially industrial agriculture, has a carbon footprint.

You ever think about that?

How does growing stuff add carbon to the atmosphere?

This question just came up recently.

I can't remember who was asking it.

It's like, yeah, it's part of just the industry itself.

You're shipping stuff around.

But part of it is that industrial agriculture interrupts this fungal network.

And therefore, the carbon that's sequestered in this fungal network, part of that gets released into the atmosphere, right?

from things like plowing fields, you know?

Yeah, when they turn over the soil, they're essentially killing the development of this network.

Right.

So that's the biggest part, I think, of the carbon footprint of industrial agriculture, which is why you could do things under the rubric of regenerative agriculture, which I think is a little problematic.

But basically, if you do no-till farming and you have diverse cover crops—

then that can retain a lot more of the fungus in the soil, even if you're farming it.