Healthy soil provides many other benefits other than growing crops—clean water, public health, flood and drought protection, and more. A farmer who knows how to collaborate with other species to grow healthy soil is rebuilding essential infrastructure (the soil sponge) and providing services for the watershed and community around them. Can farmers be paid for that work? (Just as the highway department is paid for building and maintaining roads and bridges?) There is a movement afoot to pay farmers for ecosystem services. Didi Pershouse—who is working with farmers and regional, national, and international policy leaders to write legislation on this—will lead the group through an exploration of the concepts of biological work, biological capital, ecosystem services, payment for those services, and various ways we might hire farmers to grow the biological capital and essential infrastructure that underlies all successful economies.
