When Anthony Myint, Karen Leibowitz, and Chris Kiyuna opened their San Francisco restaurant, The Perennial, in 2016, their ambitions were outsized even by San Francisco standards: They didn’t just source the most sustainably grown ingredients, they structured the entire operation to be “carbon neutral.”
Furnishings were created from reclaimed or recycled materials, while kitchen equipment was sourced with energy efficiency and a minimized carbon footprint in mind. Myint found a multi-speed, “demand controlled” range hood that only opened when it detected particulate matter, and they designed the backbar to have a single refrigeration unit, as opposed to a bunch of small ones. They had an off-site aquaponic greenhouse.
The restaurant’s goal was to be its own self-sustaining ecosystem, a “table-to-farm” setup in which the restaurant served farmers as much as the reverse.
Building on the notoriety of their previous restaurant projects, which included Mission Street Food and, later, the sensational Mission Chinese, Myint and Leibowitz wanted to change how restaurants operate. And they succeeded. But over time, Myint began to see the limitations of the model.
A virtuous chef serving food from virtuous farmers to people willing to pay a little more for that privilege wasn’t something that could be scaled. Less than 2% of total cropland in the US is certified organic. And only a similarly low percentage of people can afford to eat at restaurants like The Perennial.
“It’s great that there are people willing to buy the good thing from the good farmer,” Myint says. “But does that really change anything?” What we really need, he thought, was more good farmers.
So, he and Leibowitz turned their attention to their non-profit, the Perennial Farming Initiative. That morphed into Zero Foodprint (ZFP), which the couple now runs full-time. While they closed The Perennial in 2019, their connection to (and connections within) the restaurant trade fuels ZFP, a “non-profit organization mobilizing the food world around agricultural climate solutions.”
Such solutions include spreading organic compost, minimizing (or eliminating) tilling and plowing, planting cover crops, and “managed” animal grazing, all of which help reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions (CO2, nitrous oxide, methane) and create healthier soils. In the spirit of The Perennial, ZFP’s ambitions are grand: They state that “healthy soil could sequester all the carbon humans emit every year.” (Note that they said all, not some.)
Myint describes regenerative agriculture as “farming using biology rather than chemistry.” Its principal aim is to, firstly, “pull” carbon out of the atmosphere via photosynthesis — plants breaking down CO2 and storing the carbon in the soil — and then, secondly, keep that carbon in the ground by increasing biomass and reducing how much the soil is disturbed. ZFP employs a crowd-funding format to make that happen.
Starting in California, they enlisted restaurants and other food businesses to add an optional 1% surcharge to guest purchases, proceeds of which funded grants for regenerative farming initiatives. They’ve since recruited ZFP Member Businesses in other states as well as abroad, all of them contributing 1% of sales toward healthier soils. “It’s more meaningful for the consumer that when they buy something, they know some money is actually going towards making a change,” Myint says. Opting out of “extractive” farming is not easy since there are no financial incentives to do so.
“Subsidies and crop insurance are only available to farms practicing conventional agriculture,” Myint continues, which begs the question: How did we get to a point where the use of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides is considered conventional? Chemical farming is the norm because it is cheaper, of course, so if you want to encourage someone to abandon it, you’ve got to help them afford it. Promoting the carbon-capturing qualities of healthy soils, however, is an added motivation, especially as the conversation around greenhouse gases has become so mainstream.
Eventually, Myint hopes that ZFP will be able to influence policy at the federal level. Right now what they’re doing is “operationalizing the research” around regenerative farming.
That means paying farmers to farm carbon. Synthetic fertilizers, which are rich in nitrogen, contribute to nitrous oxide emissions while simultaneously killing microbes and other plant-beneficial organisms in the soil. To replace such practices with regenerative ones, at scale, is the mission. According to an Ohio State University study cited on ZFP’s website, increasing the carbon content of the planet’s soils by just 2% could offset 100% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Again: all, not some.
Thus far, most ZFP grant funds have gone to organic composting initiatives — not just at vegetable farms or vineyards but on vast tracts of grazing land. According to Loren Poncia, owner of Stemple Creek Ranch in Tomales, California, compost is the “secret sauce” of regenerative agriculture. Stemple Creek maintains more than 1,000 acres of organically farmed pastureland and would qualify as an early adopter by any standard: For more than a decade, the ranch has worked with a research organization called the Marin Carbon Project (with which ZFP also partners) to study and quantify just how much carbon they are storing in their soil via composting.
“We’re really grass farmers,” says Poncia, who supplies high-end restaurants with grass-fed beef, lamb and pork. He says that the application of compost to his rangeland, combined with the practice of “rotational” grazing — in which the animals graze one prescribed area at a time — improves perennial grass growth. “Composting jump-starts the soil,” Poncia says.
This is not to say that compost is fertilizer, per se. It’s better described as a facilitator of the kind of microbial activity that defines healthy, living soil. According to Britta Baskerville, a Compost Technician at Shone Farm in Forestville, California, compost “exponentially increases the soil’s capacity to store carbon.” Baskerville’s job — at least in part the result of a ZFP grant — is to teach compost production to small organic farms.
The basic recipe for compost is nitrogen (supplied not just by manure but by grape pomace from vineyards and vegetable harvest scraps), carbon (wood-chip mulch), oxygen and water. Microorganisms break down the organic matter in a process called aerobic respiration, and, as anyone who’s made compost at home knows, this process generates heat — and some CO2. But, as Baskerville explains, the amount of CO2 released from the production of compost is relatively small, especially compared to the amount of methane released from organic matter buried in landfills.
“It’s not just a question of soil fertility but waste management,” says Baskerville. “Compost doesn’t just increase microbial activity but changes the texture of the soil and improves water retention. It’s easy to see the difference: untreated soil is dustier, lighter in color, and usually severely compacted, whereas healthy soil has a much richer color and texture.”
ZFP believes that agriculture can remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases. They are blunt in their assessment of the situation, adding a dash of hipster lingo to help hammer home the message. “According to the UN,” they say on their website, “global soil has only 60 years left of productivity and continues to release shit-tons of carbon every year.” But guess what? As they say, in all caps and bold type, “HEALTHY SOIL HOLDS SHIT-TONS OF CARBON.”
It was there, under our feet, all along.