A Prophet Of Soil Gets His Moment Of Fame
Rattan Lal, an Indian-born scientist, has devoted his career to finding ways to capture carbon from the air and store it in soil. Today, that idea has a catchy name: regenerative agriculture.
More than 40 years ago, in Nigeria, a young scientist named Rattan Lal encountered an idea that changed his life — and led, eventually, to global recognition and a worldwide movement to protect the planet's soil.
Lal was fresh out of graduate school, recruited to join the newly established International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, and given an assignment that, in hindsight, seems ridiculous in its ambition. "I was 25 years old, in charge of a lab, given the mandate of improving quality and quantity of food production in the tropics!" Lal says.
He struggled. The problem was the soil. Because of climate and geological history, it was more fragile than what he'd seen in India, where he grew up, or Ohio,
