- [Announcer] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[gentle music] - [Narrator] Funding for "SCI NC" is provided by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

[gentle music continues] ♪ [gentle music continues] - Hi there, I'm Frank Graff, and welcome to a special edition of "SCI NC."

We're continuing PBS North Carolina's "State of Change" project.

It is part of the Pulitzer Center's nationwide Connected Coastlines Reporting Initiative.

Producer Michelle Lotker explains how nature-based solutions can play a role in helping us adapt to North Carolina's changing climate.

[relaxing music] - [Michelle] Carbon is at the heart of all life on Earth.

- There's a bird calling right now, okay?

That bird, just like us and every other creature on this planet is a carbon-based life form.

- [Michelle] Although it's the building block of every living organism, excess carbon in our atmosphere has the potential to dramatically alter life on our planet.

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases form a warming blanket around the planet.

Without this blanket, the earth would be too cold for us to live on.

But within the last century, the blanket has been getting heavier as the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has spiked.

- Carbon dioxide equivalents or greenhouse gases are the things that are causing our climate to become more unstable.

Really, all of this has happened since we moved into the industrial age.

- [Michelle] There's no one solution to slowing or reversing our changing climate, but nature-based solutions are taking a front seat in North Carolina and across the globe as a way to pull excess carbon dioxide out of the air and store it underground.

- We can actually do something that benefits local communities, benefits wildlife, provides for recreation.

It also stewards the land in a way that's addressing greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.

- It's an easy solution, we're not trying to build some machines that are gonna live and spin around in the ocean, right?

This is already here.

[relaxing music continues] - We are in eastern North Carolina in the Albemarle-Pamlico Watershed.

We're passing by the farmland to the south and then right up here to the east of here is the National Wildlife Refuge starting up.

Pocosin Lakes itself is 110,000 acres of primarily wetlands.

You will hear folks refer to peatlands elsewhere but Pocosin is specific to this area because of the Native Americans that called them that.

- You might think from this perspective that we're just looking at an absolutely flat landscape, but that's really not the case.

The groundwater level is actually below the soil surface which is a normal thing that's saturating that peat underground, but it's not ponding and pooling.

- This is an area we've been working for over 10 years.

This is probably some of the deeper peat here.

We could have up to eight to 10 feet of peat.

Peat is really just partially decayed plant material.

So this is the leaf litter, this is what makes the peat.

It doesn't decay very fast.

This is very unpalatable.

For the microbes it's very difficult to break down.

Big difference between having a candy bar or trying to eat a piece of wood.

People don't realize there's more carbon stored in the peatlands of the world than there are all the forests.

If you look at a typical forest soil, it's one or 2%.

Peat is basically 80 to 90% organic matter.

That's why they're so great at storing carbon.

To get to this goal of zero carbon emissions, we have to keep reducing this amount of carbon dioxide release.

If you just let these areas lie fallow and decompose, it can equal up to 2.5% of our annual goal of reducing carbon emissions for the entire United States.

It's an enormous amount.

If only 25% of the drained peatlands in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia caught on fire in one year, it could equal to 18% of our annual US goal of carbon dioxide reduction.

So we're trying to keep as much carbon in the system as we can, and wetlands are a natural sequester of carbon.

- So this is an instrument that basically you put in the hole.

Oh, that's good, And you turn it 180 degrees and this paddle basically cuts a piece of peat and we pull it back out of the hole, lift with the knees.

So there, yeah - [Curtis] That's a beautiful core that.

That core probably represents the base, probably about 2,000 to 3,000 years in age.

[gentle music] - These landscapes started to change in the '60s and '70s when there was ditching and draining primarily with the hopes of them being converted to agricultural fields.

I think one of the things that's unique about these habitats is they're fire-dependent.

Most people think of forest fires and wildfires starting in the canopy or the above ground layer, but peatlands actually, the soil itself is combustible.

- What you have to think about is that in a natural state, that underlying soil is going to be at least partially saturated.

When these soils are very, very dry, so during natural drought periods or in a ditch situation, it makes them very, very vulnerable to catching on fire.

In 2008, for example, there was a a wildfire that lasted for several months.

- [Curtis] We burned off 9.9 teragrams of carbon.

That's the amount of carbon dioxide released by 2.5 million cars driving 12,000 miles in a year, in one fire.

- The fire will move underground and we've seen repeated fires out here that will burn away feet of soil, four to five feet in the most intensely burned area.

- A thousand years of accumulation could go up in smoke, in literally an hour.

- Yeah.

- If it's drained.

- If we put water back in the soil, we provide for the habitat, but we're also making the landscape more resilient to the effects of catastrophic wildfire.

[relaxing music] The most altered part of the refuge has a ditch network every mile by half mile.

And then even within that, every 320 feet there are V ditches.

It was purchased by the conservation fund and donated to the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1990.

So one of the first things that managers at that time did was to essentially develop the plan for how to fix the drainage network on the landscape.

- So the main way that we achieve hydrologic restoration or rewetting these Pocosin wetlands is by installing flashboard riser water control structures.

And essentially it's a culvert pipe, and you're able to control what the water level is in the ditch that's just uphill of that structure.

So we stage these structures gradually up the slope of a Pocosin dome or the hill of this wetland.

We're rewetting with rainwater, we're rewetting these soils from below.

From my perspective, the most important kind of next steps is doing this on private land.

If a private landowner were to own an area that was previously ditched and drained Pocosin wetland, they could use the same sort of infrastructure that is being used at project sites all across the coastal plain here in North Carolina, re-wet their lands, and then generate carbon credits that could be sold on the voluntary carbon market.

- It's a market-based approach to restorations.

These measurement methodologies and approaches are just a way for anyone who invests in that market to know that it was carbon that actually is moving the needle to address the problem of greenhouse gas emissions in a meaningful way.

[relaxing music continues] - Hello?

Hello?

Hello, you all are eating the tender grass, you don't like the grass over there?

As a livestock grower, you are a grass grower.

[relaxing music] We're at Blackwell's Farm, located here in the Piedmont region of North Carolina.

I'm a co-owner with my brother, Seth Blackwell.

We were born and raised here on the farm.

We spent time in corporate America, the both of us, and we returned to the family farm.

We are multi-generational farmers, from a multi-generational farming family.

We basically raise beef cattle and seasonal specialty crops.

We're gonna give 'em some apples today.

We're gonna give 'em a treat.

How do I feel about my cows?

I love my cows.

My cows are my friends, okay?

[relaxing music continues] It's a totally different picture.

It's a different scenario.

It's a different process when it comes to farming.

It used to be we would get days of rain, now it's kinda like a downpour.

It comes all within a limited time period.

We didn't experience those extremes.

We did have drought times growing up where things had to be watered through irrigation, but today it's an ongoing pattern.

- Climate change is gonna affect growers in very different ways depending where you are in the United States.

Here in North Carolina, we have some predictions on what's gonna happen.

So we're gonna see maybe annually the same amount of rainfall, but it'll be distributed very differently.

- It's also predicted that droughts are going to be much more common much more intense, and last for longer duration.

When precipitation does happen, you wanna ensure that it gets into the ground.

- [Beverly] We were always taught you had to turn the land, you need to turn it 18 inches or so, you need to allow it to rest for the winter.

I looked at the fields of where we were, with our crops that we were planting and I said, "In order for this to work with extreme weather changes and the patterns that we are now confronted with, we are gonna have to go with a no-till to limited till process.

We need to do less disturbance of the land.

- Tillage is a way of cultivating the soil or preparing it for a seed bed.

- [Alex] There are advantages of tilling, but the trade-off is you've broken up the soil, all the aggregates, all the soil structure is damaged.

You're losing organic matter and then the soil becomes less productive over time.

So we're standing in one of the few long-term studies here in North Carolina looking at the impact of soil management, in particular tillage.

- [Cara] The study started in 1984.

Within this field we have randomized tillage treatments - [Alex] Looking at things as intense as moldboard plow, where we flip the soil over completely down to eight to 12 inches, heavily disturbed versus chisel plowing, kind of semi-disturbed, and then disking, which kind of middle ground.

We compare it to no-till, which is we do not touch the soil, the only interaction we have with the soil is when we plant the crops in this tiny slot.

On the left here, up higher, you can see this is the no-till site.

It hasn't been tilled for 38 years.

On the right here is the moldboard plow, which again was heavily disturbed and we've lost half a foot of soil from erosion and soil organic matter being lost.

It takes centuries to build up top soil, so this is a permanent loss, won't be fixed anytime soon.

- [Cara] Across the board, for all years, conservation tillage and in particular no-till had more consistent and higher yields in comparison to the conventionally-tilled plots.

And in particular, we saw that we had higher yields in these drier conditions, so we thought that potentially water could be the answer.

- [Alex] When we till over the long term, we're losing the integrity of the soil.

So when rain does occur, it breaks up anything on the surface and causes the surface seal or crusting.

- And here is some nice evidence of crusting.

So you can even just peel this off.

- [Alex] When a rain event does occur, a large portion of that water will hit that crust and move off.

Water is not being moved through the root zone and so there can experiencing complete different conditions depending on your soil health.

The only place we don't see crusting is in the no-till plots.

Having material on the surface provides armor and protection to the bare soil.

- This is soil from the moldboard disc plot and Alex is going to bring in soil from the no-till plot.

- [Alex] The colors, they are pretty bold there, I didn't expect it to be that different.

- [Cara] This soil has some nice granular structure and is darker because of higher amounts of soil organic carbon.

- 38 years ago, this is all the same soil type, it was all one field, they were growing probably hay and corn, and now after 38 years, looks like you have fundamentally different soils.

You can really change the direction of the soil type just with some simple management like no-till.

[relaxing music continues] - [Beverly] As a farmer, it's all about efficiency, it's all about profitability.

We were able to build the soil quality, we were able to cut down on fertilizer costs, so we've been able to minimize cost as a result of going with regenerative agriculture.

[gentle music] - Grasslands are a fundamental part of our landscape.

We think the grasslands are about a third of the global carbon sinks.

There are records that we can read dating back to the 1500s about grasslands.

Anyone that came here that was a European would write about wading through the savannahs.

- And a lot of that had to do with how indigenous people had been managing the land for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

- The early explorers, they found these grand open areas and the first explorer to this area, John Lawson, he could almost always smell smoke because of the American Indians burning here.

- This is already a cultivated place.

Especially here in the southeast and in North Carolina, grasslands have this very, very, very strong connection with human beings.

- [Johnny] The plants that make up the Piedmont Prairie, the Piedmont Savannah are what are called heliophilic, so they're sun-loving and once they start to get shaded out they decline.

- [Justin] And so one of the places we find some of these plants that have mostly vanished from other parts of the landscape is in power line easements and along roadsides.

We find these plants that look like they "belong in the Midwest."

We find the big prairie grasses, we find the asters, we find the echinaceas, the cone flowers, we find them in these places because they are the right kinds of conditions.

- [Johnny] The plants that grow at so many of these sites grow in very poor soil conditions.

When the summertime when it dries out, it's like concrete, but in the winter when it's wet, it's gummy.

That's why they have deep roots because they can spread out and grab what's out there.

- [Tara] They could be up to 10 feet deep.

There are studies that show that the chemicals that come from grassland roots actually stay in the soil up to centuries and so they're working to sequester carbon for centuries.

- One of the important things to remember about plants is that they cannot move.

And so that fact changes everything about how they have to be behave and how they have to be set up to take all the different things that they will be surrounded by.

Plants have to prepare for the extreme events.

- There are a lot of climate models out there and still it's uncertain what's going to happen as climate changes.

Some of the models show that the Piedmont will become hotter and drier.

Well, that's okay for these Piedmont savanna species because that's what they're adapted to.

They have seen so many different climates throughout their, let's say genetic memory.

So we're hoping that the Piedmont is a place where there's a tremendous amount of resilience among the native plants here.

[bright music] - One thing about prairie plants is that they thrive in degraded landscapes.

And so if we think about all of our landscapes now as we're developed, so many of them are "degraded" and people just sort of give up on 'em and think, "Maybe I'm not gonna plant anything," when actually they're the perfect landscapes, the perfect situation for prairie plants like this.

- [Justin] So this is the Chatham Mills Pollinator Garden as stewarded and designed by Debbie Roos, who is an extension agent here in Chatham County.

These are areas that would've been planted in great myrtles and monkey grass.

Look at what happened, what can happen with just a little bit of attention, some knowledge, some know-how.

It changes the feel of where we are, right?

This feels like North Carolina in the way that a strip mall parking lot would never.

- When we're thinking about native plants in this area, we have to think about grassland plants, not just woodland plants, and as a result, we need to think about what that means about a garden.

[Tara laughing] It's like a troll, it's a little troll.

- All right, you ready?

- Yeah.

- We are here in Carbo, North Carolina, and we are here at the Tony and Nelly Strayhorn house.

This house has been here in my family for seven generations.

It was built in 1879 by brick masons, my family of brick masons, and they also were farmers and they tended this land.

- I'm Landon's cousin, we're working on plants together, thinking about ways that we can steward the land in this area for another nine generations.

- [Landon] My great-grandmother was basically the last person to actually garden in this area, and I felt like it was a need to kind of restore that project.

- Restoring degraded landscapes could sequester 37% of the carbon that we need to keep temperature rise under 3.6 degrees.

To me that's really powerful because it's sort of like a low-hanging fruit.

We need to create all these new technologies, and switch the grid and there's all these things we need to do, but why would we not just be planting backyard gardens and restoring landscapes?

[gentle music] - [Sara] People are just starting to think about the value of grasses on their own.

These amazing plants that are indigenous to the Piedmont.

Very abundant and very easy to plant.

You just think about all of our roadways and backyards and empty lots that could be turned into grasslands and could sequester carbon and foster biodiversity, filter stormwater, that's an incredible potential.

[gentle music continues] [relaxing music] - Hyde County's a really unique place.

We're located right on the Pamlico sound, on the coast of North Carolina.

It's very flat and very low.

There's about 84,000 acres of farmland in Hyde County.

- Drainage ditches are very important to being able to farm our land, to be able to get the water off when we get a rain.

But if you don't have a tide gate, or some way to stop the salt water coming back, it'll back up in there.

- [Andrea] When the wind's blowing in the wrong direction, or you got storm surge from a hurricane, it doesn't take long and you've got salty water pushing back into the fields.

[relaxing music] For the most part, when the water is pushed up in these ditches and into the fields, it's affecting the edges right along the ditches.

- Then there's other areas that the crop will come up and grow, but it just will be affected, it won't yield very good.

It's not something that's just started, it's something that's been happening for generations.

But there's new places that we're seeing it come and it's it's getting worse.

Our farm is located really close to the Pamlico Sound.

We're only 18 inches above sea level.

The normal tide is what we really try to keep out of our ditches.

We can't control whether a hurricane comes over into the field, but if we can keep the salt water out of there every day, then we can make progress on it.

Salt water on this side, freshwater on that side.

This gate keeps the saltwater from going in.

When we get rain and the water's higher on the freshwater side, it allows the freshwater to go out.

- This is a salinity meter.

It measures salinity in parts per thousand.

Whenever I check water for a farmer or landowner I want it to be less than two.

Yeah, ooh.

- What is it right there?

- 13 and a half.

- That ain't good, is it?

- No.

- This thing must be leaking.

- [Andrea] It says 18-6.

- There's why, that gates cracked open.

[relaxing music continues] - As an agg.

agent for Hyde County, I work with the farmers to determine what the unique needs of Hyde County are.

A big one forming is saltwater intrusion, and it's an issue but we're still farming and raising really good crops, producing high yields, high above the state average.

Whenever you say, "Well, we need to do research, we need to find out what we can do."

But then we'll say, "Well, have you seen the maps?

Have you seen the prediction maps for sea level rise?"

"They just need to leave."

- It would be near impossible to just pick up your farm and move it somewhere.

You've got land that the family has farmed for 100 years or more.

You just can't go find farm land somewhere else and start farming, that's pretty impossible.

- Especially being an extension agent, we're here to provide solutions.

- And look who it is.

- Hi.

My role as an extension agent is basically to connect the farmers with unbiased research-based information from NC State and all the other land grant universities.

- The soils in eastern North Carolina, specifically in the Tidewater region, are very high in organic matters.

There's a reason that some of our largest producing farms in the state are out in this area.

These soils are particularly susceptible to saltwater intrusion because they have high organic matter, high clays and organic matter and clays hold onto salts better than something that sandy where it'll just wash through the system.

Holding onto salt at the surface is not a good thing in the plant root zone.

Prime agricultural soils have good soil structure.

So this is shapes and these shapes are held together with clays and organic matter.

Can you hand me some of that reference stuff?

- [Julia] Yeah.

- So this is non salt impacted, same soil.

- Oh wow.

- Yeah.

Entering salt into the system leads to loss of that structure.

And when we're losing structure in soils we lose water movement, we get more erosion, loss of carbon.

- An average agricultural field will have about 1-1.5% carbon, whereas out in Hyde County, we see it upwards of like 6% carbon, which is incredibly high and very important to keep in that soil.

- One of the alternative uses for marginal farmlands that have gotten too salty is to put them into conservation reserve programs which are typically taking them out of agriculture and putting them into more natural conditions.

This is just a linear marsh.

I mean this is like carbon sequestration 101.

Carbon accumulation leads to building lands.

By locking up carbon in soil, you're actually increasing elevation, and by doing that you're fighting sea level rise.

So we're adding a lot of biomass every year from our marsh plants, but the soil microbes are not happy.

They're not able to process that efficiently and send it back to the atmosphere as CO2.

And what ends up happening is you get a buildup of organic material.

There would be a benefit for the farmers in that you're building land up in front of their farm.

It's like a natural berm.

And if that can keep up with sea level rise, that's protecting the farm behind here from storm surge.

So do you guys get soil tests every year from NCDA or every few years?

The farmers know their soils, so they do soil testing all the time, and so relative to what their last soil test was, what does the soil test this time tell them?

Currently the methodologies that are available to farmers are time-intensive and that in many cases after a hurricane does not allow for management decisions on a quick basis.

So we're trying to develop rapid methodologies that are essentially field kits that can be used by extension agents out in the field.

So in 40 minutes you can get a similar answer to what would take over a month right now through the state labs.

- That's what's exciting.

Now everybody's coming together and is working hard to find solutions for the farmers.

If we could find some salt-tolerant varieties or develop some crops that can be marketed and are profitable that we could grow on the land that we're trying to get turned around, that would really be great.

[gentle music] - I think the future is going to be challenging, but I mean I've got a son that's going to college, he wants to come back and farm, so we're doing everything we can to preserve our land for the future.

- [Beverly] There's nothing etched in stone, it's a matter of thinking outside of the box.

- [Curtis] It's an amazing amount of carbon that we can store in these systems.

- [Sara] We really have to steward them right.

- [Justin] You can drive on any highway almost and see this same starry pattern.

- There's nothing more in North Carolina than this.

[gentle music continues] ♪ [gentle music continues] [upbeat music] - [Narrator] Funding for "SCI NC" is provided by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

- [Announcer] Quality Public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.