12/07/2026
What if I told you the hay crop on our farm will pull roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere this growing season as about 100 average passenger vehicles emit in an entire year?
Most conversations about farming and the environment start with what agriculture emits. We hear about tractors, diesel fuel and livestock. That’s part of the story, but I don’t think it’s the whole story.
While making hay this week, I kept thinking about what was actually sitting in front of me.
Every spring these fields start with sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. Through photosynthesis, grass pulls carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turns it into leaves, stems and roots. A few months later, I’m driving through the same field baling that carbon into round bales.
Our bales average about 700 pounds. Once the hay is dry, roughly 300 pounds of every bale is carbon that originally came from the atmosphere. This year we’ll likely make 850 to 900 round bales, which works out to about 130 tonnes of carbon, or roughly 477 tonnes of carbon dioxide captured in this year’s hay crop alone.
Those numbers are hard to picture, so here’s another way to think about them.
• 9 round bales = about one average passenger vehicle’s annual CO₂ emissions.
• 90 bales = about 10 vehicles.
• 450 bales = about 50 vehicles.
• 900 bales = about 100 vehicles.
And that’s just the hay.
It doesn’t include our pastures that keep growing all summer, the roots beneath the soil, the trees along our stone fences or our managed woodlot.
Our cattle, pigs, goats and pasture-raised chickens are part of that cycle. They harvest the grass, return nutrients to the soil and help keep healthy grasslands productive year after year.
I’m not saying farming has no environmental impact. Every farm should keep looking for ways to improve. I just think this side of the story deserves to be part of the conversation too.
So the next time you drive past a hay field, don’t just see grass.
See carbon that was floating in the atmosphere only a few months ago.
And remember… that’s just the hay.
