Giving Compass' Take:

• Ben Paynter at Fast Company writes on 5 agricultural hacks that the famous Microsoft founder and philanthropist believes can help stop climate change, and why he’s investing in these groundbreaking solutions.

• How can other donors also invest in agricultural methods to curb climate change? 

• Here are 25 food and agricultural leaders to look out for in 2019. 

Here’s a seemingly obvious quote from Bill Gates about how to sustain life on earth: “[A]t the end of the day, people have to eat.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out–except that with all the planet-threatening complications that growing food is responsible for, it may be not be so simple after all.

As Gates explains in a recent post on his GatesNotes blog, agriculture is, by sector, the second largest supplier of greenhouse gasses. It generates 24% of the harmful fumes associated with climate change, just 1% less than energy generation:

Here’s a mind-blowing fact: there’s more carbon in soil than in the atmosphere and all plant life combined. That’s not a big deal when left to its own devices. But when soil gets disturbed–like it does when you convert a forest into cropland–all that stored carbon gets released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That’s one reason why deforestation alone is responsible for 11% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. (Another reason is that forests and grasslands are natural carbon sinks. Clearing them reduces the planet’s capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the air.)

Read the full article on 5 agricultural hacks that can help stop climate change by Ben Paynter at Fast Company.