Matt Russell promotes regenerative agriculture as a means to reduce carbon emissions, and he hopes to push the government to help farmers put it into practice.

One afternoon in November, between a rally in Des Moines and a town hall in Knoxville, Joe Biden toured Coyote Run Farm, in Lacona, Iowa. Biden and his team arrived in two S.U.V.s. Jill Biden, the former Second Lady, was with him, as were Tom Vilsack, the former Secretary of Agriculture and Iowa governor, and Christie Vilsack, his wife. The Vilsacks, to some modest fanfare, had endorsed Biden that morning. Their host at Coyote Run was Matt Russell, the co-owner of the farm, which occupies a hundred and ten acres of rolling hills near White Breast Creek. As they walked the grounds, about twenty reporters who’d R.S.V.P.’d to an e-mail invitation from the Biden campaign trudged around them, photographers and camera operators shooting film, reporters jotting random notes, everyone but Russell stepping carefully to avoid the cow manure. A farmer, a campaign, and the press—as cliché as it comes in Iowa. The group stopped to look over a red barn on the property, a little ways down from the main farm house. “How old’s the barn?” Biden asked Russell. Small talk. But it was the question Russell was waiting for. He had an answer ready. There, in front of a former Vice-President, Second Lady, and the most powerful political couple in the state of Iowa, he delivered an entire speech.

Russell is an advocate of a set of buzzy, climate-conscious farming practices collectively known, in certain circles, as regenerative agriculture, which holds the promise of drastically reducing the carbon emissions produced by farming, and even pulling some carbon out of the atmosphere. Russell wants the government to start paying farmers to implement these practices, and for farmers to start thinking of environmental services as one more commodity that they can cultivate. The barn was his barn, but also his metaphor. “There are five draft-horse stalls in this barn,” he said, and gestured inside, where one of his dogs was nimbly jumping up onto bales of hay. “In the mid-thirties, the previous owners were betting that the future of agriculture was horses and harnesses. And we know the future of agriculture in the thirties was tractors and hybrids and petrochemicals. And we’re at that exact same moment.”

Russell is a fifth-generation Iowa farmer, but, like his father before him, farming life is something he left and returned to as an adult. After graduating from high school, he considered becoming a Catholic priest but ended up in agricultural policy instead. He worked for many years at Drake University’s Agricultural Law Center, and as an adviser to the Department of Agriculture during the Obama Administration. He now works as the executive director of Iowa Interfaith Power & Light, an affiliate of the national faith-based nonprofit that advocates for action on climate change. Russell and his husband, Patrick Standley, bought Coyote Run fifteen years ago. Standley was a zookeeper. He took care of the big cats—Siberian tigers, African lions, snow leopards—at the Blank Park Zoo, in Des Moines, until 2006, when he quit to manage Coyote Run full time. “We’re really typical of the American farm family,” Russell, who is forty-nine, told me earlier this month, when I stopped by the farm again. “One farm income and one non-farm income. That’s absolutely normative.”

Coyote Run doesn’t look like what you’d expect when you think of an Iowa farm. There’s the rolling hills, plus trees, a couple of ponds, and no corn or soybeans on site. Russell and Standley used to raise cattle, and chickens, and some vegetables, but it’s down to mostly just the cows now, along with various efforts to implement regenerative practices like cover crops, rotational grazing, and managing unproductive land so it returns to prairie or wetland. They sell their produce to restaurants and beef to families in the area. When I arrived, Russell had just come back from some morning meetings in Des Moines. He had me wait in his kitchen while he changed out of his “city pants.” The house, like the farm, is a work in progress, with unfinished walls and exposed beams. On the stove was a chocolate-chip-cookie bar that Standley had baked. The windows above it looked out over the pale winter fields.

This past year, in addition to Biden, Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris made campaign stops at Coyote Run. According to Russell, more than half a dozen other 2020 candidates or their campaigns—Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Jay Inslee, Tom Steyer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Andrew Yang, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Tim Ryan—have called to talk about agriculture and climate change. The sudden interest in Coyote Run was borne of the peculiar economy created by the Iowa caucus process: the supply of candidates on the ground, the public’s demand to see them at campaign stops, the exchange rates of local and national issues. These past twelve months, candidates who wanted to discuss the acute effects of climate change could survey the flood damage that racked the state last spring. If they wanted to talk about renewable energy, they could tour one of the state’s many wind farms. And if they wanted to talk about farming and climate change, they could call Russell. “A lot of people think that the Iowa caucuses happen in February,” Russell said. “But the most interesting, the most important things are happening leading up to that. The night of the caucuses is big for the candidates, right? But if you’re doing any work on the caucus cycle, it’s all happening ahead of that time.”

Russell wears glasses and, with the patient bearing of a would-be clergyman, uses the terms “creation” and “the environment” interchangeably. A year ago, his friend Robert Leonard, a radio journalist from nearby Knoxville, offered to help him write an op-ed about regenerative agriculture. In February, they published a piece in the Kansas City Star that got some attention from agriculture blogs. A month later, the Times accepted a piece from them that ran under the headline “What Democrats Need to Know to Win in Rural America.” Paying farmers to keep carbon in the ground was a topic of both pieces. Soon after, Russell and Leonard heard from O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman. “Beto was the first to really run with it,” Russell said. “He called me and Bob, and we had an hour-long sitdown in Des Moines. It was me and Bob and two staffers, and he just picked our brains.” The next day, Russell said, “he came out and he had revised his climate plan. He said, ‘I’m in Iowa, and I’ve been talking to farmers, and I’m making these changes.’ One of the things he said is we have to pay farmers for environmental services, particularly climate change.”