If the phrase “climate change” conjures up mental images of gas-guzzling SUVs and coal-powered plants in America and in China, think again. Chances are that what’s on your plate is just as relevant to the issue.

Agriculture worldwide is responsible for about 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. Pesticides and fertilizers are brewed using highly polluting processes, and industrial farms spare no energy-intensive machinery to tend to their crops (including planes). On most continents, the burning of crop residues is a widespread practice. Meanwhile, rice fields and cattle emit vast quantities of methane (CH4), a gas that is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2). Livestock alone accounts for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet, agriculture has been conspicuously absent from the global political debate about greenhouse gas mitigation. Until last week, that is. In the final sprint before the Waxman-Markey Bill on climate change is to be introduced to the House of Representatives for a vote later this month, the House Agriculture Committee got an earful from supporters of agricultural offsets. They argued that the bill is unacceptable because its design of a carbon market ignores, in true European fashion, the elephant standing right there in the room: lest we forget, agriculture is potentially the cheapest and most accessible tool at our disposal to significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions in the short term.

They have a point. Regenerative farming can provide us with a lot more than the delicious and healthy food that more of us are increasingly coming to love and value. Sustainable farming practices shrink the carbon footprint of agriculture AND help reduce the amount of carbon already present in the atmosphere. According to conservative estimates, land farmed sustainably can store 10% to 15% of the carbon emissions we produce each year.

“A black soil is a soil rich in carbon. That’s what we need to get back to, after decades of mining our soils with fertilizers”, Larry Schweiger, president of the Wildlife National Federation and an advocate of regenerative agriculture, told me this week. With plant roots as the necessary channel, carbon can be put back into the soil as organic matter. Carbon saturation of cultivated land should not occur before 75 to 100 years, which gives us plenty of room to maneuver as we tackle the climate crisis.

However, expecting farmers to bear the brunt of the cost of cleaning up the air is wishful thinking. The European Union Emission Trading Scheme, the biggest carbon market in the world to date, allocated no credits for farmers on the grounds that their output of greenhouse gas emissions was impossibly difficult to measure and that the agricultural sector is an unreliable vehicle to reduce emissions.

Given the urgency we’re facing, however, we would do well to give agriculture the attention it deserves and to consider alternative methods for financing its transformation. If carbon markets around the world don’t give farmers the necessary financial incentive, governments should be able to nudge them on the path to sustainability. The same way subsidies have promoted the intensive production of corn in the United States, they could just as well discourage it while promoting crop rotations and the end of the meat industry as we know it.

Of course, believers in market forces may also get their wish. Just as the price of oil dictates how much we drive, it may also dictate how we farm. Moreover, when the costs of carbon and other harmful impacts (“externalities”) of food production get incorporated into the real price of food, consumers will soon realize that a trip to the supermarket does not rival a stroll down to the local organic farmers’ market.