If you grow one tomato plant each year, eat the fruit and compost the rest - there’s a carbon cycle happening. Atmospheric CO2 is turned into sugars and carbohy

If you grow one tomato plant each year, eat the fruit and compost the rest - there’s a carbon cycle happening. Atmospheric CO2 is turned into sugars and carbohydrates via photosynthesis in the plant. Then the plant is eaten (the fruit by a human, the rest by bacteria, fungi, nematodes, etc. in your compost). The process of digestion/metabolisation is that the carbohydrates/sugars are broken down for energy and respired back into the air as carbon dioxide. Back to where we started The net change to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is roughly zero per year if you start with no tomato plant and end with eaten tomatoes and compost* If you want to sequester carbon then you have to (a) increase the biomass of plants year after year or (b) take plant matter (or animal matter) out of the carbon cycle for good. That means doing something like burying it or dropping it to the bottom of the ocean. Anywhere where there’s no oxygen (the O in CO2). That’s what happened to the gigatons of algae and plankton that turned into the oil we’ve had so much fun burning. * I believe healthy soil does store more carbon than dead dirt so if your ongoing growing is improving the soil every year then you might be winning a bit.