I agree with the opposing view in the article that we should consider researching the possibility and ways to make it more effective... but currently, that seems like it should be done as an academic project, not by throwing hundreds of millions of dollars to miscellaneous carbon startups and hoping something changes.
Side question: why are many of the article's examples of "carbon friendly" farmers getting major carbon-credit payments part-time cattle ranchers? It seems like helping expand cattle ranching is not a fantastic side-effect of carbon credits, and could cancel out much of the marginal benefit of cover crop planting, etc.
Same for weighing - this sounds like an implementation nightmare. The cost of equipment and time to weigh every piece of vegetation grown (then the cost of developing the mathematical models to subtract out carbon emissions, possible loss of carbon sink, etc.) sounds wildly expensive for something easily gamed by any nontrustworthy farmer.
That said though, if you have a vision for this that would solve these problems, you could probably create an extremely successful startup with it. There's hundreds of millions of dollars in the market of carbon indulgences.
The problem with simply weighing it isn't the cost, ore processing facilities already do this at scale. The problem is the cost of fertilizers and that you need heat it up to turn it into mostly coal first, or the methane generated by large scale decomposition after dumping it in a pile somewhere will be far worse than the carbon captured. Heating and transportation could be solved by nuclear and electric vehicles respectively, but its still a rather bad idea. Not to say that biological carbon capture cannot work, there are good ways to do so.
