Farmers’ Use of Cover Crops Could Benefit the Pheasant Population

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Author: Michael Pearce

Jeff Prendergast said life is pretty easy for a grown Kansas pheasant. With so many crop fields, food is seldom a problem. Even with reductions in Conservation Reserve Program fields there’s normally enough cover to protect a lot of the birds from predators and the elements. With nearly 8 million acres of wheat there’s no shortage of potential nesting cover. Still …

“Our main limiting factor is brood-rearing cover,” said Prendergast, Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism pheasant biologist. “Wheat fields have been the nesting cover, and when they grew into weeds they were our brood-rearing cover. Then (when farmers began spraying harvested fields with herbicides) those fields became essentially deserts without any vegetation and insects for the chicks.”

But Prendergast sees the growing practice of planting freshly harvested fields to non-harvested plants as a positive for pheasant numbers in the future.

Kelly Griffeth, a farmer in Mitchell and Jewell counties, is a believer in such cover crops.

“We’re using cover crops about everywhere we farm,” Griffeth said. “It’s making us money by improving our soil, and we have tons of wildlife, too.”

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Reversing Desertification Shows Living Soil is Key Factor in Environmental Health

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Author: Pamela

This beautiful TED Talk by Allan Savory, biologist and ecologist, highlights the importance of rebuilding native soil, particularly in areas where desertification already has begun. The irony of the story is that holistic land management and animal husbandry provide the strategic cornerstone to rejuvenating the grasslands of the world.

The lesson for those in G3 is: Protect and nurture your O.W.L. (Oxygen, Water, and Life), because Living Soil is the KEY FACTOR in environmental health in general and specifically for the health of your landscape and the health of your waterways.

Recently our Managing Member, Pamela Berstler, spoke in a meeting of Water Conservation Managers noting the paramount importance of educating about soil health in water conservation and pollution prevention.  Pamela argued that building a healthy, biologically active Soil Sponge was the MOST IMPORTANT ACTIVITY in healthy landscape building and that this truth applied to all manner of land use from agriculture to urban/suburban residential and commercial, parklands, and even “natural” watershed areas that we would consider wildlands. Pamela also reasoned that all soil is degraded (especially biologically speaking) and that intervention, remediation, and ACTION was required to rebuild our soils, particularly as it applies to garden-building, even when using plants that are considered native or have become perfectly adapted to the climate and place over thousands of years.

Map of Global Soil Degradation

There was push-back from the audience.  One attendee proposed that plant selection and placement was the most important factor for education and that selecting and planting native plants in native soil was THE simple and compelling solution for restoring watersheds and producing healthy, low resource gardens (including water conserving, of course). The reasoning was that native plants don’t need soils with organic matter in them, and so long as the microclimate conditions supported the plant selection, no soil amendment was necessary.

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Top 10 Carbon Market Predictions for 2015 from The Climate Trust

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Author: Kasey Krifka

The Climate Trust, a mission-driven nonprofit that specializes in climate solutions, with a reduction of 1.9 million tons of greenhouse gases to its name, announced its second annual prediction list of 10 carbon market trends to watch in 2015.

The trends, which range from increased climate change adaptation measures at the state and city-level to new protocols for agriculture and forestry, were identified by The Climate Trust based on interactions with their diverse group of working partners—government, utilities, project developers and large businesses.

“We’re excited to once again look at the overall market with fresh eyes and identify areas of potential movement and growth,” said Dick Kempka, vice president of business development for The Climate Trust.

  1. Allowance and offset demand will increase in 2015. The second compliance period for California’s cap-and-trade system began the first of this year. Distributors of transportation fuel and natural gas have officially joined the ranks of other capped, covered entities, and with the addition of these fuel distributors, the emission cap immediately more than doubles in size. As a result, The Trust predicts that cost containment mechanisms such as offsets and banking will become much more significant components of the cap-and-trade system. A recent whitepaper estimates the current market value at $2 billion annually, and anticipates that this will increase to $4 billion in 2015. To date, the California market has largely been viewed as an operational success, however, some have suggested the system has not yet experienced stresses that could result from drastic and unplanned energy use spikes—escalations triggered by weather events such as drought, hot summers, and cold winters. The Trust believes that the introduction of transportation fuels under the cap, coupled with allowance uncertainty and shortage of offsets, are likely to increase the demand for both allowances and offsets in 2015.

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Humans Cause Erosion 100x’s Faster Than Normal

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Author: Alexander Montoro

Experts have long linked deforestation and intensive farming to worsening erosion rates around the world. Although studied extensively, determining erosion rates due to human-induced activities has rarely been quantified by scientists. However, new research conducted by geologists finds that erosion rates in the southeastern United States increased one hundred times after the arrival of European colonists in the 1700s due to tree clearing and unsustainable agriculture practices.

One of the researchers, Paul Biermann, a geologist from the University of Vermont, told mongabay.com that he has been studying erosion rates and landscape change ever since he came to Vermont and saw the dramatic human imprint on the landscape.

Bierman explained that there are two primary types of human activities that are responsible for increased soil erosion rates in the southeastern United States: “the removal of the trees and thus their root systems which stabilize the soil on slopes and the advent of tillage agriculture which loosens the soil and makes it susceptible to water and wind erosion.”

In order to determine the impact of human activities on erosion rates, geologists had to first establish background (geologic) rates of erosion. They conducted research at ten large river basins (10,000-100,000 square kilometers) in the southern Appalachian piedmont region from Virginia to Alabama. These ten river basins sites all had a history of large-scale native forest clearing and intensive agriculture use starting in the 1700s and experienced maximum land use in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

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