Tag Archive for: Soil Carbon Sequestration

Soil Conservation Plants Hope

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The soil beneath our feet might save the planet.

“If we get the soil right we can fix a lot of our issues,” Ray Archuleta says. “Healthy soils lead to a healthy plant, a healthy animal, a healthy human, healthy water, and ultimately a healthy climate and planet.”

Archuleta, a Certified Professional Soil Scientist with the Soil Science Society of America, has a calling – soil conservation. He’s traveled the United States as well as abroad to plant the seeds of thought about the negative effects of a problem that he sees everywhere he goes. That problem is soil erosion.

In the film “Kiss the Ground,” released in 2020, the problem of rapid soil erosion is said to have begun long ago when mankind invented the plow. As the plow became popular vast areas around cities were plowed to grow grain for food. As the soils eroded so did those early empires until they eventually vanished into the dust. The film describes the 1930s Dust Bowl era as the largest manmade disaster in history. By the end of 1934, millions of cropland acres were permanently damaged.

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From the Ground up — the Soil Can Make All the Difference in Healthy, Thriving Plants

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Gardeners can get pretty excited when choosing flowers or vegetables for their gardens, but to have success with growing, you need a strong foundation — and that is the soil.

Healthy soil leads to healthy and happy plants. It all starts from the ground up.

Soils vary tremendously from state to state and even from neighborhood to neighborhood. Some places have deep, rich native soils, while others have poorly drained clay soils, and others are a haven of rocks. Some soils are very acidic while others can be very alkaline.

Knowing what your yard contains to begin with is the starting point in knowing how to improve it. You should start with a soil test.

To take a soil sample, try to get a “core” of soil, a good trowel-full, roughly 6 inches deep from several areas in the garden. Mix the cores together and take one pint to your county office of the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture Cooperative Extension Service (uaex.edu). Within a few weeks, you will get a computer analysis back, giving you a lot of information about your soil.

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Soil Can Remove Air Pollution and Regulate Climate Change

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In natural environments, most microorganisms in the soil are not growing and instead exist in various dormant states.

Researchers at Queen Mary University London analysed these microorganisms and found that over 70% of soil bacteria is capable of living off the small amounts of hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane in the air, thus helping to remove atmospheric pollution and regulate climate change.

With the bacteria adopting this flexible diet, it has given the researchers a new understanding of how diverse and productive soils can be and how microorganisms adapt to survive in different environments.

Dr James Bradley, co-author of the study said: ‘We commonly think of organic carbon being the primary source of energy to soil microbes. Our research shows that in fact, these soil microbes use trace gases such as hydrogen to meet their energy needs.

‘The reaction of hydrogen and oxygen releases a lot of energy – enough that it is commonly used in aerospace engineering to propel rockets into orbit. We now know that these alternative reactions are prevalent among soil microbes, and supply at least enough energy to meet their basic energy needs.’

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4 cosas que hacen de la tierra una de las cosas más asombrosas de nuestro planeta

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La tierra es una de las maravillas más subestimadas y poco comprendidas de nuestro planeta.

Bajo tus pies hay cosas maravillosas, asegura Bridget Emmet, especialista en tierra del Centro para la Ecología y la Hidrología de Reino Unido, y, con las siguientes palabras, le explicó a la BBC por qué cree eso.

Lejos de ser mugre, se estima que en un solo gramo de tierra puede haber hasta 50.000 especies de organismos microscópicos.

En una sola cucharadita, hay más microorganismos que personas en la Tierra.

Pero mucho de lo que hay ahí abajo, en este universo profundo y oculto, todavía nos es ajeno.

1. Es desconocida pero invaluable

A pesar de estar literalmente bajo nuestros pies, los humanos hasta ahora solo han identificado una pequeña fracción de la extraordinaria vida que abunda bajo tierra.

Sin embargo, los animales y microorganismos que conocemos sabemos que desempeñan un papel invaluable.

Millones de años de competencia evolutiva han llevado a los microorganismos a producir compuestos antibióticos para luchar contra sus vecinos.

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La biodiversidad de los suelos es fundamental para alimentar al planeta

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Los suelos son una de las principales reservas mundiales de biodiversidad y albergan más del 25 % de la diversidad biológica del planeta. Estos microorganismos nos alimentan, nos protegen del cambio climático y hasta de las enfermedades.

En el marco del Día Mundial del Suelo, celebrado el pasado 5 de diciembre, la FAO pide una gestión sostenible de estos ecosistemas, así como su inclusión entre las prioridades de los países.

Los organismos del suelo desempeñan una función esencial para impulsar la producción de alimentos, mejorar las dietas nutritivas, preservar la salud humana, recuperar los lugares contaminados y combatir el cambio climático, pero su contribución permanece en su mayor parte subestimada, señala un nuevo informe publicado este sábado por la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación y la Agricultura (FAO).

El estudio afirma que a pesar de que la pérdida de biodiversidad figura entre las principales preocupaciones mundiales, no se otorga a la biodiversidad subterránea la importancia que merece, y debe tenerse plenamente en cuenta al planificar las intervenciones para el desarrollo sostenible.

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Peatlands Keep a Lot of Carbon out of Earth’s Atmosphere, but That Could End with Warming and Development

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But that might not be true for much longer. Warming temperatures and human actions, such as draining bogs and converting them for agriculture, threaten to turn the world’s peatlands from carbon reservoirs to carbon sources.

In a newly published study, our multidisciplinary team of 70 scientists from around the world analyzed existing research and surveyed 44 leading experts to identify factors that could change peatlands’ carbon balance now and in the future. We found that permafrost degradation, warming temperatures, rising sea levels and drought are causing many peatlands around the world to lose some of their stored carbon. This is in addition to rapid degradation caused by human activity. And unless steps are taken to protect peatlands, carbon loss could accelerate.

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Ganadería regenerativa: restaurando la biodiversidad del suelo para combatir el cambio climático

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Una pradera sana requiere que el suelo contenga los minerales y microorganismos adecuados para su desarrollo. Para esto es esencial la materia orgánica, que por lo demás, es la principal responsable de la retención de agua en el suelo y proviene de la descomposición de los residuos de plantas, animales y microorganismos del subsuelo y micorriza (ambiente que rodea a las raíces).

Actualmente, casi la mitad de los suelos (49,1%) de Chile presentan erosión, especialmente en la zona centro de nuestro país y de acuerdo con los estudios que existen sobre el tema, el sector agropecuario es uno de los principales emisores de gases de efecto invernadero, que junto con los efectos del uso de tierras, están entre las principales causas del calentamiento global.

Además, la agricultura y la ganadería contribuyen directamente a las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero por medio de las técnicas empleadas para el cultivo de granos y monocultivos, y la cría de ganado.

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Pasar del corral al pastoreo en la pradera

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En las praderas de la región de Los Ríos hay vacas que pastan durante todo el año. No se alimentan de concentrados, granos ni hormonas. Rondan por suelos verdes y frondosos, libres de fertilizantes químicos. El ganado pertenece a Carnes Manada. Su cofundador, Cristóbal Gatica, está comprometido con no dañar el terreno a costa de su producción. A él le ha tocado ver de cerca el daño que puede causar la industria ganadera en el suelo.

Cuando aparecen grietas en un terreno, es señal de que está dañado. La erosión es natural, pero las prácticas agrícolas pueden intensificarla. Actualmente, casi la mitad –49.1 por ciento– de los suelos chilenos presentan erosión. Para evitarla, en Manada basan su producción en el manejo regenerativo, que concibe el suelo como un sistema vivo, por lo que procuran restaurar las interacciones biológicas entre sus distintos organismos.

Con el objetivo de aprender más sobre la ganadería regenerativa, la Fundación para la Innovación Agrícola (FIA) del Ministerio de Agricultura impulsó el desarrollo de un centro en Pirque, que busca implementar y evaluar técnicas agropecuarias adaptadas a productores de la zona central.

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Want a More Sustainable Food System? Focus on Better Dirt

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Four years ago, Cody Straza went “down the YouTube rabbit hole” of regenerative agriculture. “And I haven’t come up since,” he cracks.

For the past decade, Straza and his wife Allison Squires have been the owners of Upland Organics, a 2,000-acre farm near Wood Mountain, Sask. While their approach to farming was guided by organic principles from the start – Straza and Squires met at the University of Saskatchewan where he was studying agricultural and bioresource engineering and she was completing her PhD in toxicology – they transitioned to a regenerative agriculture farming model in 2016. (Squires went down the rabbit hole soon after her husband did.)

Regenerative agriculture is a system of principles designed to boost the farm ecosystem through the enhancement of soil health. This system is rooted in five pillars – better water management, low or no tillage (mechanical agitation of the soil), crop diversity, year-round cover crops and livestock integration.

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Soil Fungi Act like a Support Network for Trees, Study Shows

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Being highly connected to a strong social network has its benefits. Now a new University of Alberta study is showing the same goes for trees, thanks to their underground neighbours.

The study, published in the Journal of Ecology, is the first to show that the growth of adult trees is linked to their participation in fungal networks living in the forest soil.

Though past research has focused on seedlings, these findings give new insight into the value of fungal networks to older trees–which are more environmentally beneficial for functions like capturing carbon and stabilizing soil erosion.

“Large trees make up the bulk of the forest, so they drive what the forest is doing,” said researcher Joseph Birch, who led the study for his PhD thesis in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences.

When they colonize the roots of a tree, fungal networks act as a sort of highway, allowing water, nutrients and even the compounds that send defence signals against insect attacks to flow back and forth among the trees.

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