Tag Archive for: Soil Carbon Sequestration

Excrementos de lombriz para revelar los niveles de carbono en el suelo

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Zaragoza, 3 sep (EFE).- Un estudio internacional del Instituto Pirenaico de Ecología (IPE) analiza los niveles de carbono en el suelo a través de las deposiciones producidas por lombrices de tierra en el Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido (Huesca).

Como ha informado esta entidad dependiente del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), el investigador Juan José Jiménez ha liderado este proyecto que revela la edad y el origen de las deposiciones producidas por estos invertebrados.

Publicado en la revista PLoS one, el trabajo detalla, a través de la edad y el origen de los excrementos, los efectos sobre el suelo en la zona, lo que permitirá precisar los parámetros en modelos de acumulación de carbono en el suelo y emisiones de CO2.

Los oligoquetos (lombrices de tierra) juegan un importante papel en el suelo, como reveló Charles Darwin en su último libro sobre la formación del mantillo vegetal por la acción de las lombrices con observaciones sobre sus hábitos, publicado en 1881.

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David Montgomery: “Estamos cerca de una revolución basada en la salud del suelo”

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En el marco del XXVIII Congreso de Aapresid, ‘siempre vivo, siempre verde’, el geólogo de la Universidad de Washington, David Montgomery, habló del rol de los suelos en la civilización y la importancia de su restauración en términos del futuro de la humanidad.

“Estamos cerca de una revolución basada en la salud del suelo; en un punto de cambio en la historia. Podemos convertir a la agricultura en actor de recuperación del suelo en lugar de degradador. La reconstrucción del suelo es una de las inversiones más grandes que puede hacer hoy la humanidad”, dijo.

“Se habla de la deforestación como causante principal de esta degradación, pero la realidad es que el arado contribuyó más que el hacha”, advirtió. A lo largo de la charla también explicó que la erosión y degradación del suelo jugó un rol critico en la caída de antiguas civilizaciones, desde la Europa neolítica hasta Roma.

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Cattle Are Part of the Climate Solution

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Rodale Institute’s updated climate change white paper, “Regenerative Agriculture and the Soil Carbon Solution,” will be published September 25th. To learn more, visit RodaleInstitute.org/Climate2020.

We’re in the process of updating Rodale Institute’s Regenerative Agriculture and the Soil Carbon Solution white paper and we wanted to talk to you about your influential work with cattle and rangeland soil carbon sequestration.

So to start, a question of semantics—there’s a lot of terms for management intensive grazing, you use adaptive multi-paddock or AMP, there’s mob grazing, high intensity rotational grazing, holistic grazing management, and now regenerative grazing. Are there practical differences between these systems?

There are small differences, but they’re all part of the same cadre in terms of a general way of doing things and the philosophy. Prior to starting our regenerative grazing studies in 1999, we worked with the NRCS who did all the soil mapping around the nation. We asked them to introduce us to farmers and ranchers who had the highest soil carbon levels. Without a single exception, they were all following Holistic Management, or a couple of variations around that. Our research has been following up on that ever since.

 

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Perennial Vegetables Are a Solution in the Fight Against Hunger and Climate Change

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Marisha Auerbach’s home garden is an edible landscape. Archways of table and wine grapes shade the entry while tree kales, tree collards, and stinging nettles dot the pathway. Auerbach, a permaculture teacher at Oregon State University, and her partner, Zane Ingersoll, estimate roughly 80 percent of their diet comes from this 6,600-square-foot lot in Portland. About 60 percent of the garden is perennial plants, trees, and shrubs—meaning they grow all year long and don’t need to be replanted or reseeded the following year.

Perennial agriculture—including agroforestry, silvopasture, and the development of perennial row crops such as Kernza—has come to prominence in recent years as an important part of the fights against soil erosion and climate change. Not only do perennial plants develop longer, more stabilizing roots than annual crops, but they’ve also been shown to be key to sequestering carbon in the soil.

Now, a new study in the journal PLoS ONE is pointing to vegetables like the ones in Auerbach’s garden as another important addition to the list.

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Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat – Review

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Sacred Cow:  The Case for (Better) Meat by Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf is a book (and forthcoming film) challenging what has become conventional wisdom:  that regardless of how it is raised, beef is bad for the planet.  It takes a holistic and science-based view of the issues associated with meat and forms them into a coherent argument that regeneratively-grazed animals are important for our diets and the planet.  As they put it: “It’s not the cow.  It’s the how”.   Disclosure:  Rodgers is a registered dietitian and nutritionist who owns an organic vegetable farm and raises some livestock.  Wolf is the best-selling author of  the book The Paleo Solution.

Sacred Cow examines the issue in three parts:  nutrition, environment, and ethics.  The book covers a lot of ground.  There is no way I can adequately summarize everything, so I will focus primarily on the environment section, which I think will be of most interest to Resilience readers.

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Cover Crop Roots Are An Essential Key To Understanding Ecosystem Services

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To judge the overall effectiveness of cover crops and choose those offering the most ecosystem services, agricultural scientists must consider the plants’ roots as well as above-ground biomass, according to Penn State researchers who tested the characteristics of cover crop roots in three monocultures and one mixture.

“Almost everything that we know about the growth of cover crops is from measuring the above-ground parts and yet some of the benefits that we want to get from cover crops come from the roots,” said researcher Jason Kaye, professor of soil biogeochemistry. “This study shows us that what we see above ground is sometimes — but not always — reflective of the benefits below ground.”

Cover crops are widely used to increase the quantity of organic carbon returned to the soil between cash crops such as corn, wheat and soybean, as well as to limit erosion and to fix or add nitrogen to the soil.

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Unlocking the Potential of Soil Can Help Farmers Beat Climate Change

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Farmers are the stewards of our planet’s precious soil, one of the least understood and untapped defenses against climate change. Because of its massive potential to store carbon and foundational role in growing our food supply, soil makes farming a solution for both climate change and food security.

The threat to food security

Farming is capital-intensive and farmers are at the mercy of volatile global commodity markets, trade disputes, regulatory changes, weather, pests, and disease. Factor in climate change and you can include droughts, floods and temperature shifts.

We need to change how we grow our food because:

  • climate change will increasingly impact farm yields
  • how we farm can help mitigate climate change
  • helping our farmers unlock the full potential of soil will help them meet growing food demands while remaining profitable
  • restoring the carbon-holding potential of our soil combats climate change.

Soil and climate change

The last few years have been among the hottest on record. As of May 2020, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2)​​​​​​​ in our atmosphere has been the highest it’s been in human history.

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UMass Amherst Microbiologists Clarify Relationship Between Microbial Diversity and Soil Carbon Storage

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AMHERST, Mass. – In what they believe is the first study of its kind, researchers led by postdoctoral researcher Luiz A. Domeignoz-Horta and senior author Kristen DeAngelis at the University of Massachusetts Amherst report that shifts in the diversity of soil microbial communities can change the soil’s ability to sequester carbon, where it usually helps to regulate climate.

They also found that the positive effect of diversity on carbon use efficiency – which plays a central role in that storage – is neutralized in dry conditions. Carbon use efficiency refers to the carbon assimilated into microbial products vs carbon lost to the atmosphere as CO2 and contributing to climate warming, DeAngelis explains. Among other benefits, soil carbon makes soil healthy by holding water and helping plants grow.

She and colleagues addressed these questions because they point out, “empirical evidence for the response of soil carbon cycling to the combined effects of warming, drought and diversity loss is scarce.”

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Planet Watch: Regenerative Agriculture as One Answer to Planetary Crisis

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Over the last few decades, modern industrialised agriculture has wrought havoc on natural systems. It has razed forests, decimated biodiversity, and has done immense damage to soils. Most individual farmers may just want to turn a profit to feed their families and pay off their mortgages, but collectively, if you look at what’s happening around the world, this form of agriculture is a major contributor to the ongoing degradation of our planet.

A primary impact of agriculture is soil degradation. Land-clearing, overgrazing, the impact of heavy farming equipment, chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and irrigation, all contribute to soil degradation. This has resulted in the degradation of one-third of the world’s soils:

  • 30 per cent of the world’s cropland has been abandoned over the past 40 years due to degradation and desertification,
  • 52 per cent of the land used for agriculture is moderately to severely affected by soil degradation.
  • 12 million hectares of cropland are lost per year (23 hectares per minute)

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El polvo de roca aplicado a campos agrícolas podría ayudar a capturar 2B de toneladas de CO2

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El polvo de roca que se extiende sobre los campos agrícolas del planeta puede ser una solución climática con el potencial de eliminar hasta dos mil millones de toneladas de dióxido de carbono (CO2) de la atmósfera, según investigadores británicos.

Eso es más que las industrias mundiales de aviación y transporte marítimo combinadas, o aproximadamente la mitad de las emisiones actuales de Europa. La investigación publicada la semana pasada en la revista Nature analiza cómo la técnica podría usarse en diferentes países, con optimismo sobre cómo algunos de los emisores de CO2 más altos del mundo, incluidos China, India y Brasil, son los más beneficiados en términos de eliminación de CO2.

El equipo de científicos, dirigido por David Beerling del Centro Leverhulme para la Mitigación del Cambio Climático de la Universidad de Sheffield, también incluyó expertos de instituciones en los Estados Unidos y Bélgica, entre ellos el líder mundial del clima James Hansen del Instituto de la Tierra en la Universidad de Columbia. Explican cómo la meteorización de rocas, como se conoce la técnica, también podría proporcionar un uso de economía circular para subproductos mineros y materiales de construcción reciclados.

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