Tag Archive for: Soil Health

Food and Climate Change: The Forgotten Link

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Food is a key driver of climate change. How our food gets produced and how it ends up on our tables accounts for around half of all human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Chemical fertilizers, heavy machinery and other petroleum-dependant farm technologies contribute significantly. The impact of the food industry as a whole is even greater: destroying forests and savannahs to produce animal feed and generating climate-damaging waste through excess packaging, processing, refrigeration and the transport of food over long distances, despite leaving millions of people hungry.

A new food system could be a key driver of solutions to climate change. People around the world are involved in struggles to defend or create ways of growing and sharing food that are healthier for their communities and for the planet. If measures are taken to restructure agriculture and the larger food system around food sovereignty, small scale farming, agro-ecology and local markets, we could cut global emissions in half within a few decades. We don’t need carbon markets or techno-fixes. We need the right policies and programmes to dump the current industrial food system and create a sustainable, equitable and truly productive one instead.  

Food and climate: piecing the puzzle together

Most studies put the contribution of agricultural emissions – the emissions produced on the farm – at somewhere between 11 and 15% of all global emissions.[1] What often goes unsaid, however, is that most of these emissions are generated by industrial farming practices that rely on chemical (nitrogen) fertilizers, heavy machinery run on petrol, and highly concentrated industrial livestock operations that pump out methane waste.

The figures for agriculture’s contribution also often do not account for its role in land use changes and deforestation, which are responsible for nearly a fifth of global GHG emissions.[2] Worldwide, agriculture is pushing into savannas, wetlands, cerrados and forests, plowing under huge amounts of land. The expansion of the agricultural frontier is the dominant contributor to deforestation, accounting for between 70-90% of global deforestation.[3] This means that some 15-18% of global GHG emissions are produced by land-use change and deforestation caused by agriculture. And here too, the global food system and its industrial model of agriculture are the chief culprits. The main driver of this deforestation is the expansion of industrial plantations for the production of commodities such as soy, sugarcane, oilpalm, maize and rapeseed.

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Emerging Land Use Practices Rapidly Increase Soil Organic Matter

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Authors: Megan B. Machmuller, Marc Gerald Kramer, Kevin Taylor Cyle, Nick Hill, Dennis Hancock, Aaron Thompson

ABSTRACT

The loss of organic matter from agricultural lands constrains our ability to sustainably feed a growing population and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Addressing these challenges requires land use activities that accumulate soil carbon (C) while contributing to food production. In a region of extensive soil degradation in the southeastern United States, we evaluated soil C accumulation for 3 years across a 7-year chronosequence of three farms converted to management-intensive grazing. Here we show that these farms accumulated C at 8.0 Mg ha(-1) yr(-1), increasing cation exchange and water holding capacity by 95% and 34%, respectively. Thus, within a decade of management-intensive grazing practices soil C levels returned to those of native forest soils, and likely decreased fertilizer and irrigation demands. Emerging land uses, such as management-intensive grazing, may offer a rare win-win strategy combining profitable food production with rapid improvement of soil quality and short-term climate mitigation through soil C-accumulation.

Download the Report from Research Gate

Grazing Cover Crops and Benefits for Livestock Operations – Gabe Brown

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A presentation by North Dakota farmer Gabe Brown at the National Conference on Cover Crops and Soil Health.

Watch More Videos on SARE Outreach’s Youtube Channel

Dr. Mercola Interviews Gabe Brown on Regenerative Land Management

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Natural health expert and Mercola.com founder Dr. Joseph Mercola interviews Gabe Brown, a pioneer in teaching about regenerative land management, which helps restore soil health.

Watch More Videos on Mercola Health’s Youtube Channel

Better Save Soil

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Fertile soil forms the foundation of our modern societies. Although we should be doing everything we can to sustain it, when we look around us, we see a very different story.

Both political initiatives and local actions are necessary to secure the access to food and livelihoods for everyone. Measures for sustainable agriculture are already at hand, but they are often not applied – both on a small and large scale. And even if most of us live in cities, we all can do our part in saving soils all over the world.

“Better Save Soil” is the second collaboration between the IASS and the animation studio of Uli Streckenbach to raise awareness on soil issues.

Watch More Videos on the IASS Vimeo Channel

Beyond the Beginning: The Zero Till Evolution

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Introduction: A Biological System Evolves

The risk-takers of past decades who were among the first to park plows and cultivators – believing they could plant crops into untilled stubble and still harvest good yields – may have never dreamed they’d launch a farming revolution. Yet their cumulative efforts worldwide have done just that.

“Increasing numbers of farmers are converting to no-till, making it a global phenomenon,” says Jon Hanson, newly retired research director of the USDA Agricultural Research Service Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory at Mandan, North Dakota. “In South America farmers are adopting no-till in a big way, and worldwide 95 million hectares [235 million acres] are in no-till. No-till is helping to conserve soil around the globe.”

The modern no-till movement on large-scale farms became possible with the invention of herbicides, such as 2, 4-D and paraquat in the 1940-50’s, permitting weed control without tillage. The absence of tillage results in a residue mulch covering the soil surface and requiring seeding practices or equipment designed to sow directly into mulch-covered soil.

The no-till system retains more than 90 percent of crop residue on the soil surface. By contrast, the moldboard plow retains less than 10 percent of residue; the chisel plow and disk retain between 25 and 75 percent of residue; while ridge-planting and strip-till planting systems retain 40 to 60 percent of residue.

Download the Report from the Manitoba-North Dakota Zero Tillage Farmers Association

Soil Carbon Sequestration in Conservation Agriculture: A Framework for Valuing Soil Carbon as a Critical Ecosystem Service

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Conservation agricultural systems sequester carbon from the atmosphere into long-lived soil organic matter pools – while promoting a healthy environment and enhancing economically sustainable production conditions for farmers throughout the world. Soil organic carbon is fundamental to the development of soil quality and sustainable food production systems. Soil, soil organic carbon, and soil quality are the foundations of human inhabitation of our Earth. We must enhance the ability of soil to sustain our lives by improving soil organic carbon.

Conservation agricultural systems have been successfully developed for many different regions of the world. These systems, however, have not been widely adopted by farmers for political, social and cultural reasons. Through greater adoption of conservation agricultural systems, there is enormous potential to sequester soil organic carbon, which would:

(1) help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions contributing to global warming and

(2) increase soil productivity and avoid further environmental damage from the unsustainable use of inversion tillage systems, which threaten water quality, reduce soil biodiversity, and erode soil around the world.

Download the Report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Climate Change, Healthy Soils, and Holistic Grazing… A Restoration Story

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Author: Savory Institute

Summary

Regenerating the health and productivity of our soils is critical for ensuring the Earth’s climate remains conducive to not only human life but other species as well. Moreover, we need to take direct action so that we have enough water and food to sustain a growing population of people. Livestock, properly managed, have a critical role to play in achieving these goals.

Reducing fossil fuel emissions is essential for curtailing the acidification of our oceans and for reversing the rapidly increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But it is just as critical that we greatly reduce the CO2 emissions tied to modern agricultural practices. In addition, there are still many billions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere that need to be drawn down to Earth and safely stored if we are to maintain a livable climate for life on Earth.

The most obvious place to store this “legacy load” of CO2 is in our soils, where soil organisms convert it into organic matter, or soil organic carbon. The world’s soils, however, are unable to store the vast amounts of carbon they once did; scientists estimate our soils have lost up to 80 to 537 billion tons of carbon and that land misuse accounts for 30% of the carbon emissions entering the atmosphere.

Efforts to limit emissions from fossil fuel Combustion alone are incapable of stabilizing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Here we will shed light on the process of atmospheric carbon capture and storage that has developed in the natural world over millions of years, has minimal possibility for unintended consequences, and has myriad benefits for the health of lands worldwide as well as all dependent on them.

The quantity of carbon stored in soils is directly related to the diversity and health of soil life. Bacteria, fungi and other soil life convert carbon that plants have extracted from the atmosphere through photosynthesis into organic matter. When soils are healthy, soil life is healthy and more carbon is converted and stored.

Keep Reading on Revitalization News

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.”

Keep Reading on Madison.com

The Healing Power of Regenerative Organic Agriculture

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September 20, 2015 marked 25 years since my father, Robert Rodale, was killed in a car accident in Russia. If on that fateful day someone would have asked him what his legacy was to be, I know for a fact he would have answered: “Regenerative organic agriculture.”

To him, organic alone was not enough. He believed we needed a commitment to making things better. But more importantly, he understood that nature inherently makes things better when left to do her work. Nature heals itself, just as our bodies inherently attempt to heal themselves when wounded. We needed, he thought, to get nature on our team to make organic agriculture reach its true power.

A lot of people thought he was crazy. But some thought he was onto something.

After he died, the idea of regenerative agriculture seemed forgotten as the organic movement grew. But lately, there has been a resurgence of support behind the idea of regeneration. Thanks to the work of Tom Newmark, with the Carbon Underground, people are gathering around the tribal fire of regenerative organic agriculture in a way that my father would have only dreamed about. There’s even a growing movement toward regenerative capitalism, an idea proposed by the Capital Institute‘s John Fullerton.

Keep Reading on Maria’s Farm Country Kitchen