Shhhh, We've Got a Secret: Soil Solves Global Warming, Part 1
by George Spyros, New York City, USA on 06.28.07
In the seven-minute video after the jump, QuantumShift.tv turns its lens to the carbon emissions caused by large-scale farming practices used in growing much of the food in the United States, Canada and the UK. According to the video Soil: The Secret Solution to Global Warming, land farmed organically, using such methods as "no-till" and the planting of winter cover crops, absorbs and holds up to 30% more carbon than conventional agriculture. Converting all US farmland to organic would reduce CO2 emissions by 10%. The UK version of the video states that such a conversion would result in a 20% per year reduction in CO2 emissions (although the on-screen graphic still reads 10%, ostensibly because only the voice-over has been changed from the US version). The extra carbon in the soil also increases food nutrients, which could greatly reduce health care costs. Dig a little deeper after the jump.
The land-based carbon cycle works as plants take CO2 out of the atmosphere and convert it to organic material by photosynthesis. The oxygen in the molecule is released back into the air and the carbon becomes part of the plant's structure and eventually the soil. Plowing churns up this organic matter and introduces oxygen which expedites its decay. That is, the exposed carbon recombines with oxygen and is released into the atmosphere as CO2, a principle greenhouse gas. The organic farming practice of no-till greatly reduces this large-scale break-up of soil by cutting small slits that are just large enough to accommodate the planting of seeds, thereby conserving the amount of carbon stored in the earth. From a policy perspective, it is most accurate and I think effective to refer to such storing as "agricultural carbon sequestration" in opposition to the industrial catch phrase "carbon sequestration" which refers to the business of going to impractical lengths and assuming a high degree of risk to bury CO2 in the earth's crust. According to the USDA, U.S. agricultural soils have lost, on average, about one-third of the carbon they contained before wide-scale cultivation began in the 1800s, but more on that later. The video also points out that less tillage also decreases C02 emissions from farm machinery since the equipment makes fewer runs over the field. Also, the benefits of no-till sequestration are tripled when combined with the planting of winter cover crops which are used in organic farming to maintain a healthy soil.
Much of the data in the video is based on a 27-year comparative study conducted by the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvannia which also dispels the myth that chemical fertilizers are needed to provide better yields. Today I spoke briefly with Dr. Paul Hepperly who's featured in the video in an on-camera interview, and he told me that the data from the study has been taken up by Kyoto Protocol signatories Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands as a component of their climate roadmaps for reducing atmospheric CO2 levels. Notwithstanding that good news, petitions are available which have the goal of pushing leaders to shift existing agricultural subsidies from conventional to organic farming. Go here to sign for the US, Canada or ROW (rest of world). Via:: QuantumShift.tv
The only problem with this is that organic farming yields significantly less crops per acre. The 20% carbon saving would eaily be eaten up by the larger land area needed to grow the same amount of crops.
I'm starting to think that the farm bill could have more of an impact than the energy bill.
Can you provide examples of large-scale for-profit organic gardening that make a profit off the crops alone? Also, what do you estimate the cost of retooling and buying new machines to convert to new tilling methods will cost?
Many city folks, I've noticed, make the mistake of thinking that farmers have a large profit margin, and that we can easily change crops - but the cost of retooling just to switch crops can run to several million dollars. Large farms are multi-million dollar operations, but all of that money is sunk into the land and the machinery, not liquid assets that can be moved around.
We looked at organic farming, when the old farm manager retired, but we came to the pretty stark conclusion that between the sheer cost of labor organic crops take, not to mention the drop in productivity in the years that it takes to convert and the cost of certification, that it'll be at least a generation before the organic question comes up again.
Our gains are practical and not prone to fads - choosing cover crops that can still put food on the table, reducing the amount of water and pesticide we can use to save money, and combating soil erosion. It's not sexy, glamorous, or high-tech, but it keeps the farm running.
Excellent info. I'll have to look into the no-til concept a bit further. I grow organically, and use permaculture ideas (interplanting), and avoid tilling as much as possible, so it's good to know that my instincts were right.
As for organic farming being a good way to make a living, the secret is being local, being diverse, and being a good neighbor, so that your community wants to buy from you, and is willing to pay a higher price for the higher quality produce that you offer. Oh, and give up on the idea of trying to make a profit (win-lose) and instead focus on making a living while helping others stay healthy (win-win). That's what works for me, anyway.
Good info, but too long.
Video can be cut to 3 mins. without key content loss.
Video shouls stop at the 4.28 minutes mark.
Can do this by cutting out much of the talking head stuff.
Shorter the vid, the more people will watch...
PS: Logging on to make a comment takes forever, off the video page. I went back to Home after waiting waiting wait...
My parents have been using no-till practices on their farm for years. The results have been very positive for them. However, I was under the impression that it was not associated with organic farming. In fact, I have often read about it as an argument against organic farming.
When you don't till the soil, weeds innevitably will grow. Because of this, no-till farms usually use large amounts of herbicides to kill the weeds. That's the trade off for leaving the soil intact. No-till has been the main reason that I tend to not support organic farming. From everything that I've read on organic farming, it requires excessive tillage of the soil, most of the time.
For the gentleman who asked for an example of a large scale organic farm making money: may I suggest you visit a supermarket or read a newspaper? The organic food industry is now well past $20 billion a year...and most of that (whether we long time organic farmers like it or not) is coming from large farms. Examples: Klaas and Mary-Howell Martens, Penn Yan NY at 1500 acres; Fred Kirschenmann's operation in North Dakota at about 3200 acres. Or Earthbound or Cascadian Farms (CA & WA) doing in the hundreds of millions per year.
But Sarah is right: LOCAL is better. By the way, I worked at Rodale and can vouch for those results. See www.newfarm.org for the rest.
This is great infromation and I wish it were implimented, but with out monetary subsidation it's just not going to happen. No individual farmer is going to destroy their profit margins to 'save the environment' criticisms aside it's just not how our economy is featured to work. No commercial farm is going to do so either for the same reasons.
Plus, with such a strain on our abillity to produce food for the billions of people on this planet there is an issue with converting too much land to the lower yielding organic farms.
But with that said we can't let one problem be a deterent for fixing another. While population control may be an issue that we need to start discussing, organic farming combined with other forms of pollution reduction can have an impact.
This is a hot topic. Try googling "Agri Char" and "Terra Preta."
"Biomass to energy" and "biomass to ethanol" might need to be amended to "biomass through pyrolisis to biochar and ethanol"
http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/aboutus/news/agriculture-today/february-2007/agrichar-trialled-wollongbar
http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/research/updates/issues/may-2007/soils-offer-new-hope
low tillage and cover crops alone does not make something organic. You can still use pratices that include pestisides, among other things.
This all seems like a good idea, it is strange, however, that they put the term "organic" in there when being certified organic is not necessary....
hmmmmmmmmm.....
Did you even watch the video?
Organic farming can get yields equal or better than conventional farms. The challenge for organic growers is weed control because managing weed populations close to crop inevitably requires manual cultivation. Otherwise costs can be lower because we're not purchasing chemical pesticides.
It is myth that organic agriculture has lower yields than conventional farms.
Larry Jacobs
President
Jacobs Farm / Del Cabo
I'm not an authority on this subject by any means, but I'm afraid there is at least one substantial inaccuracy in this article. To wit:
"The oxygen in the molecule is released back into the air and the carbon becomes part of the plant's structure and eventually the soil."
Actually, the oxygen released during photosynthesis comes from water. The details of the photosynthetic process are taught in high school biology, and are also widely available on the Internet. Do a search on the Calvin Cycle if you're interested in the details of what happens to CO2 during photosynthesis.
I really don't want to seem like I'm bashing either the video or the article but the error does give the appearance of improper research. How then, can I trust other harder-to-confirm claims?
I also have some other questions.
Does this analysis account for any possible differences in carbon fixation between organic and conventionally grown crops?
Also, I have a question regarding the sustainability of the reduced CO2 benefit of no-till. Does no-till suppress CO2 release indefinitely or does it simply spread out carbon emissions over a wider timespan? On the surface at least, the choice mainly seems to lie between fast and slow decay, as ultimately the total amount of biomass degraded is unlikely to differ. Accordingly I would think that a long term analysis of the matter (a measurement of net carbon uptake/output over the course of several years) would be beneficial. Has such an analysis been done and can it be referenced?
I see a lot of confusion in many of the comments being made regarding this issue. I can not say that I myself an am expert, but I have been studying up on organic farming over the past two years as I plan to do it on a very small scale at my 3 hectare finca.
First, I would like to mention that the US govt has been spending large quantities of money for many decades now to induce farmers to implement low-tillage or no-tillage farming practices. This has been not in order to promote organic farming but rather to avoid topsoil erosion and runoff from wind and rain. Heavy tilling exposes valuable topsoil (which just happens to contain a lot of carbon, along with other valuable plant nutrients) to the effects of the wind and rain, causing it to blow away or get dragged away by water, ending up in rivers, lakes, oceans, and just about everywhere but where it needs to be - on the farmland. The US at the beginning of the century was losing incredibly vast quantities of topsoil (anyone remember the Dust Bowls?) that was turning areas that used to be highly productive into completely barren - basically desert - areas. With diminished topsoil, which is essentially the natural food for farm crops, farmers have needed to rely extensively on extra fertilizers, and in particular the chemical kind. The combination of heavy tilling and chemicals led to the problem of contaminated topsoil leaching into waterways and lakes, damaging or killing off those water ecosystems (which happens to be one of the reasons some lashed out against 'modern' farming and moved toward 'organic' or 'traditional' farming). And since heavy tilling destroys the natural microbial, microscopic and insect life in the top 20 to 30 inches of the soil, it destroys those natural soil 'ecosystems' that usually keep a large number of 'harmful' insects and diseases to crops in check. The heavy tilling, by eliminating these natural checks and therefore inadvertently causing severe insect, bacterial or viral plagues on the crops, led farmers to use more insecticides, fungicides, pesticides, etc. - more in terms of both type and quantity. This in turn damaged the soil microbial life even more and also meant that topsoil loss through runoff and erosion were negatively affecting nearby rivers, lakes, forests, etc. Futhermore, by destroying the natural topsoil through heavy tillage, which in its natural state has a high capacity for water absorption and retention and also chemical and nutrient fixing, adding large amounts of chemical fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, etc. meant that often these chemicals managed to leak into groundwater sources where water tables were high and subsurface soil structure inadequate for filtration. This would further contaminate not just rivers and lakes, but also the downstream wells of other farmers, homes and businesses. Heavy tillage therefore led to topsoil loss, increased use of chemical fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides, fungicides, etc., damage or destruction through contamination of nearby streams, rivers, lakes, wetlands, wells, and even forests and other nearby ecosystems. Not to mention the damage done to local fauna from exposure to chemical toxins. And moving on to one of the primary reasons demand for organic farming grew - fear of the contamination of food with toxic chemicals. One of the few benefits that heavy tilling did bring about was reduced weeds. That is not to say complete elimination of weeds. Chemical weed killers are still needed in many, most, cases of large scale farming. So saying that heavy tilling solves the weed problem is misleading - it only lessens it. Furthermore, by leaving a heavy layer of crop residues on the ground, such as the stalks of corn crops, weeds are also greatly reduced by suffocating them of light and space to grow. This is called mulching. And it is one method that many corn farmers throughout the US have implemented rather than do heavy tillage.
Second, no tillage or low tillage does not mean that a farm has to implement all practices typical of a full organic farm. Most farms that do little or no tillage AREN"T organic. So saying that a farm implement no tilling practices will lead to increased need for agricultural land is simply false. It won't and as a matter of fact, since the US has increasingly moved toward no tillage while at the same time reducing amount of farmland and increasing productivity, completely refutes that statement.
There are a couple other points I want to make regarding organic farming and the no-till practice. First, no-till is a practice that is used both in organic and non-organic farms. It is not confined to organics. Second, no-till is a very common practice in organic farming. From what I PERSONALLY have read, most organic farmers consider no-till a fundamental organic practice - for the reasons I mentioned above. It helps reduce use of fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, pesticides, etc. And in combination with other organic farming practices such as sheet mulching and cover crops, can also help reduce herbicide use.
The main other point that I would like to make is the continual mention of the lower yields of organic farms as opposed to 'conventional' farms with regards to the same amount and type of land. I have heard claims by organic farmers and organic farming institutions (like this Rodale organic farming org) that yields are NOT smaller and may actually be bigger. I personally doubt such claims. I do believe the yields to be lower per hectare for organic farms, but I do not believe those 'anti' organic farm statements that say the difference is significant (like 20%). This seems exagerated. I believe 'best' practive organic farming compared to 'best' practice conventional farming leads to only slightly inferior yields. But the main point here is not the there is a yield difference, but rather that the main reason there is a small yield difference is because conventional farming drowns crops in a toxic brew of chemicals. Of course you will have higher yields if you chemically kill off all weeds, insects, bacteria, pests, and chemically overfeed the plants. But at the expense of the well-being of local flora and fauna, local water and land ecosystems, local water sources, and possibly toxic food crops. The slight positive of requiring a little less land than organics to produce the same amount of food in no way comes close to offsetting the cumulative negative impact of chemically-intesive farming.
Seems like a no-till approach would present difficulties for someone who was attempting to compost a cover crop in situ -- mainly because it would seem to involve mostly anaerobic decomposition in reinvigorating the soil instead of partial aerobic process. Anaerobic processes are good for retaining nitrogen content, but you also have more methane produced as opposed to carbon dioxide. It's also not as friendly to in situ vermiculture. Perhaps it would be more useful if it was worked into a longer term rotation. I'm the furthest thing from an expert, but I suspect the success and efficiency would depend on the mulching approach. Experimentation is vital.
What we think of as a lot of work today is probably going to seem trifling in the coming decades as the margin profits of petroleum-dependent agriculture erode.
This no-till versus organic farming is a moot point because they are one in the same.Plant materials breakdown into compost albeit slower than piles and assimilate in the ground.Adding compost as a topdressing would be organic,so why not both?
See also
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Organic farming needs compost. Compost creates methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas. Rather eat food produced with nice clean factory made chemicals than grown in shit. Reg