Ohio State University soil scientist Rattan Lal writes, "We are dealing with 10 global issues at the moment: food security, availability of water, climate change, energy demand, waste disposal, extinction of biodiversity, soil degradation and desertification, poverty, political and ethnic instability, and rapid population increase. The solution to all of these lies in soil management. It doesn't mean that agriculture is the only solution, but it plays a major role in addressing these issues."

For the rest, including 10 recommended steps to better soil management, see

http://www.agriculture.com/ag/story.jhtml?storyid=/templatedata/ag/story...

Help spread the word on the soil carbon opportunity! To the majority of people, even those very concerned about climate change, water shortages, human health, and biodiversity loss, the role of soil organic matter is unknown. The Flash widget below is an invitation to begin learning more.

You may copy the embedding code below and paste into a webpage to use this Flash widget in your website. (Facebook users: you must include an application such as My Stuff or My Embed Stuff in your account to post this code; you can search for it and add it.)

<embed src="http://soilcarboncoalition.org/swf/earthIQ.swf" quality="high" wmode="transparent" width="220" height="330" name="earthIQ" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" allowFullScreen="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /></embed>

A recent PowerPoint presentation by Abe Collins, attached below this article, outlines the soil carbon opportunity, the role of carbon farming, and policy directions to realize the opportunity. Right click and choose "Save link (or target) as" to download it.

By Martha Holdridge, West Wind Farm

Editor's note: This article is reproduced with permission from the Summer 2008 Grassfed Gazette, published by the American Grassfed Association.

American Grassfed Association member Martha Holdridge, owner of West Wind Farm, used soil samples to determine that her West Virginia farm sequestered 15 tons of CO2 per acre over the past four years (photo by Kenny Kemp, Charleston WV Gazette).

From 1987 to 2007, at West Wind Farm, we regularly sent soil samples from our pastures to the West Virginia University (WVU) testing lab--in some years requesting organic matter tests. In those same years, there has been increasing public alarm about greenhouse gasses and global warming. In the fall of 2007, Dr. Ed Rayburn, extension forage agronomist at WVU, reminded me that an increase of organic matter in the soil means that carbon dioxide (CO2) is being drawn from the air into the soil. He kindly agreed to calculate the rate of carbon sequestration in the pastures of West Wind Farm.

Our average organic matter in 2002 was 4.1 percent, in 2004 it was 7.0 percent, and in 2007 it was 8.3 percent. According to Rayburn’s calculations based on a 2-inch deep sample, over five years (2002-2007) we had sequestered 15 tons of CO2 per acre or four tons of carbon per acre.

An article from ODE magazine about soil carbon research and trials in Marin County, California.

". . . John Wick--who owns this ranch in the hills of Marin County north of San Francisco with Peggy Rathmann, author of the classic picture book Goodnight Gorilla--goes on to outline the climate crisis in terms all-too-familiar to anyone paying attention to the issue. But he then offers a solution that would astonish most people, especially green activists: 'Eat a local grass-fed burger.'"

http://www.onthecommons.org/content.php?id=2020

Presentations from the Marin efforts at the June 2008 presentation, Carbon, Soils, and Your Ranch

http://groups.ucanr.org/RangeSoilsCarbon/Carbon%2C_Soils_%26_Your_Ranch/

See also

http://marincarbonproject.org/ and

http://marinclimateinitiative.org

A short article from Australia on the work of Christine Jones:

"Thousands of farmers are joining a voluntary soil carbon movement adopting specialised cropping and pasture practices to improve yields and income, while measuring loads of carbon storage on their farms."

"But the Senate inquiry, looking into the impacts of climate change on agriculture, also heard the results have been largely shunned by the science fraternity because the carbon storage data does not fit into existing carbon models."

http://sl.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/...

See also Christine Jones's paper "Our Soils, Our Future" attached below.

"In little over 200 years of European settlement, more than 70 percent of Australian agricultural land has become seriously degraded. Despite efforts to implement 'best practice' in soil conservation, the situation continues to deteriorate.

"On average, 7 tonnes of topsoil is lost for every tonne of grain produced. This situation has worsened in recent years due to an increased incidence of erosion on unprotected topsoils, coupled with declining yields.

"The most meaningful indicator for the health of the land, and the long-term wealth of a nation, is whether soil is being formed or lost. If soil is being lost, so too is the economic and ecological foundation on which production and conservation are based.

"In addition to the loss of soil itself, there has been a reduction of between 50% and 80% in the organic carbon content of surface soils in Australia since European settlement."

A good introduction to agricultural soil carbon -- what it is, what it does, how it forms -- from Saskatchewan, Canada.

"When soil was first broken by Europeans for crop production, SOC [soil organic carbon] decreased rapidly. There were several factors that accounted for this initial reduction: tillage broke up the soil and exposed much more soil organic matter to microbial decomposition, fallow periods promoted microbial breakdown of SOC by leaving soil moist without any new plant material additions, erosion of topsoil removed soil organic matter, and annual crops typically produced less residue than perennial crops (remember the roots!). When SOC was decreasing in the years after conversion to arable agriculture, great quantities of CO2 were released into the atmosphere that added to that released by burring fossil fuels. Generally, soil scientists believe much of the cropland in North America is now in approximate equilibrium under conventional management practices (ignoring losses of SOC in eroded sediment)."

http://www.mandakzerotill.org/books/proceedings/Proceedings%201999/McCon...

Will reducing carbon dioxide emissions slow down global warming? Hardly, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Complete elimination of CO2 emissions is estimated to lead to a slow decrease in atmospheric CO2 of about 40 ppm over the 21st century" (IPCC Fourth Assessment FAQ, section 10.3).

Carbon dioxide is a stable gas, requiring energy to break its molecular bonds. With 100 percent reductions in 2007, we will maintain what NASA climate scientist James Hansen calls dangerous levels—not just for a few years, but for generations. The area under the Keeling curve will remain huge, and that translates into ocean heating.

What this means is that our current widespread advocacy of CO2 emissions reduction has little leverage on what most scientists regard as the cause of global warming—the highest atmospheric CO2 levels in hundreds of thousands of years. The assumption that CO2 emissions reductions will do the trick has become popular groupthink, not subject to scrutiny because it's what we all know, and may seem like the only available option. Once again, we are goading ourselves into a gallant cavalry charge into the barbed wire.

What's needed is to reverse the Keeling curve, to quickly and significantly reduce existing atmospheric concentrations of CO2. According to NASA's figures on the global carbon cycle, fossil fuel burning represents less than 3 percent of the annual flux of CO2 into the atmosphere (3.4% according Rattan Lal's figures). The rest is biology, which also responds to human management.

The Hoosier chapter of the Soil and Water Conservation Society has a well-rounded position statement on the soil carbon sequestration opportunity. Of particular interest is the effect of soil organic matter on agricultural land value in Illinois.

http://www.hoosierchapterswcs.org/pdf/carbon_sequestration.pdf

by Peter Donovan

NOTE: This calculation is offered to show some degree of correspondence between atmospheric levels and soil carbon. There are too many variables and complex feedback loops to make reliable predictions. Were atmospheric carbon dioxide to decline, the oceans would release significant amounts of carbon dioxide, buffering and delaying the decline.

In Allan Yeomans’s book Priority One: Together We Can Beat Global Warming (2005, 2007), he states that an additional 1.6% of the top 12 inches of the world’s cropland and grazing land soils turned into organic matter would bring atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 300 ppm (if we also quit adding carbon to the atmosphere). This figure is based on removing 80 parts per million of atmospheric CO2.

Yeomans’s calculation converts carbon to soot (Priority One, chapter 2). Here is a somewhat more straightforward calculation. Note that the figures are for straight carbon, not carbon dioxide.

The atmosphere currently contains about 800 Gt (gigatons or billion metric tons) of carbon. The vast majority of this is in the form of carbon dioxide, which is currently about 383 parts per million (Yeomans used 380 ppm for his calculation). Each of these parts per million = 800/383 = 2.089 Gt C. So, to take out 80 ppm we are talking about removing 80 x 2.089 or 167 Gt (167,000,000,000 metric tons) of carbon from the atmosphere.

Soil density is usually between 1.2 and 1.4 on a dry basis. That is in relation to the density of water which is 1.0.

A hectare of soil (100 m x 100 m), 12 inches or 30.48 cm deep, has a volume of 3,048 cubic meters. At a soil density of 1.2, this foot-deep hectare of soil weighs 3,658 metric tons. One percent of this weighs 36.58 metric tons, and if this 1 percent is organic matter (58% carbon by weight), it contains 21.21 tons of carbon.