A growing number of
farmers are exploring the potential of capturing and storing greater
amounts of carbon dioxide in soil as a way to combat climate change. Soil
naturally stores some amount of carbon, much of it from decaying plants
and animal matter. The National Academy of Sciences estimated in a study last year
that global farmland could capture and store as much as 3 billion tons
of additional carbon dioxide if farmers adopted a number of improved
practices, including adding organic matter like manure or compost,
shifting cultivation to favor crops that contribute more of their carbon
to the soil, or using off seasons to plant cover crops that will then
break down. (See “One man’s two-decade quest to suck greenhouse gas out of the sky.”) California has started providing small grants
from the state’s carbon cap-and-trade fund to farmers who employ
techniques that promise to store more carbon. Meanwhile, a Boston
startup known as Indigo AG recently announced
a plan to pay farmers to pursue similar practices and then sell carbon
credits to companies or individuals looking for ways to offset their
climate impacts. Noah Deich,
executive director of Carbon180, a think tank promoting carbon removal
and recycling, said that since the onset of agriculture, the planet has
released about 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide from soil—about 14 times the amount released
from all fossil-fuel energy sources globally last year. It’s a huge
pool that could potentially be refilled, if those ecosystems can be made
to take up higher levels of carbon dioxide. “But from that basic premise it gets much, much more complicated,” he said...MORE
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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