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It's not Just Joel Salatin anymore
In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote: Tropical rainforest is often on leached soil where most of the nutrients are actually in the trees. Saying that this environment doesn't accumulated soil and therefore no forest will do so does not necessarily follow. Particularly where temperate forests were cleared for crop land you can certainly increase the amount of carbon stored by converting them to pasture or back to forest. But your point about reaching a maximum and then not storing any more is correct. Citation, please. Note that we were talking about changes to land use not sequestering carbon in less decomposable forms. I was told the amount that can be stored has limits in a course by Dr Judi Earl who put me on to Dr Christine Jones. The latter is the local guru on agricultural carbon sequestration. The reason given is that as decomposable carbon builds up the microbes that break it down also build up until the rate they are breaking down reaches the rate of build-up, in other words an equilibrium is reached. The position of the equilibrium depends on the land use and methods but you will still get one sooner or later. This is ignoring the carbon stored above ground in forests etc but you can see that it also has a maximum value depending on what is grown. Here is one quote: "The capacity of soil to store decomposable organic carbon by physical protection within micro-aggregates or other organomineral complexes seems to be finite. Once these complexes are saturated any added decomposable organic carbon cannot be protected from decomposition. Even if this capacity has been severely depleted it can be resaturated rapidly (e.g. within 30 years by growing pasture)." Which is from he http://www.amazingcarbon.com/PDF/Lei...N_ARMIDALE.pdf This site http://www.amazingcarbon.com has a huge amount of material on this topic. I haven't read it all. If you also google on: carbon sequestration "christine jones" site:.au you will get much more. She is of the view that paying farmers to do sequestration is a solution to climate change. I think we must try many solutions because until you try you don't know for sure what the effect will be and also there are political, economic and social limits on the extent that any given solution can be adopted thus we are likely to need a multi-pronged approach to succeed. Also I would not want to push only sequestration solutions because the fossil fuel industry will try to seize on any method of dealing with climate change (eg "clean coal") as long as it allows them to keep on burning and that is very undesirable for many reasons apart from the increase in atmospheric CO2. David The pdf was a good romp with soil "C" saturation rates varing from 30 years to 20,000. Part of Salatin's putative success with topsoil building would have to be that he is returning more "C" to the soil than "N", so it would seem that this isn't a rudderless enterprise. I share your concern about coal, and since we have already breached the Rubicon for the CO2 greenhouse effect at 450 ppm, if you factor in the influences of the other greenhouse gasses (CH4, NO2, O3, H2O). If our politicians weren't such whores, it would be a simple matter of maximizing those activities that ameliorate greenhouse gases, and the continuous reduction of those activities that aggravate it (fossil fuel). Of course this would need to factor in, transitioning those employed in fossil fuel extraction into different employment, and the screams of "socialism" from the lunatic fringe. Building topsoil would still have the salubrious effects of: 1) cessation of the use of chemical fertilizers, which encourage some bacteria to devour the organic material in the soil (topsoil) 2) stops the release of NO2 from the fertilizer, which is a greenhouse gas. 3) stops the pollution of ground and run off water, thus improving the quality of drinking water, and cutting off the cause of ocean dead zones. 4) At the very least, what remaining topsoil would be protected by the permanent ground cover, and there is the expectation that we may add to it. 5) Additional topsoil (because there is more of it, and it is made from organic material) would effectively sequester CO2 to some extent. Again the question is where to put the decimal point, not "if one is needed". Peter Bane (google the name) puts the sequestration potential at being equivalent to the US production of CO2. 6) Increased topsoil leads to increased absorption of rain fall, recharging aquifers, and reducing chances of flooding. 7) Increased meat production on grassland instead of in CAFOs, means that 70% of antibiotics in this country won't go into meat animals, thereby creating antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. 8) Less grain will be needed to divert into CAFOs 9) Fewer CAFOs means fewer stinking lagoons of animal excrement, that won't be dumped into public water ways, or find its way into ground water. 10) Gives us a good source of complete proteins (beef and chickens), for healthy, growing kids. Hopefully the above would also inspire more small farmers to return to mixed use farms as Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). This is the first time that I have heard of "Phytolith Occluded Carbon". Unless we can grow sugarcane it in Ohio, to make methanol as a replacement for fossil fuel, it sounds as it it is of limited utility. I don't think the plant is suited to the weather in most of this country, and I would hate to see farmland given over to just CO2 sequestration. It seem to me that fast growing forests that can be converted to charcoal would give both habitat, clean water and air, and sequestration. Anyway, thanks for the citation. -- - Billy "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini. http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/2/maude http://english.aljazeera.net/video/m...515308172.html |
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