Showing posts with label agrichar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agrichar. Show all posts
Friday, August 26, 2011
Carbon Farming Coming Soon to Australia
CFI bill passes: On-farm carbon mitigation to be rewarded
24 Aug, 2011 10:11 AM
The National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) has acknowledged the passage of the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) through the Parliament, enabling farmers to be rewarded for carbon mitigation practices undertaken on-farm.
“The NFF has been broadly supportive of the concept and intent of the CFI from the outset as positive recognition of the major role agriculture can play in mitigating carbon emissions through on-farm management,” said NFF President Jock Laurie.
“We have long said that voluntary, market based mechanisms, using a carrot rather than a stick approach to carbon abatement, is the best way to engage with farmers in this challenge. The CFI fits this description.
“The NFF has also been consistent in saying that Australian farmers are under no illusions that the CFI will transform farm income, especially not in the short- to medium-term.
“However, with a continued focus on productivity-based research and the development of methodologies underpinning abatement projects, we hope that the CFI can mature to draw a meaningful contribution to Australia’s carbon mitigation effort,” Mr Laurie said.
“It is positive that the CFI legislation passed late yesterday has addressed a number of the key concerns raised by the NFF, particularly surrounding the potential for shifting regional land use away from agriculture and towards forestation. “We know that this Bill has undergone extensive debate and scrutiny and for this reason we feel confident that many of the potential pitfalls in this relatively new and complex area of carbon abatement have now been ironed out. “However, we will continue to closely monitor outcomes under the CFI to ensure that no unintended consequences emerge in regional Australia to the detriment of our farmers. “It is now vital that the Government intensifies its education process to ensure that farmers who decide to engage with the CFI do so with complete and unbiased information about the responsibilities that come with the program,” Mr Laurie concluded.
NFF Source: http://www.nff.org.au
---------------------------------
While a positive move, there is much to be done especially around determining soil carbon and its movements.
A new process currently under final development at the University of Sydney does seem to offer some possibilities on the measurement aspects. But......will it apply around Australia?
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Plant Power - Build Better Plants for More Carbon Capture or Bioenergy
WOW!!! Scientific American seems to have woken up to a fact probably well understood by many in the agriculture research area, and also by many farmers.
Better plants for carbon capture, biofuels, or for that matter almost anything else requires an investment in R and D, specifically some decent plant breeding and genetics. Along with some public policy work to see that the plants get used.
The article below appeared in http://www.sciam.com/ in mid October 2010, and at least the review does build a case for a decent and ongoing investment in plant research, something that seems to have been over looked in the rush to develop geosequestration of carbon. Algae also probably has a place, especially for coal power stations, as does agrichar.
The comments about a price for carbon are very US-centric, and reflect what I would consider as "head in the sand" thinking by many US policy gurus, as another study, on mainstream media reports today, has indicated that many countries already have an explicit or implicit carbon price, including China and the EC countries, and that the US is probably out of line in its current thinking.
The article really says little that is new, but getting this approach into the mainstream thinking is very necessary to ensure the $$$$ do flow into a very useful avenue of development, in a time when agriculture seems to be less endowed with investment for long term progress.
Review article below.
-----------------------------
Flower Power: Genetic Modification Could Amply Boost Plants' Carbon-Capture and Bioenergy Capacity
A new review sums up options for increasing global carbon-sequestration by flora, and speculates that genetically engineering crops and trees could enhance the process, trapping gigatons of the greenhouse gas as well as increasing bioenergy production.
Human activities currently add about nine gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere yearly.
Photosynthetic organisms on land and in the ocean absorb about five of those gigatons through the natural uptake of CO2, leaving to humans the task of dealing with the rest. But no matter how much carbon there is, capturing it and preventing it from reentering the atmosphere is an immense engineering challenge; even today's best technology is orders of magnitude less effective than photosynthesis at trapping atmospheric carbon.
A new analysis published in the October issue of Bioscience suggests that by 2050 humans could offset between five and eight gigatons of the carbon emitted annually by growing plants and trees optimized via genetic engineering both for fuel production and carbon sequestration.
Bioenergy crops represent an opportunity to mitigate atmospheric carbon dioxide in two separate ways, says lead author Christer Jansson, a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Earth Sciences Division. First, they are a carbon-neutral energy source that could offset the burning of fossil fuels. Second, "if they are the right kind of plants, they have a chance to transfer a lot of carbon underground for long-term sequestration," he says.
Plants take up CO2 and store carbon in their biomasses. Carbon can stay for decades or centuries in leaves, stems, branches, seeds and flowers aboveground, whereas carbon allocated to underground root systems is more apt to be transferred into the soil, where it can stay sequestered for millennia. Therefore, an ideal bioenergy plant would produce lots of aboveground biomass for fuel as well as have an extensive root system. Preliminary research indicates that genetic engineering approaches could be employed to enhance both these traits.
Using genetic modification to enhance photosynthesis and thus biomass yield is a realistic approach, says Stephen P. Long, a professor of crop sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign who was not part of the study. Long notes that transgenic tobacco plants, with simple modifications applicable to other plants as well, have already been shown to be more productive. "We are in a position now where we certainly know enough to where we could engineer quite a few of these changes," he says.
Meanwhile, regarding the problem of coaxing plants to allocate more carbon to their root systems, Jansson says an important difference between perennial and annual plants is a good place to start. "Perennials are more efficient than annuals at hiding carbon underground," he says. That's because annuals, which make up most of the world's food crops, spend much more energy producing seeds, stems and leaves than for building their root systems. On the other hand, perennials like switchgrass and Miscanthus have more extensive root systems—necessary because they remain dormant for part of the year and then must grow up again from their roots.
Whereas it may be exciting to imagine a bioenergy or food crop that produces lots of aboveground biomass and has large, carbon-sequestering root systems, research into whether this goal is realistic is still in its early stages. "Perenniality is a complex trait," Jansson says. He suggests it may end up being easier to modify perennials so they possess desirable annual-like features, as opposed to the other way around—but it's too early to tell. For the short term Jansson is confident that science can modify plants so they are more drought resistant and salt tolerant. Crops that could be maintained with brine or brackish water, such as industrial wastewater or seawater, would help preserve freshwater supplies. "These are important traits that need to be introduced into food and bioenergy crops," Jansson says, adding that "we will see this sooner" than enhanced photosynthesis or perennials with annual traits and/or vice versa.
The authors stress that genetic engineering should not be viewed as a cure-all, but rather part of a larger breeding effort. Further, Jansson says, "One problem is that the different aspects we mention—increasing photosynthesis, improving bioenergy crop yield, and putting more carbon into the root systems—are highly interlinked, and thus not necessarily additive." It could be, for example, that a modifying a plant to grow more roots takes away aboveground biomass production. Again, research in this area is too preliminary to tell.
Allison Thomson, who studies climate change and land use at the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Md., also expressed the need for caution when interpreting the study's projections. They are valuable in principle, she says, but also based on many assumptions regarding future economic conditions, land availability, and the size of bioenergy's role in a larger future energy strategy. For example, she says, "you can't really say how much bioenergy we are going use if you're not also considering other available energy sources and how much they emit." Furthermore, she points out, whether or not there is a price for carbon, which is hard to account for at this point, will figure heavily into future energy scenarios.
Also important to consider are potential land-use issues related to increasing demand for food. "When we do modeling, that's the one demand you can't ignore," Thomson says. "People want to eat before they want bioenergy."Besides all the unknowns, there is also existing regulatory policy regarding genetically modified organisms, which imposes high costs of compliance, thereby making it difficult to assess whether the ideas discussed in the paper are all doable.
Long says: "The bottleneck and damper on all this is really, 'How do you get transgenics out there, and meet all the regulatory requirements and costs?'"
Better plants for carbon capture, biofuels, or for that matter almost anything else requires an investment in R and D, specifically some decent plant breeding and genetics. Along with some public policy work to see that the plants get used.
The article below appeared in http://www.sciam.com/ in mid October 2010, and at least the review does build a case for a decent and ongoing investment in plant research, something that seems to have been over looked in the rush to develop geosequestration of carbon. Algae also probably has a place, especially for coal power stations, as does agrichar.
The comments about a price for carbon are very US-centric, and reflect what I would consider as "head in the sand" thinking by many US policy gurus, as another study, on mainstream media reports today, has indicated that many countries already have an explicit or implicit carbon price, including China and the EC countries, and that the US is probably out of line in its current thinking.
The article really says little that is new, but getting this approach into the mainstream thinking is very necessary to ensure the $$$$ do flow into a very useful avenue of development, in a time when agriculture seems to be less endowed with investment for long term progress.
Review article below.
-----------------------------
Flower Power: Genetic Modification Could Amply Boost Plants' Carbon-Capture and Bioenergy Capacity
A new review sums up options for increasing global carbon-sequestration by flora, and speculates that genetically engineering crops and trees could enhance the process, trapping gigatons of the greenhouse gas as well as increasing bioenergy production.
Human activities currently add about nine gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere yearly.
Photosynthetic organisms on land and in the ocean absorb about five of those gigatons through the natural uptake of CO2, leaving to humans the task of dealing with the rest. But no matter how much carbon there is, capturing it and preventing it from reentering the atmosphere is an immense engineering challenge; even today's best technology is orders of magnitude less effective than photosynthesis at trapping atmospheric carbon.
A new analysis published in the October issue of Bioscience suggests that by 2050 humans could offset between five and eight gigatons of the carbon emitted annually by growing plants and trees optimized via genetic engineering both for fuel production and carbon sequestration.
Bioenergy crops represent an opportunity to mitigate atmospheric carbon dioxide in two separate ways, says lead author Christer Jansson, a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Earth Sciences Division. First, they are a carbon-neutral energy source that could offset the burning of fossil fuels. Second, "if they are the right kind of plants, they have a chance to transfer a lot of carbon underground for long-term sequestration," he says.
Plants take up CO2 and store carbon in their biomasses. Carbon can stay for decades or centuries in leaves, stems, branches, seeds and flowers aboveground, whereas carbon allocated to underground root systems is more apt to be transferred into the soil, where it can stay sequestered for millennia. Therefore, an ideal bioenergy plant would produce lots of aboveground biomass for fuel as well as have an extensive root system. Preliminary research indicates that genetic engineering approaches could be employed to enhance both these traits.
Using genetic modification to enhance photosynthesis and thus biomass yield is a realistic approach, says Stephen P. Long, a professor of crop sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign who was not part of the study. Long notes that transgenic tobacco plants, with simple modifications applicable to other plants as well, have already been shown to be more productive. "We are in a position now where we certainly know enough to where we could engineer quite a few of these changes," he says.
Meanwhile, regarding the problem of coaxing plants to allocate more carbon to their root systems, Jansson says an important difference between perennial and annual plants is a good place to start. "Perennials are more efficient than annuals at hiding carbon underground," he says. That's because annuals, which make up most of the world's food crops, spend much more energy producing seeds, stems and leaves than for building their root systems. On the other hand, perennials like switchgrass and Miscanthus have more extensive root systems—necessary because they remain dormant for part of the year and then must grow up again from their roots.
Whereas it may be exciting to imagine a bioenergy or food crop that produces lots of aboveground biomass and has large, carbon-sequestering root systems, research into whether this goal is realistic is still in its early stages. "Perenniality is a complex trait," Jansson says. He suggests it may end up being easier to modify perennials so they possess desirable annual-like features, as opposed to the other way around—but it's too early to tell. For the short term Jansson is confident that science can modify plants so they are more drought resistant and salt tolerant. Crops that could be maintained with brine or brackish water, such as industrial wastewater or seawater, would help preserve freshwater supplies. "These are important traits that need to be introduced into food and bioenergy crops," Jansson says, adding that "we will see this sooner" than enhanced photosynthesis or perennials with annual traits and/or vice versa.
The authors stress that genetic engineering should not be viewed as a cure-all, but rather part of a larger breeding effort. Further, Jansson says, "One problem is that the different aspects we mention—increasing photosynthesis, improving bioenergy crop yield, and putting more carbon into the root systems—are highly interlinked, and thus not necessarily additive." It could be, for example, that a modifying a plant to grow more roots takes away aboveground biomass production. Again, research in this area is too preliminary to tell.
Allison Thomson, who studies climate change and land use at the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Md., also expressed the need for caution when interpreting the study's projections. They are valuable in principle, she says, but also based on many assumptions regarding future economic conditions, land availability, and the size of bioenergy's role in a larger future energy strategy. For example, she says, "you can't really say how much bioenergy we are going use if you're not also considering other available energy sources and how much they emit." Furthermore, she points out, whether or not there is a price for carbon, which is hard to account for at this point, will figure heavily into future energy scenarios.
Also important to consider are potential land-use issues related to increasing demand for food. "When we do modeling, that's the one demand you can't ignore," Thomson says. "People want to eat before they want bioenergy."Besides all the unknowns, there is also existing regulatory policy regarding genetically modified organisms, which imposes high costs of compliance, thereby making it difficult to assess whether the ideas discussed in the paper are all doable.
Long says: "The bottleneck and damper on all this is really, 'How do you get transgenics out there, and meet all the regulatory requirements and costs?'"
Thursday, January 21, 2010
It is Time to Recycle the Organics
Organic recycling will be vital to recover the vast amounts of nutrients that come to the city in food.
I posted some material from Singapore in 2009, a place where organic recycling is a joke, and where incineration is the norm. YET.........some commentators wax lyrical about using organic food, and how wonderful it is, in a city that imports over 95% of its food, and then burns the residuals. One needs to be a little bit real about the issue.
So many nutrients, so much carbon is in the food we eat, and in the city, most is wasted.........wasted.
I posted some material from Singapore in 2009, a place where organic recycling is a joke, and where incineration is the norm. YET.........some commentators wax lyrical about using organic food, and how wonderful it is, in a city that imports over 95% of its food, and then burns the residuals. One needs to be a little bit real about the issue.
So many nutrients, so much carbon is in the food we eat, and in the city, most is wasted.........wasted.
In Australia, particularly in southern cities this issue is slowly being addressed. It fits with the emerging potential technologies of vertical wall and roof top gardens as well, potential city sites for food and green production, currently being developed and enthused over by for example, Prof Julian Cribb of Sydney.
the following article has been lifted from "Inside Waste" and was written by Gerry Gillespie, an ardent advocate for carbon and nutrient recycling and recovery.
Unfortunately, I think it will be a considerable time before it happens in the Northern Territory in any modest fashion, even. But it should, as local soils scream out for better soil carbon levels to both hold water and nutrients, as well as needing a great boost in soil nutrients to aid production in both agriculture and horticulture.
It is a important story...........
The organic base
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
As Australia’s waste industry gears up for 2010, the president of Revolve - Canberra, Gerry Gillespie, urges people to focus on the root issues of organic waste management. He argues valuable organic materials must be returned to soils, and experience shows this can be done very effectively when communities are empowered to become part of local solutions.
Every individual, regardless of their social standing, produces organic waste as long as they continue to eat.The true value of this product, both in terms of its nutrient value and its value as a catalyst for the soil to generate more food, has never truly been capitalised on in western society.
It is only in Asian communities that the true value of returning organic materials to soils has been appreciated and developed.
Yet even in western societies, where the public (with the exception of gardeners) has long been seen as ignorant of the value of this material, a substantial shift has begun to take place with the advent of new programs focussed on food.For the first time in its modern history, western society has begun to truly look at its waste organic outputs.
In the first instances this was mainly from the western perspective of wasted food as a waste of money, but now also and more importantly, for its value to the food chain.This in turn has lead to a consideration of the value of clean, quality organic products as a catalyst in the production of quality food from quality soil.The Groundswell project in NSW has clearly demonstrated that, given the right tools and information to act, the public will respond with enthusiasm to the collection of food waste for reuse in agriculture.
This project, using the City to Soil collection system, has demonstrated that at our very animal base we fully grasp the importance of soil as our mother, in the sense that it feeds and clothes us.As individuals, parents and grandparents, we see that the security of future generations is firmly based in the soil. The response to this project has seen the collections of organic waste with extremely low contamination rates of less than 0.5%.
This project has clearly demonstrated the public wants to be involved. Indeed it has demonstrated the collection of organic waste, once it is embraced by the community, will not only empower them to become part of the solution but will also provide the basis for a link into a much bigger picture of behavioural change.
Compost and carbon
In developing the City to Soil process, the project managers needed to reduce the cost of compost manufacture and so designed a new system where the organic waste requires no shredding and very little turning. This process importantly also produces no odour.
Material is sprayed with water and a two part biological inoculant, covered with tarpaulins and left for six weeks without turning. The material can achieve temperatures in excess of 70 degrees in the first week. It then settles back to around 55 degrees for the remainder of the process.
The material produced in this compost process, returned to the soil, provides the basis for supported land management change which dramatically reduces fertiliser use, improves moisture retention water in soils, increases yield and increases soil carbon.
If the legacy emissions currently in the atmosphere are to be addressed, improving our soils worldwide is the only way of doing it. While climate change may be the largest threat we have brought upon humanity, the generation of carbon in agricultural soils and the opportunities for change that it brings could be one of the greatest benefits humanity has ever given to the world. We have at our fingertips the means to end poverty, we have at our fingertips the means to feed the world, we have at our fingertips the means for a new world economy.This new direction, this new hope, is based on the simplest and most disregarded of the products of humanity – our organic waste.
Source-separated organic waste provides the tools to link the community back to its food supply, it provides the tools for us to rebuild our relationship with out soils, it provides the means to support local regional economies. The only thing we need to do to be part of this great revolution is to maintain ownership of our own organic waste.
Conclusion
The greed of the global economy has forgotten that you can’t have a labourer in China make cheap clothes for the world market without food. And you can’t feed that labourer without soil.
The global economy has forgotten that it is nothing without soil. Every cheap shirt, every cheap car, every cheap tool, represents some part of a nation’s soil. We are nothing without soil. We don’t exist without soil.
Peak phosphorus spells the death of chemical agriculture. There is a new way. There is a better way – for humanity and for the planet.
Owning your organic wastes in your home and in your community provides you with the power to help local farmers produce food and to generate local wealth in the emerging carbon market.
No economy, rich or poor, exists without food – because no economy rich or poor exists without soil. The soil is your mother – you are nothing without your mother.
The issues of ‘peak oil’, of ‘peak phosphorus’ and other matters of assumed criticality are all indicators of our humble human need to replace one problem with another by addressing only the symptoms of our disease. In the same way that ‘peak oil’ tells us that we have been too reliant on an unsustainable supply of oil, ‘peak phosphorus’ tells us that we have relied for too long on industrial chemical farming.
Good quality soil and soil carbon can provide humanity with the direct link back to its very basic roots. It can be part of our individual responsibility to ensure that the farmers are given the right tools and the capacity to utilise their soil based on the experiential management skills of themselves and past generations. In linking personal behaviour with soil carbon we will be weaving the tapestry of soil quality into the reality of our daily existence. To achieve this we need to have a community understanding and response to the ability to grow our soils. The only place this can be achieved is on the farm.
It is that same place that grows our food and is the home and heart of our repeatable economic base.
In the world voluntary carbon market we have been presented with the first opportunity in human history to include our environment in our economy. We as humans have finally reached that same point that every monkey, bird and bee awoke to as it was born new into its circumstance, its natural economy. Every species lives within its economy because to do otherwise is to perish.
We can now join the evolution of economy by including the obvious in our accounts. Everything we now do and make can be predicated on its carbon value. You as an individual in this place are at this exciting starting point.
We must begin.
[partially sourced from Inside Waste]
Friday, June 05, 2009
Climate Change and Land Use
Recently released is the new World Watch Institute Report on climate change and land use.
Nothing too radical really, but a sensible approach to improving everyday land use with a focus on the actions that can mitigate climate change.
Some of the actions may not be practical - afterall, most grain crops are annuals - so you cannot farm perennials to meet the world grain needs. But you can improve what is being done now.
It is also true to say that for many countries already, some of these steps are being taken, with minimal and conservation tillage having a significant use in many of the major grain production regions of the world.
It is interesting to note they advocate using biochar [agrichar] to enrich soil carbon. Unfortunately the Australian government does not seem too interested in this option.......it needs more research! BUT.......biochar results may not start being discernible for a number of years, probably after the current term of the government; maybe it is time to start sometime soon on expanded research. At least in Australia, initial research has been quite positive on a role for this product so work on further R and D should be cranked up and not left without funding. CSIRO has got some money......for a 3 year trial period. But unfortunately, they are unlikley to do much in the tropical areas of Australia.
Read the summary. Make up your mind. Climate change is everyone's business.
------------------------
Worldwatch Report: Mitigating Climate Change Through Food and Land Use
Mitigating Climate Change Through Food and Land Use
Author: Sara J. Scherr and Sajal Sthapit ISBN 13: 978-1-878071-91-0 Paperback 50 pages
Summary Table of Contents
E-book $12.95
Summary
Land makes up a quarter of Earth’s surface,and its soil and plants hold three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. More than 30 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions arise from the land use sector. Thus, no strategy for mitigating global climate change can be complete or successful without reducing emissions from agriculture, forestry, and other land uses. Moreover, only land-based or “terrestrial” carbon sequestration offers the possibility today of large-scale removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, through plant photosynthesis.
Five major strategies for reducing and sequestering terrestrial greenhouse gas emissions are:
• Enriching soil carbon. Soil is the third largest carbon pool on Earth’s surface. Agricultural soils can be managed to reduce emissions by minimizing tillage, reducing use of nitrogen fertilizers, and preventing erosion. Soils can store the carbon captured by plants from the atmosphere by building up soil organic matter, which also has benefits for crop production. Adding biochar (biomass burned in a low-oxygen environment) can further enhance carbon storage in soil.
• Farming with perennials. Perennial crops, grasses, palms, and trees constantly maintain and develop their root and woody biomass and associated carbon, while providing vegetative cover for soils. There is large potential to substitute annual tilled crops with perennials, particularly for animal feed and vegetable oils, as well as to incorporate woody perennials into annual cropping systems in agroforestry systems.
• Climate-friendly livestock production. Rapid growth in demand for livestock products has triggered a huge rise in the number of animals, the concentration of wastes in feedlots and dairies, and the clearing of natural grasslands and forests for grazing. Livestock- related emissions of carbon and methane now account for 14.5 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions—more than the transport sector. A reduction in livestock numbers may be needed but production innovations can help, including rotational grazing systems,manure management, methane capture for biogas production, and improved feeds and feed additives.
• Protecting natural habitat. The planet’s 4 billion hectares of forests and 5 billion hectares of natural grasslands are a massive reservoir of carbon—both in vegetation above ground and in root systems below ground. As forests and grasslands grow, they remove carbon from the atmosphere. Deforestation, land clearing, and forest and grassland fires are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Incentives are needed to encourage farmers and land users to maintain natural vegetation through product certification, payments for climate services, securing tenure rights, and community fire control. The conservation of natural habitat will benefit biodiversity in the face of climate change.
• Restoring degraded watersheds and rangelands. Extensive areas of the world have been denuded of vegetation through land clearing for crops or grazing and from overuse and poor management. Degradation has not only generated a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions, but local people have lost a valuable livelihood asset as well as essential watershed functions. Restoring vegetative cover on degraded lands can be a win-win-win strategy for addressing climate change, rural poverty, and water scarcity.
Agricultural communities can play a central role in fighting climate change. Even at a relatively low price for mitigating carbon emissions, improved land management could offset a quarter of global emissions from fossil fuel use in a year. In contrast, solutions for reducing emissions by carbon capture in the energy sector are unlikely to be widely utilized for decades and do not remove the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. To tackle the climate challenge, we need to pursue land use solutions in addition to efforts to improve energy efficiency and speed the transition to renewable energy.
Yet so far, the international science and policy communities have been slow to embrace terrestrial climate action. Some fear that investments in land use will not produce “real” climate benefits, or that land use action would distract attention from investment in energy alternatives. There is also a concern that land management changes cannot be implemented quickly enough and at a scale that would make a difference to the climate.
-----------------
It is a sensible and sober assessment. But action is needed.
Nothing too radical really, but a sensible approach to improving everyday land use with a focus on the actions that can mitigate climate change.
Some of the actions may not be practical - afterall, most grain crops are annuals - so you cannot farm perennials to meet the world grain needs. But you can improve what is being done now.
It is also true to say that for many countries already, some of these steps are being taken, with minimal and conservation tillage having a significant use in many of the major grain production regions of the world.
It is interesting to note they advocate using biochar [agrichar] to enrich soil carbon. Unfortunately the Australian government does not seem too interested in this option.......it needs more research! BUT.......biochar results may not start being discernible for a number of years, probably after the current term of the government; maybe it is time to start sometime soon on expanded research. At least in Australia, initial research has been quite positive on a role for this product so work on further R and D should be cranked up and not left without funding. CSIRO has got some money......for a 3 year trial period. But unfortunately, they are unlikley to do much in the tropical areas of Australia.
Read the summary. Make up your mind. Climate change is everyone's business.
------------------------
Worldwatch Report: Mitigating Climate Change Through Food and Land Use
Mitigating Climate Change Through Food and Land Use
Author: Sara J. Scherr and Sajal Sthapit ISBN 13: 978-1-878071-91-0 Paperback 50 pages
Summary Table of Contents
E-book $12.95
Summary
Land makes up a quarter of Earth’s surface,and its soil and plants hold three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. More than 30 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions arise from the land use sector. Thus, no strategy for mitigating global climate change can be complete or successful without reducing emissions from agriculture, forestry, and other land uses. Moreover, only land-based or “terrestrial” carbon sequestration offers the possibility today of large-scale removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, through plant photosynthesis.
Five major strategies for reducing and sequestering terrestrial greenhouse gas emissions are:
• Enriching soil carbon. Soil is the third largest carbon pool on Earth’s surface. Agricultural soils can be managed to reduce emissions by minimizing tillage, reducing use of nitrogen fertilizers, and preventing erosion. Soils can store the carbon captured by plants from the atmosphere by building up soil organic matter, which also has benefits for crop production. Adding biochar (biomass burned in a low-oxygen environment) can further enhance carbon storage in soil.
• Farming with perennials. Perennial crops, grasses, palms, and trees constantly maintain and develop their root and woody biomass and associated carbon, while providing vegetative cover for soils. There is large potential to substitute annual tilled crops with perennials, particularly for animal feed and vegetable oils, as well as to incorporate woody perennials into annual cropping systems in agroforestry systems.
• Climate-friendly livestock production. Rapid growth in demand for livestock products has triggered a huge rise in the number of animals, the concentration of wastes in feedlots and dairies, and the clearing of natural grasslands and forests for grazing. Livestock- related emissions of carbon and methane now account for 14.5 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions—more than the transport sector. A reduction in livestock numbers may be needed but production innovations can help, including rotational grazing systems,manure management, methane capture for biogas production, and improved feeds and feed additives.
• Protecting natural habitat. The planet’s 4 billion hectares of forests and 5 billion hectares of natural grasslands are a massive reservoir of carbon—both in vegetation above ground and in root systems below ground. As forests and grasslands grow, they remove carbon from the atmosphere. Deforestation, land clearing, and forest and grassland fires are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Incentives are needed to encourage farmers and land users to maintain natural vegetation through product certification, payments for climate services, securing tenure rights, and community fire control. The conservation of natural habitat will benefit biodiversity in the face of climate change.
• Restoring degraded watersheds and rangelands. Extensive areas of the world have been denuded of vegetation through land clearing for crops or grazing and from overuse and poor management. Degradation has not only generated a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions, but local people have lost a valuable livelihood asset as well as essential watershed functions. Restoring vegetative cover on degraded lands can be a win-win-win strategy for addressing climate change, rural poverty, and water scarcity.
Agricultural communities can play a central role in fighting climate change. Even at a relatively low price for mitigating carbon emissions, improved land management could offset a quarter of global emissions from fossil fuel use in a year. In contrast, solutions for reducing emissions by carbon capture in the energy sector are unlikely to be widely utilized for decades and do not remove the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. To tackle the climate challenge, we need to pursue land use solutions in addition to efforts to improve energy efficiency and speed the transition to renewable energy.
Yet so far, the international science and policy communities have been slow to embrace terrestrial climate action. Some fear that investments in land use will not produce “real” climate benefits, or that land use action would distract attention from investment in energy alternatives. There is also a concern that land management changes cannot be implemented quickly enough and at a scale that would make a difference to the climate.
-----------------
It is a sensible and sober assessment. But action is needed.
Friday, March 06, 2009
Earth's Soils
Always remember that - "man's continued existence depends on a thin 150mm layer of soil and the fact that it rains"
I have had that quote displayed in my office in just about all offices occupied over many years. A poignant reminder of how fragile our very existence is on this planet. Soil is critical and certainly not all that well mapped, described or understood in relation to management and nutrients in many parts of the world. It is abused in others, from poor physical management methods in cropping often seen in semi arid tropical areas , to over saturation with nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen in some of the naturally good quality soils of the eastern USA.
There is now to be a co-ordinated and expanded effor to increase understanding and mapping of soils on this planet earth. This is also currently topical for the Northern Territory, with many land owners actively researching land and soil data as part of the new management regime in the Top end of the NT.
The media release is appended below.
-----------------------------
Scientists to map out earth`s soil
Some of the answers to the world’s greatest challenges -- such as climate change, food security, and water scarcity -- lie right beneath our feet. Responding to these and other critical issues, a group of scientists from around the world have announced an ambitious new plan to digitally map the Earth’s soil and its properties. Scientists, industry leaders, and government officials gathered at Columbia University to launch GlobalSoilMap.net, a pioneering new tool that will shape future policy making, especially in those regions of the world most vulnerable to environmental shocks.
Knowledge of the world’s soil resources is fragmented and dated. GlobalSoilMap.net will provide accurate soil information in real-time as well as state of the art analysis of soil properties, meeting the needs of various stakeholders, including policymakers, the climate change community, farmers, other land users, and scientists.
“On the current trajectory we will not meet our Millennium Development Goal to cut hunger by half by 2015,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “We need to speed up, and fortunately can do so if we mobilize much greater global cooperation. Today’s meeting speaks to the MDG hunger challenge and many others as well, including climate change, agriculture deficiency, nutrition, and water availability. Soil mapping is one of the pillars to the challenge of sustainable development and the Earth Institute is proud to be a founding partner in this undertaking.”
Work has already started in sub-Saharan Africa, through an $18 million grant awarded to the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to create Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS). AfSIS will be the first-ever, detailed digital soil map of that region’s 42 countries. The Nairobi-based Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute of CIAT will lead this effort.
“The best science and technology available must be deployed immediately if Africa’s soils are to be managed in a sustainable manner,” said Kofi Annan, chairman of AGRA and former UN Secretary-General, in a pre-written statement. “Fortunately, this is exactly what is happening. I refer to the Africa Soil Information Service –AfSIS for short. AfSIS is a most welcome addition to the arsenal of tools deployed against the scourge of hunger in Africa, and I heartily congratulate the scientists who developed the project.”
The global digital soil map will use enormous advances in technologies for accurate collection and prediction of soil properties. Conventional soil maps, which are based on technology that existed before the computer, only provide descriptive, static information and are difficult to decipher for those outside the soil science community. Digital soil maps, which are essentially a spatial database of soil properties, are quantitative, dynamic, and will be comprehensible to scientists, policy makers, and government officials.
“Improved soil management for better crop productivity is crucial for providing food security – an intensifying challenge in the context of population growth, increasing numbers of hungry people, and the impacts of climate change on agriculture,” explained Pedro Sanchez, director of AfSIS and director of Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “This initiative will provide farmers, policy makers, and scientists crucial information on how to address declining soil fertility in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa,” Sanchez continued.
Part of the funding will also provide initial support for the formation of the global consortium that is developing the methodology and raising funds for GlobalSoilMap.net. The consortium, which is led by World Soil Information (ISRIC), also includes the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the US Department of Agriculture - Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (Australia), the University of Sydney, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the French Research Institute for Development.
The information system will be freely accessible on the Internet. A ministry of agriculture, for example, can access GlobalSoilMap.net to anticipate fertilizer needs for farmers. Government officials will draw on the information to understand the extent of soil erosion and costs for addressing it. Scientists will utilize the data to forecast the effects of climate change. The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), a center at the Earth Institute, will work with regional partners around the world to integrate and deliver the data using rapidly developing information and communication technologies.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Are Plastic Bags Important in Waste Management Policy?
Plastic bags and their management have become a symbolic issue in Australian waste management. In doing so, waste management has largely become irrelevant, for it has meant that the large issues are being ignored. We all love to hate industry, those making a living from our waste, but in reality they perform a public good function. Some even argue they could do much better, if allowed to do so.
In northern and north west Australia we have tended to ignore waste issues. Afterall, plenty of space and relatively few people, so waste issues are of modest interest, except in relation to a kerfuffle over nuclear waste, where those emptier spaces around Australia could serve a useful role. And yes, plastic bags are noticeable here too........but that is largely a litter issue, not a major waste problem.
But waste issues are of pressing importance in relation to the coming changes over carbon management. Superior organics management could yield improved outcomes in carbon emissions and capture, while potentially improving agriculture [ see any of the posts on carbon management on this site], and of even greater relevance in a time of reduced jobs.......better waste management could create many new jobs, and these would be permanent ones too. Technology to do this is available right now.
The following article provides a decent overview of some of these issues. Are we focussing on an irrelevant issue in trying to ban plastic bags? I would agree with the author.
---------------------------
Increasingly, the humble plastic bag is being highlighted as “public evil number one” when it comes to waste and the environment. It seems all levels of government have got the demise of plastic bags firmly in their sights. Never was so much effort and political capital spent on such a marginal issue.
Don’t get me wrong – reducing plastic bags as part of a litter management scheme is an important place to start but from a waste management point of view it is symbolic at best. Plastic bags represent just one thousandth of the waste stream or 0.1%. 20,000 tonnes out of a landfill waste stream of 20 million tonnes.
Resource recycling and greenhouse gas emissions must be the waste policy priorities as we move into an era of climate change and a carbon constrained economy.
There is an enormous opportunity for the Australian recycling and waste sector to lead positively from the front on issues of emissions reductions and climate change. A study by Warnken ISE points to the potential to deliver nearly 35 million tonnes of greenhouse gas abatement through innovative resource recovery, organics processing and improved landfill gas capture practices. That adds up to a reduction of nearly 7 percent in Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions – equal to taking all cars off Australian roads.
Doing so would see investment of around $4 billion in new infrastructure and the creation of 4000 new jobs.
Waste is one of those sectors where there is an alignment of Government policy on climate change and business opportunities for growth and diversification. I’m not advocating we ignore plastic bags but can we also focus on the big issues?
Gas capture from landfills
When organic waste, mainly wood, garden waste and food is disposed to landfill, it generates methane which is a significant greenhouse gas. While on the positive side it is estimated that 70% of household waste is disposed into landfills with gas capture systems, capture inefficiencies taken with the 30% of landfills without capture and importantly the massive amounts of organics sent to Commercial and Inert landfills, amount to a landfill emission profile of 15 million tonnes CO2e/year.
Landfills will always have a role to play in an integrated waste framework so it is important that we get the landfill platform operating with the lowest carbon footprint possible.
The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will go some way to address this by putting a cost on methane emissions from landfill. For the first few years of the scheme the price is likely to be $25-40 /tCO2e. That could see landfill gate prices rise by anywhere from $10-$50 /t of waste across the weighbridge depending on whether the landfill has a gas capture system and the organic loading of the waste.
At a particular carbon pollution price, landfill operators will install new and improved gas capture systems.
Alternatives for organics treatment
At a particular carbon pollution price (taken with rises in landfill levies), waste generators will seek out alternatives to landfill and those alternatives become commercially viable. The main treatment options for organics are “clean stream composting” and “residual processing” through an Advanced Waste Treatment (AWT) plant.
Clean stream composting is widely practiced in Australia and growth in carbon costs (taken with the potential for some form of carbon storage benefit) will see this sector flourish. In 2008 there were 12 “residual processing” AWT plants either operating or under construction across Australia, up from 1 in 1994. AWT has been taken up for different reasons in different states – sometimes government policy and targets driven through regional waste boards (e.g. Perth), sometimes price signals via landfill levies (e.g. Sydney) and sometimes local Councils have taken the lead (and the cost burden) (e.g. Cairns, Port Macquarie, Port Stephens).
More than 30% of Sydney Councils are now using AWT to process their waste. Tenders for the processing of residual/organic waste are expected for another 40% in 2009. By mid 2009 with two new plants coming on stream, NSW will have one of the highest concentrations of AWT’s per head of population in the world, with 7 AWT’s between Coffs Harbour and Campbelltown (3 anaerobic digesters and 4 MBT composters).
Perth is similarly fast tracking towards low emission and high resource recovery options with 4 AWT’s operating or being constructed. Adelaide has Australia’s premier timber treatment technology turning a greenhouse gas liability in landfill, into an alternative fuel source with outstanding greenhouse gas benefits. Melbourne has signaled its intention to start aggressively down the path of 12 new AWT and organics processing facilities.
Resource recovery
The third key action is to rapidly ramp up resource recovery and recycling. Australia recycles only 48% of the total waste stream. Recovering the embodied energy in recycled materials reduces energy consumption in other manufacturing sectors of the economy. But this benefit is given limited recognition by governments.
There is a desperate need for improved infrastructure and programs to support commercial and industrial, construction and residential recycling.
Getting Australia’s recycling rate up toward 70 or 80% will deliver massive greenhouse gas benefits, as well as generally lower costs of production to manufacturers. It will also generate huge numbers of jobs.
If a company was closing up shop today and taking 4000 jobs with it, it would be front page news. But the waste sector can create 4000 new jobs with significant environmental and economic benefits, and at very low cost.
What is required is a change of perspective on the role of waste within a carbon constrained economy. We need to move past old images of the waste sector as garbos in trucks and dumping at the local tip, toward a view of waste as an integrated part of resource reuse in the economy.
Toward an understanding of the role recycling, resource recovery and waste management can have in helping to solve Australia’s (and the world’s) climate change problems.
These are the key issues from a waste policy perspective.
The campaigns for politicians to ban plastic bags are understandable given that plastic bags are such a visible waste stream, but from a strategic waste perspective, a ban on plastic bags is symbolic at best and distracting at worst.
written by Mike Ritchie, President NSW Branch of the Waste Management Association of Australia and General Manager, Marketing & Communications, SITA Environmental Solutions.
----------------------
While these views may be quite in your face and definitely confronting.........they are logical and deserve more thought from the NT and Darwin City politicians.
One of our major issues in the NT is construction and demolition waste, and most goes straight to landfill. Other jurisdictions have made major attempts to reduce and manage that material, but not here. A simple one would be to use all the waste gyprock/ dry wall in the compost. Grind it and add to the green waste, and there is a lot of dry wall wasted!
And in Darwin the MRF avoids many useful grades of plastic - they are banned from recycling, yet are widely reused in many types of new plastic products, even as co-mingled materials.
Can the NT do better than it is now?
In northern and north west Australia we have tended to ignore waste issues. Afterall, plenty of space and relatively few people, so waste issues are of modest interest, except in relation to a kerfuffle over nuclear waste, where those emptier spaces around Australia could serve a useful role. And yes, plastic bags are noticeable here too........but that is largely a litter issue, not a major waste problem.
But waste issues are of pressing importance in relation to the coming changes over carbon management. Superior organics management could yield improved outcomes in carbon emissions and capture, while potentially improving agriculture [ see any of the posts on carbon management on this site], and of even greater relevance in a time of reduced jobs.......better waste management could create many new jobs, and these would be permanent ones too. Technology to do this is available right now.
The following article provides a decent overview of some of these issues. Are we focussing on an irrelevant issue in trying to ban plastic bags? I would agree with the author.
---------------------------
Increasingly, the humble plastic bag is being highlighted as “public evil number one” when it comes to waste and the environment. It seems all levels of government have got the demise of plastic bags firmly in their sights. Never was so much effort and political capital spent on such a marginal issue.
Don’t get me wrong – reducing plastic bags as part of a litter management scheme is an important place to start but from a waste management point of view it is symbolic at best. Plastic bags represent just one thousandth of the waste stream or 0.1%. 20,000 tonnes out of a landfill waste stream of 20 million tonnes.
Resource recycling and greenhouse gas emissions must be the waste policy priorities as we move into an era of climate change and a carbon constrained economy.
There is an enormous opportunity for the Australian recycling and waste sector to lead positively from the front on issues of emissions reductions and climate change. A study by Warnken ISE points to the potential to deliver nearly 35 million tonnes of greenhouse gas abatement through innovative resource recovery, organics processing and improved landfill gas capture practices. That adds up to a reduction of nearly 7 percent in Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions – equal to taking all cars off Australian roads.
Doing so would see investment of around $4 billion in new infrastructure and the creation of 4000 new jobs.
Waste is one of those sectors where there is an alignment of Government policy on climate change and business opportunities for growth and diversification. I’m not advocating we ignore plastic bags but can we also focus on the big issues?
Gas capture from landfills
When organic waste, mainly wood, garden waste and food is disposed to landfill, it generates methane which is a significant greenhouse gas. While on the positive side it is estimated that 70% of household waste is disposed into landfills with gas capture systems, capture inefficiencies taken with the 30% of landfills without capture and importantly the massive amounts of organics sent to Commercial and Inert landfills, amount to a landfill emission profile of 15 million tonnes CO2e/year.
Landfills will always have a role to play in an integrated waste framework so it is important that we get the landfill platform operating with the lowest carbon footprint possible.
The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will go some way to address this by putting a cost on methane emissions from landfill. For the first few years of the scheme the price is likely to be $25-40 /tCO2e. That could see landfill gate prices rise by anywhere from $10-$50 /t of waste across the weighbridge depending on whether the landfill has a gas capture system and the organic loading of the waste.
At a particular carbon pollution price, landfill operators will install new and improved gas capture systems.
Alternatives for organics treatment
At a particular carbon pollution price (taken with rises in landfill levies), waste generators will seek out alternatives to landfill and those alternatives become commercially viable. The main treatment options for organics are “clean stream composting” and “residual processing” through an Advanced Waste Treatment (AWT) plant.
Clean stream composting is widely practiced in Australia and growth in carbon costs (taken with the potential for some form of carbon storage benefit) will see this sector flourish. In 2008 there were 12 “residual processing” AWT plants either operating or under construction across Australia, up from 1 in 1994. AWT has been taken up for different reasons in different states – sometimes government policy and targets driven through regional waste boards (e.g. Perth), sometimes price signals via landfill levies (e.g. Sydney) and sometimes local Councils have taken the lead (and the cost burden) (e.g. Cairns, Port Macquarie, Port Stephens).
More than 30% of Sydney Councils are now using AWT to process their waste. Tenders for the processing of residual/organic waste are expected for another 40% in 2009. By mid 2009 with two new plants coming on stream, NSW will have one of the highest concentrations of AWT’s per head of population in the world, with 7 AWT’s between Coffs Harbour and Campbelltown (3 anaerobic digesters and 4 MBT composters).
Perth is similarly fast tracking towards low emission and high resource recovery options with 4 AWT’s operating or being constructed. Adelaide has Australia’s premier timber treatment technology turning a greenhouse gas liability in landfill, into an alternative fuel source with outstanding greenhouse gas benefits. Melbourne has signaled its intention to start aggressively down the path of 12 new AWT and organics processing facilities.
Resource recovery
The third key action is to rapidly ramp up resource recovery and recycling. Australia recycles only 48% of the total waste stream. Recovering the embodied energy in recycled materials reduces energy consumption in other manufacturing sectors of the economy. But this benefit is given limited recognition by governments.
There is a desperate need for improved infrastructure and programs to support commercial and industrial, construction and residential recycling.
Getting Australia’s recycling rate up toward 70 or 80% will deliver massive greenhouse gas benefits, as well as generally lower costs of production to manufacturers. It will also generate huge numbers of jobs.
If a company was closing up shop today and taking 4000 jobs with it, it would be front page news. But the waste sector can create 4000 new jobs with significant environmental and economic benefits, and at very low cost.
What is required is a change of perspective on the role of waste within a carbon constrained economy. We need to move past old images of the waste sector as garbos in trucks and dumping at the local tip, toward a view of waste as an integrated part of resource reuse in the economy.
Toward an understanding of the role recycling, resource recovery and waste management can have in helping to solve Australia’s (and the world’s) climate change problems.
These are the key issues from a waste policy perspective.
The campaigns for politicians to ban plastic bags are understandable given that plastic bags are such a visible waste stream, but from a strategic waste perspective, a ban on plastic bags is symbolic at best and distracting at worst.
written by Mike Ritchie, President NSW Branch of the Waste Management Association of Australia and General Manager, Marketing & Communications, SITA Environmental Solutions.
----------------------
While these views may be quite in your face and definitely confronting.........they are logical and deserve more thought from the NT and Darwin City politicians.
One of our major issues in the NT is construction and demolition waste, and most goes straight to landfill. Other jurisdictions have made major attempts to reduce and manage that material, but not here. A simple one would be to use all the waste gyprock/ dry wall in the compost. Grind it and add to the green waste, and there is a lot of dry wall wasted!
And in Darwin the MRF avoids many useful grades of plastic - they are banned from recycling, yet are widely reused in many types of new plastic products, even as co-mingled materials.
Can the NT do better than it is now?
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Soil Carbon Reality Check
Following up from the previous post, there has been additional material form the recent Soil Carbon conference in Australia, that does offer some sort of a reality check. Nothing that cannot be factored into the equation, but that does need some thinking about.
The message from high-profile scientists Dr Jeff Baldock and Professor Peter Grace was clear: soil carbon is intrinsically valuable, but on current understanding it seems unlikely to yield a meaningful return to farmers in a carbon trading scheme.
Dr Baldock, a leading CSIRO soil scientist, and Prof. Grace, a climate change specialist at the Queensland University of Technology, offered a contrary point of view against the prevailing mood of optimism at last week's Carbon Coalition's Carbon Farming Conference in Orange, NSW.
Prof. Grace observed that soil carbon will be traded under a scheme that also accounts for emissions—and right now, the farming ledger balances out with carbon inputs/outputs firmly in the red. He showed modelling of emissions from a 400 hectare Darling Downs farm, with 300ha of crop, 12ha of trees, and some cattle, which collectively resulted in 416 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) per year.
As a rule of thumb, mainstream science considers soil carbon sequestration potential in the more fertile, high-rainfall parts of eastern Australia to be around 500 kilograms per hectare per year.
The reality might be considerably less.
"You can't just sell the carbon," Prof. Grace said. "You have to look at the whole farming system and your profitability. A whole farming systems approach is essential—all gases have to be taken into account."
Carbon isn't just carbon, Dr Baldock told the conference, and the type of carbon a soil contains determines whether the carbon has a role in a trading scheme. At one end of the scale is the "labile" carbon pooled in plant residue and fragmented organic matter, which is quickly cycled and lost back to the atmosphere; at the other end is humus and charcoal, which lock away carbon and other nutrients. "We can induce big variations in the carbon across various pools by changing farm management," Dr Baldock said.
The challenge for farmers looking to rebuild their carbon is ensuring that it is rebuilt in the right pools.
In an modelling example shown by Dr Baldock, 18 years of soil carbon rundown under one farming practice was rebuilt in 10 years by another farming practice—but the carbon lost was largely humus, and the carbon that was rebuilt was in more labile pools. Dr Baldock also noted that building carbon requires nutrient, which comes at a cost.
While carbon has been run down on most Australian farms, in decomposing it released other nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, which masked the detrimental effects of carbon loss. In an example, a soil that started with a carbon content of 3pc was progressively run down to 1pc carbon.
The nitrogen released as the carbon decomposed came to 2.8t/ha.
"I can turn this on its head," Dr Baldock said. "If I want to build carbon from 1pc to 3pc, I have to find nitrogen."
Soil organic matter has a consistent carbon-to-nitrogen ratio, which depends on the parent material. As the amount of carbon grows, so must the amount of nitrogen to ensure the ratio is maintained.
"That nitrogen can come from legumes, it doesn't have to come from bag fertiliser. "The important message to take away is that to build carbon, you have to supply nutrients. You can’t build one without the other."
Dr Baldock suggested that carbon trading would not be a natural fit for all farmers.
Deciding to build carbon, and keep it there under contract, would demand changes in production systems. Before making the change, farmers would have to consider their profitability, and their willingness to incur the liability of contracted carbon that might compromise their flexibility to change production systems in response to new circumstances.
"There's potential there, but there's a lot of bits and pieces we need to put together before we can decide whether it's appropriate for a given landowner."
However, Dr Baldock and Prof. Grace agreed that increased soil carbon was a highly desirable objective in itself for any farming system.
"Soil carbon is the key to long-term profitability," Prof. Grace said. "If you've got it, that's your superannuation."
So the options seem to be to add long term source materials - products such as agrichar and similar but in the short term cycling materials suxh as those from crop residues. This issue does have a lot to work through yet, although one message does seem very clear.........increase your soil carbon!
[partially sourced from Matt Cawood report - Queensland Country Life]
The message from high-profile scientists Dr Jeff Baldock and Professor Peter Grace was clear: soil carbon is intrinsically valuable, but on current understanding it seems unlikely to yield a meaningful return to farmers in a carbon trading scheme.
Dr Baldock, a leading CSIRO soil scientist, and Prof. Grace, a climate change specialist at the Queensland University of Technology, offered a contrary point of view against the prevailing mood of optimism at last week's Carbon Coalition's Carbon Farming Conference in Orange, NSW.
Prof. Grace observed that soil carbon will be traded under a scheme that also accounts for emissions—and right now, the farming ledger balances out with carbon inputs/outputs firmly in the red. He showed modelling of emissions from a 400 hectare Darling Downs farm, with 300ha of crop, 12ha of trees, and some cattle, which collectively resulted in 416 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) per year.
As a rule of thumb, mainstream science considers soil carbon sequestration potential in the more fertile, high-rainfall parts of eastern Australia to be around 500 kilograms per hectare per year.
The reality might be considerably less.
"You can't just sell the carbon," Prof. Grace said. "You have to look at the whole farming system and your profitability. A whole farming systems approach is essential—all gases have to be taken into account."
Carbon isn't just carbon, Dr Baldock told the conference, and the type of carbon a soil contains determines whether the carbon has a role in a trading scheme. At one end of the scale is the "labile" carbon pooled in plant residue and fragmented organic matter, which is quickly cycled and lost back to the atmosphere; at the other end is humus and charcoal, which lock away carbon and other nutrients. "We can induce big variations in the carbon across various pools by changing farm management," Dr Baldock said.
The challenge for farmers looking to rebuild their carbon is ensuring that it is rebuilt in the right pools.
In an modelling example shown by Dr Baldock, 18 years of soil carbon rundown under one farming practice was rebuilt in 10 years by another farming practice—but the carbon lost was largely humus, and the carbon that was rebuilt was in more labile pools. Dr Baldock also noted that building carbon requires nutrient, which comes at a cost.
While carbon has been run down on most Australian farms, in decomposing it released other nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, which masked the detrimental effects of carbon loss. In an example, a soil that started with a carbon content of 3pc was progressively run down to 1pc carbon.
The nitrogen released as the carbon decomposed came to 2.8t/ha.
"I can turn this on its head," Dr Baldock said. "If I want to build carbon from 1pc to 3pc, I have to find nitrogen."
Soil organic matter has a consistent carbon-to-nitrogen ratio, which depends on the parent material. As the amount of carbon grows, so must the amount of nitrogen to ensure the ratio is maintained.
"That nitrogen can come from legumes, it doesn't have to come from bag fertiliser. "The important message to take away is that to build carbon, you have to supply nutrients. You can’t build one without the other."
Dr Baldock suggested that carbon trading would not be a natural fit for all farmers.
Deciding to build carbon, and keep it there under contract, would demand changes in production systems. Before making the change, farmers would have to consider their profitability, and their willingness to incur the liability of contracted carbon that might compromise their flexibility to change production systems in response to new circumstances.
"There's potential there, but there's a lot of bits and pieces we need to put together before we can decide whether it's appropriate for a given landowner."
However, Dr Baldock and Prof. Grace agreed that increased soil carbon was a highly desirable objective in itself for any farming system.
"Soil carbon is the key to long-term profitability," Prof. Grace said. "If you've got it, that's your superannuation."
So the options seem to be to add long term source materials - products such as agrichar and similar but in the short term cycling materials suxh as those from crop residues. This issue does have a lot to work through yet, although one message does seem very clear.........increase your soil carbon!
[partially sourced from Matt Cawood report - Queensland Country Life]
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
The True Value of Soil Carbon
Carbon trading systems must be careful not to undervalue soil carbon, according to a leading soil scientist, because the true productivity value of soil carbon to farmers may be hundreds of dollars per tonne.
Dr Rattan Lal, a professor and director of the Carbon Management & Sequestration Center at Ohio State University, was a keynote speaker at last week's Carbon Farming Conference in Orange, NSW, hosted by the Carbon Coalition. He indicated that in order to commoditise carbon, a realistic value must be established that reflects its value to farmers and society.
When Dr Lal looked at humus, of which carbon is the main component, and teased out the nutrients and water typically held within a kilogram of humus, he arrived a value of US$250 a tonne on today’s prices. BUT…..initial estimates of carbon's starting value under the Australian Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) are around $20 per tonne. That is a big disparity!
Farmers, and society at large, also benefit from the fact that soils with high levels of organic carbon (humus, as shown in the photo) are resistant to erosion, deliver less pollution to waterways, biodegrade chemical pollutants and buffer climatic extremes.
"Whether the trading process can provide farmers with all of that value remains to be seen, but undervaluing a resource can lead to its abuse " Dr Lal told the conference via an internet video link.
If soil carbon ultimately earns a high price, it raises questions about the value and use of crop residues that contribute to soil carbon formation. Cellulosic ethanol plants that will draw on crop residues are being built in the United States, and the technology is under discussion in Australia.
However, Dr Lal observed that the world's estimated four billion tonnes of annual crop residues should play an important part on the farming process. In Dr Lal's estimation, those global residues contain 30 million tonnes of nitrogen, 3.5mt of phosphorus and 47mt of potassium—and crop residue contains about 40pc carbon.
His initial studies were mainly concerned with conservation tillage and use of crop residues for erosion management in the tropics. Attempting to increase the cover component of the Universal Soil Loss Equation, in effect, and improving establishment. It worked! But the use of residues also improved the soil carbon levels, in the medium and longer term. That improves soil quality.
With residue left in the field rather than removed, soil carbon levels were 0.2pc higher, soil pH was 5.1 under residue and 4.6 without, and that corn yields on a field sown into residue were 2.7t per hectare compared to 1.5t/ha in a bare field. This data is based on studies of crop residues in a Nigerian corn system. Soil quality is significantly influenced by residue retention. There are also additional studies from both temperate and tropical areas that draw the same conclusions.
Dr Lal has also extrapolated how improving soil carbon might affect food security for the 854 million people currently considered "food insecure". In 2000, the global food deficit was considered to be 13 million tonnes; by 2010, this will have risen to 22 mt, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. By increasing soil carbon levels in the 532 million hectares of agricultural soils in developing countries by a modest one tonne per hectare per year, Dr Lal calculated an extra 30-50mt of food could be produced per year.
This is a potent message and adds to increasing pressure to better use the millions of kilograms disposed of as recycled organic material in Australia each year. While there are some logistical issues in returning this material to rural areas for use, they need adressing to ensure the material is used effectively.
Soil carbon is vital.......ensure there is more of it!
Dr Rattan Lal, a professor and director of the Carbon Management & Sequestration Center at Ohio State University, was a keynote speaker at last week's Carbon Farming Conference in Orange, NSW, hosted by the Carbon Coalition. He indicated that in order to commoditise carbon, a realistic value must be established that reflects its value to farmers and society.
When Dr Lal looked at humus, of which carbon is the main component, and teased out the nutrients and water typically held within a kilogram of humus, he arrived a value of US$250 a tonne on today’s prices. BUT…..initial estimates of carbon's starting value under the Australian Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) are around $20 per tonne. That is a big disparity!
Farmers, and society at large, also benefit from the fact that soils with high levels of organic carbon (humus, as shown in the photo) are resistant to erosion, deliver less pollution to waterways, biodegrade chemical pollutants and buffer climatic extremes.
"Whether the trading process can provide farmers with all of that value remains to be seen, but undervaluing a resource can lead to its abuse " Dr Lal told the conference via an internet video link.
If soil carbon ultimately earns a high price, it raises questions about the value and use of crop residues that contribute to soil carbon formation. Cellulosic ethanol plants that will draw on crop residues are being built in the United States, and the technology is under discussion in Australia.
However, Dr Lal observed that the world's estimated four billion tonnes of annual crop residues should play an important part on the farming process. In Dr Lal's estimation, those global residues contain 30 million tonnes of nitrogen, 3.5mt of phosphorus and 47mt of potassium—and crop residue contains about 40pc carbon.
His initial studies were mainly concerned with conservation tillage and use of crop residues for erosion management in the tropics. Attempting to increase the cover component of the Universal Soil Loss Equation, in effect, and improving establishment. It worked! But the use of residues also improved the soil carbon levels, in the medium and longer term. That improves soil quality.
With residue left in the field rather than removed, soil carbon levels were 0.2pc higher, soil pH was 5.1 under residue and 4.6 without, and that corn yields on a field sown into residue were 2.7t per hectare compared to 1.5t/ha in a bare field. This data is based on studies of crop residues in a Nigerian corn system. Soil quality is significantly influenced by residue retention. There are also additional studies from both temperate and tropical areas that draw the same conclusions.
Dr Lal has also extrapolated how improving soil carbon might affect food security for the 854 million people currently considered "food insecure". In 2000, the global food deficit was considered to be 13 million tonnes; by 2010, this will have risen to 22 mt, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. By increasing soil carbon levels in the 532 million hectares of agricultural soils in developing countries by a modest one tonne per hectare per year, Dr Lal calculated an extra 30-50mt of food could be produced per year.
This is a potent message and adds to increasing pressure to better use the millions of kilograms disposed of as recycled organic material in Australia each year. While there are some logistical issues in returning this material to rural areas for use, they need adressing to ensure the material is used effectively.
Soil carbon is vital.......ensure there is more of it!
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Carbon Emissions Reduction in Australia - Here We Come - Maybe: The Garnaut Report
The Garnaut Report - the final report is published today on 30 September 2008.
It is a gargantuan report, and is best digested in small bites.......a bit like a termite munching through wood! There is a significant chapter now on agriculture, and the report does join agriculture and forestry together as land users with potential for doing good, carbon wise.
Much will be made of the view espoused in the report that we need to reduce cattle and sheep and farm kangaroos, principally to reduce methane emissions. Maybe modification of the gut bacteria using modified bacteria is feasible as recently suggested at a conference I was at which looked at carbon issues in agriculture. A "big science" approach might be needed to achieve an outcome, but the payoff would be huge...and exportable. However, in the report, a 5-6% increase in costs at retail level for beef would occur at a carbon price around $20 per tonne. So that is modest, although cattle producers would have to purchase permits.
However, the potential for soil carbon sequestration is recognised......and about time, even in tropical savannah woodland, as the photo.
Savannah burning contributions to the carbon emissions, including the West Arnhem Savannah Burning Project gets a mention, but for Australia, the carbon contributed by this source is very small, even if large for northern Australia. In this project fire reduction by wet season buring at low intensity, funded by a large emitter, offsets their emissions from another source.
Carbon sequestration in soils has enormous potential for Australia, and the report does make some serious comment on that issue, with some detailed references on soil carbon management by Dr Rattan Lal among the citations. It is not just carbon sequestration........it is as much about higher soil productivity in Australia.
The chapter on agriculture and land use can be accessed at:
http://www.garnautreport.org.au/reports/Garnaut%20Climate%20Change%20Review%20-%20Final%20Report%20-%20Chapter%2022.pdf
It is too detailed a topic to easily cover here and should be required reading by those in Australian agriculture.
More detail and individual chapters are available at www.garnautreport.org.au .
It is a gargantuan report, and is best digested in small bites.......a bit like a termite munching through wood! There is a significant chapter now on agriculture, and the report does join agriculture and forestry together as land users with potential for doing good, carbon wise.
Much will be made of the view espoused in the report that we need to reduce cattle and sheep and farm kangaroos, principally to reduce methane emissions. Maybe modification of the gut bacteria using modified bacteria is feasible as recently suggested at a conference I was at which looked at carbon issues in agriculture. A "big science" approach might be needed to achieve an outcome, but the payoff would be huge...and exportable. However, in the report, a 5-6% increase in costs at retail level for beef would occur at a carbon price around $20 per tonne. So that is modest, although cattle producers would have to purchase permits.
However, the potential for soil carbon sequestration is recognised......and about time, even in tropical savannah woodland, as the photo.
Savannah burning contributions to the carbon emissions, including the West Arnhem Savannah Burning Project gets a mention, but for Australia, the carbon contributed by this source is very small, even if large for northern Australia. In this project fire reduction by wet season buring at low intensity, funded by a large emitter, offsets their emissions from another source.
Carbon sequestration in soils has enormous potential for Australia, and the report does make some serious comment on that issue, with some detailed references on soil carbon management by Dr Rattan Lal among the citations. It is not just carbon sequestration........it is as much about higher soil productivity in Australia.
The chapter on agriculture and land use can be accessed at:
http://www.garnautreport.org.au/reports/Garnaut%20Climate%20Change%20Review%20-%20Final%20Report%20-%20Chapter%2022.pdf
It is too detailed a topic to easily cover here and should be required reading by those in Australian agriculture.
More detail and individual chapters are available at www.garnautreport.org.au .
Friday, August 22, 2008
Glomalin - Not Heard of it Then Take Note - THE Soil Carbon Fixer
A soil constituent known as glomalin provides a secure vault for the world's soil carbon. That’s according to Kristine Nichols, a microbiologist at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory in North Dakota, USA.
Glomalin is a sticky substance secreted by threadlike fungal structures called hyphae that funnel nutrients and water to plant roots. Glomalin acts like little globs of chewing gum on strings or strands of plant roots and the fungal hyphae. Into this sticky “string bag” fall the sand, silt and clay particles that make up soil, along with plant debris and other carbon-containing organic matter. The sand, silt and clay stick to the glomalin, starting aggregate formation, a major step in soil creation.
On the surface of soil aggregates, glomalin forms a lattice-like waxy coating to keep water from flowing rapidly into the aggregate and washing away everything, including the carbon. As the builder of the formation “bag” for soil, glomalin is vital globally to soil building, productivity and sustainability, as well as to carbon storage.
Nichols uses glomalin measurements to gauge which farming or rangeland practices work best for storing carbon. Since glomalin levels can reflect how much carbon each practice is storing, they could be used in conjunction with carbon credit trading programs.
In studies on cropland, Nichols has found that both tilling and leaving land idle--as is common in arid regions--lower glomalin levels by destroying living hyphal fungal networks. The networks need live roots and do better in undisturbed soil.
When glomalin binds with iron or other heavy metals, it can keep carbon from decomposing for up to 100 years.
Even without heavy metals, glomalin stores carbon in the inner recesses of soil particles where only slow-acting microbes live.
This carbon in organic matter is also saved, like a slow-release fertilizer, for later use by plants and hyphae.
Glomalin is one of the factors that help build soil carbon stores. Othes include biochar or agrichar, another form of macro carbon materials, said to be the underlying factor aiding high productivity of terra preta soils in Brazil.
Glomalin is a sticky substance secreted by threadlike fungal structures called hyphae that funnel nutrients and water to plant roots. Glomalin acts like little globs of chewing gum on strings or strands of plant roots and the fungal hyphae. Into this sticky “string bag” fall the sand, silt and clay particles that make up soil, along with plant debris and other carbon-containing organic matter. The sand, silt and clay stick to the glomalin, starting aggregate formation, a major step in soil creation.
On the surface of soil aggregates, glomalin forms a lattice-like waxy coating to keep water from flowing rapidly into the aggregate and washing away everything, including the carbon. As the builder of the formation “bag” for soil, glomalin is vital globally to soil building, productivity and sustainability, as well as to carbon storage.
Nichols uses glomalin measurements to gauge which farming or rangeland practices work best for storing carbon. Since glomalin levels can reflect how much carbon each practice is storing, they could be used in conjunction with carbon credit trading programs.
In studies on cropland, Nichols has found that both tilling and leaving land idle--as is common in arid regions--lower glomalin levels by destroying living hyphal fungal networks. The networks need live roots and do better in undisturbed soil.
When glomalin binds with iron or other heavy metals, it can keep carbon from decomposing for up to 100 years.
Even without heavy metals, glomalin stores carbon in the inner recesses of soil particles where only slow-acting microbes live.
This carbon in organic matter is also saved, like a slow-release fertilizer, for later use by plants and hyphae.
Glomalin is one of the factors that help build soil carbon stores. Othes include biochar or agrichar, another form of macro carbon materials, said to be the underlying factor aiding high productivity of terra preta soils in Brazil.
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