Can carbon farming save the planet?
April 24, 2018 2:45 PM   Subscribe

"Climate change often evokes images of smokestacks, and for good reason: The single largest source of carbon emissions related to human activity is heat and power generation, which accounts for about one-quarter of the carbon we put into the atmosphere. Often overlooked, though, is how we use land, which contributes almost as much. The erosion and degradation of soil caused by plowing, intense grazing and clear-cutting has played a significant role in the atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gases."

Hope for a hot planet
"Carbon farming is agriculture’s answer to climate change. Simply put, the goal is to take excess carbon out of the atmosphere, where the element causes global warming, and store it in the soil, where carbon aids the growth of plants. The principle is pretty straightforward—the practice, not so much."

Carbon sequestration
Agriculture is the ONE sector that has the ability to transform from a net emitter of CO2 to a net sequesterer of CO2 — there is no other human managed realm with this potential. Common agricultural practices, including driving a tractor, tilling the soil, over-grazing, using fossil fuel based fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides result in significant carbon dioxide release. Alternatively, carbon can be stored long term (decades to centuries or more) beneficially in soils in a process called soil carbon sequestration.

Neither cheap nor easy
The result: many think biosequestration is a cheap and easy way out. There is a perception it will swamp the need for action to reduce emissions in the power, transport or mining sectors.
The reality is that changing land management to achieve this potential will be neither cheap, nor easy, and will be severely constrained by operational factors.
posted by Lycaste (7 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
Tree farming is effective and self-financing carbon sequestration. As soon as you harvest one fast growing tree you plant another in its place, and the carbon the growing tree pulled from the air stays locked up in the fabric of houses, furniture, and anything else you can make out of wood.
posted by w0mbat at 3:12 PM on April 24, 2018 [6 favorites]


Disposable bamboo plates and utensils are a way to pull carbon out of the air and stuff it in a landfill. While I'm sure there are some problems, bamboo is fast growing.
posted by The Power Nap at 4:25 PM on April 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


Every little bit helps. :)

As for top emitter... I'm looking at you, drivers. So, every little bit hurts too.
posted by ecco at 4:52 PM on April 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


There were 25 million dairy cows in the US in 1950. Today there are 9 million. There is clearly room for further improvements in efficiency, but we’re working pretty hard on that already. Cows are pretty good at converting livestock feed into food for humans, as are chickens and pigs. However, beef is still very inefficient, even when it’s not finished in a feedlot. There’s some really interesting work underway to manipulate the rumen microbiome to reduce methane emissions from cattle. Practices such as no-till farming are pretty common now, and there’s a lot of interest in reducing pesticide use by co-planting things that help keep insects at bay. It’s common in Europe to see solar panels on livestock barns, as well as methane co-generators on farms that produce enough manure to feed them, but I don’t think that those tax-advantaged programs have been mirrored much in the US.

The lack of funding for agricultural research poses a major challenge to future innovation, and some of our international competitors are outspending us by as much as two-to-one. Both the Land Grant universities and USDA’s in-house research arm are substantially under-funded. This has long-term effects on the next generation of scientists.

(Disclaimer: I’m an agricultural scientist who has a vested interest in calling for greater research funding.)
posted by wintermind at 5:24 PM on April 24, 2018 [16 favorites]


Large uncertainty in carbon uptake potential of land‐based climate‐change mitigation efforts
Given the low confidence in simulated carbon uptake for a given land‐based mitigation scenario, and that negative emissions simulated by the DGVMs are typically lower than assumed in scenarios consistent with the 2°C target, relying on negative emissions to mitigate climate change is a highly uncertain strategy.
posted by MrVisible at 8:18 AM on April 25, 2018


There is clearly room for further improvements in efficiency, but we’re working pretty hard on that already. Cows are pretty good at converting livestock feed into food for humans, as are chickens and pigs. However, beef is still very inefficient, even when it’s not finished in a feedlot.

If you've got time, could you elaborate on this a bit? I've always been under the impression that meat production broadly speaking is a quite inefficient process, in that most livestock feed is produced using agricultural resources that could have instead been used to grow food crops for humans, skipping a trophic level and the energy losses inherent in that. This is in fact the primary reason I became a pescetarian. I'd be interested to know more about what the agricultural research says on this topic. Is improved efficiencies in meat production going to help save the planet, or is reduced meat consumption the only ultimate option?
posted by biogeo at 9:45 AM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm no expert, but there's some interesting research that suggests that chicken production is slightly more efficient than Atlantic salmon aquaculture, if you measure by protein and calorie content in the human-consumed product, rather than by feed weight / animal weight (feed conversion ratio). Except for the salmon, other types of aquaculture are on par with pork. Even eggs are slightly less efficient to produce than chicken meat. (All this notwithstanding environmental impact, humane treatment, etc.)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:27 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


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