GE Ag and global warming.

[David Tribe <detribe@unimelb.edu.au>]

Date: 26 May 2001 20:34:09 -0000
From: gcouger@couger.com
To: agbioview-owner@listbot.com
Subject: GE Ag and global warming.

A CAST report http://www.cast-science.org/pdf/glo2_ip.pdf shows that
farming practices can increase amount of carbon stored in soils. It
relies on returning as much low productivity land to grass as possible and
minimum tillage farming to minimize oxidation of organic mater in the soil
from tillage.

No till can take this a giant step forward in using the soil as a
carbon sink  making crop land almost as good a carbon sink as grass land
in some cases. High residue crops such as corn could possibly be a better
sink than some grasses.

Farmers have been trying no till since the first herbicides came on the
market. It met with limited success because the over the top herbicides
could only be used for a limited time early in the plants life without
seriously hurting the yield and the preplant herbicides didn't work well
because they couldn't get to the soil because of the trash cover and
relied on a timely rain to incorporate them. Round Up Ready crops
addressed most of these problems. All the problems of no till are solved.
Crops the are more disease resistant and germinate and thrive in cooler
soil are needed as well. But RR crops are a giant step for no till.

One place that RR crops can have a really large effect on global
warming is in rice farming. Replacing the traditional flooding of rice
paddies for weed control with herbicide as a way to control weeds would
reduce the amount of methane released into the environment. Methane being
a much more potent green house gas than CO2.

Yet Neue (1993)  estimate that flooded rice produced between 20 and 100
million tons of methane or 6 to 29% of the total annual methane
emissions. http://www.ciesin.org/TG/AG/ricecult.html

Since it will never be possible to raise everything no till to retire
as much land as possible to grass and forest it is obvious that it is
necessary to maximize yields on the land that is farmed. It is obvious to
me and the agriculturist I know that our current course is the best hope
for a ecologically sound agriculture. The relentless growth of the
population and never ending emission of green house gasses present us with
problems that are increasing at an increasing rate. The longer we dally in
addressing these problems the more difficult they will be to handle.
Agriculture is not the solution to global warming but it can be a
contributing or a mitigating factor. GE Ag can contribute greatly to the
later.

The CAST news release on Storing Carbon in Agricultural Soils to Help
Mitigate Global Warming  follows.

Gordon
Gordon Couger gcouger@couger.com
Retired Farmer  www.couger.com/gcouger

Storing Carbon in Agricultural Soils to Help Mitigate Global Warming
(Issue Paper): | Issue Paper (PDF) | Catalog | News Release | Order
Workshop Proceedings
CAST News Release, Monday, April 3, 2000

World's Soils Can Store Carbon to Benefit the Environment Finds Paper
by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology

The same farming practices that promote soil conservation can also
decrease the amount of CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere and threatening
a global warming, according to a new issue paper by the Council for
Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST). Agricultural practices that
conserve soil and increase productivity while improving soil quality also
increase the amount of carbon-rich organic matter in soils,
therebyproviding a global depository for CO2 drawn from the atmosphere by
growing plants.

"We call it a win-win. Returning carbon to the soil in the form of
organic matter is good agronomy. On farmed land, carbon has been released
through practices that promoted organic matter oxidation, but it can be
restored. An even greater opportunity for carbon storage lies in the some
2 billion hectares of desertified and degraded lands worldwide (75% in the
tropics) where improved land management could benefit soil quality and
hold carbon.

A significant fraction of the 30% increase in atmospheric CO2 over the
past 150 years stems from the breakdown of soil organic matter after
forests and grasslands were cleared for farming. So there is room for
it to go back," says Norman J. Rosenberg who authored the paper along with
R. Cesar Izaurralde.

There are opportunities to store carbon in soils around the world,
according to Izaurralde. The soil's storage capacity for carbon has
limits, but sequestration of carbon in soils offers a unique strategic
opportunity to slow global warming especially in the next 30 to 40
years while new, energy-efficient low-carbon power generation and
transportation technologies are phased into use.

The CAST paper highlights results of a workshop organized by the
Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest and Oak Ridge National
Laboratories in conjunction with CAST. Nearly 100 Canadian and U.S.
scientists, agricultural representatives, policy makers, and others
attended the workshop. New scientific opportunities were identified at the
workshop to increase both the content and duration of carbon in soils. The
need for inexpensive instruments and other ways of monitoring changes in
soil carbon also was recognized. Workshop participants also discussed the
question of what would encourage farmers to adopt practices that lead
toincreased soil carbon storage.

The paper indicates that there are also energy costs associated with
capturing carbon in the soil -- through the production, transport, and
application of chemical fertilizers, manures, and pesticides; as well
as the pumping and delivery of irrigation water needed to increase plant
growth. But because these costs are primarily connected to food and fiber
production, the resulting increase in soil carbon storage might decrease
or even offset the net contribution of agriculture to global warming.

CAST is an international consortium of 38 scientific and professional
societies. Its mission is to identify food and fiber, environmental,
and other agricultural issues and to interpret related scientific research
information for legislators, regulators, and the media for use in public
policy decision making. More information on CAST and its numerous
scientific reports are available at http://www.cast-science.org. Copies of
the reports, including Storing Carbon in Agricultural Soils to Help
Mitigate Global Warming, are available from CAST at (515) 292-2152 or by
e-mail at cast@cast-science.org.

Contact: Norman J. Rosenberg, phone (202) 646-5029,
nj.rosenberg@pnl.gov;
R. Cesar Izaurralde, phone (202) 646-5227, cesar.izaurralde@pnl.gov;
Richard E. Stuckey, phone (515) 292-2125, rstuckey@cast-science.org; or
Karen Coble Edwards, phone (703) 502-8980, karen@kcegroup.com