What Is Carbon Sequestration and How Can We Use Agricultural Soils For This Purpose?
Take a few minutes and follow the link to the above article. For months I have heard about how we need to extract CO2 from the atmosphere (I understand this part – global warming) and store it in the soil.
CO2 Moving from the atmosphere to soil
But I thought, aren’t we simply moving a problem from one area and transferring it to another? I grew up during a time where businesses thought we could use the ocean as a dumpster. “Look at the size of the ocean! What could possibly go wrong?” (Surely there are not companies still doing this, right?)
When my parents (gasp!) told us it was ok to throw a bag of trash out of the car window and to empty the ashtray in the supermarket parking lot. Now we (at least most of us) understand that these practices are no longer acceptable.
It appears that taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and adding it to our soil will actually help the earth. Here are a few points that I learned from this article:
- Intensively managed agricultural soils (a nice way of explaining how we have overplanted fields and attempted to replace depleted nutrients with fertilizers without considering the long term effects) have lost 50% to 70% of their pre-cultivation carbon. (Carbon has historically been transferred to the soil via photosynthesis and subsequent storage in plant root tissues, which decompose into soil organic matter. Because plants pull in CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in their biomass, plant residue that decomposes on fields contributes to soil carbon)
- The difference between the maximum amount of carbon that soils could naturally contain and the amount they actually contain is referred to as the soil saturation deficit. The larger the deficit, the higher the potential for carbon storage.
- North America has the highest potential of any continent for soil carbon storage at 0.17 to 0.35 gigatons (Gt) per year, and the United States has the highest potential of any country on Earth
There is the article in summary. There are still a lot of issues to work out, but using the excessive CO2 in the atmosphere to restore the balance in our fields is beginning to sound like a step in the right direction. Send us your thoughts – info@irrigationsupplyparts.com.
Thanks and stay tuned.
