ORGANIC

REMEMBER, YOU CAN EDIT THIS PAGE. So far, this page is an argument for organic agriculture and permaculture, in the future, it is what you make it.

The land contains more carbon than the atmosphere by far. Our current agricultural habits send carbon into the air: we need to take it back by changing the way we manage land.
Strongly recommended reading is the following, which can also be accessed by going to the page:
http://managingwholes.net/

The future of the farm bill

November 17th, 2007 by Peter Donovan
North Dakota senator Kent Conrad calls the farm bill a “legislative battleship that you cannot turn around quickly.” As of mid-November 2007 this year’s $286 billion farm bill appears to be having engine trouble. Stalled in the Senate, there is talk of a presidential veto, of extending the 2002 bill.

Should farmers be able to receive more than $250,000 in subsidy payments? What should the funding be for biofuels, for school lunches? Most of these arguments are about the speed of the battleship, or which flags it should fly, not the direction.

For generations, that direction has been the maintenance and continued acceptability of high-input, industrialized agriculture —“production agriculture” to its defenders. The farm bill is the legislative and financial instrument by which we attempt to turn an agriculture that is economically, socially, and ecologically unsound into something that is politically acceptable. This is getting harder and harder to do.

Since the 1930s, farm bill conservation programs have been based on the recognition (or the assumption) that agriculture tends to be destructive to soils and to water cycling. Farm bill conservation programs seek to modify and mitigate agricultural practices, or take acreage out of production.

On the people side, there have been a whole string of programs to help the some of the victims, especially the farmers themselves. These payments and subsidies are the best-known features of the farm bills. Crop insurance and disaster assistance remove considerable risk from ecologically unsound large monocultures. Programs for beginning farmers try to address the seemingly relentless shrinkage and aging of the farmer population. Food stamps and school lunch programs help the poor (many of them displaced farmers and farm workers) while guaranteeing a larger market for farm commodities and those who process them into junk food. Rural community development programs try to repair some of the social damage. Research and marketing focuses on doing what we’re doing, but harder and faster.

But as more people besides farmers realize how important farm policy is to a host of other social issues and concerns, real dissent has grown. A big one is food and health. “A new politics has sprouted up around the farm bill,” notes Michael Pollan in a recent editorial. “Americans have begun to ask why the farm bill is subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils at a time when rates of diabetes and obesity among children are soaring.” Daniel Imhoff, author of Food Fight: The Citizens Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, reports that the cost of treating obesity exceeds farm bill expenditures each year.

More and more people are connecting the dots. Sustainable agriculture and environmental interests are pushing hard to change direction. Awareness grows about how American cotton subsidies, for example, impoverish West African cotton farmers by undercutting them in the increasingly global marketplace.

So far, the farm bloc has been able to appease these increasing concerns by allowing them to add some railings and flags to the battleship. But the pressure for a major change of direction will only grow, and the shift from the farm bill into the Healthy Food and Farm Act will only be the beginning. The twin issues of climate change and land degradation will further expand the circle.

Neither technology, nor regulation of technology, will suffice to stop global warming or address land degradation. We must transform our land management by mimicking and enhancing nature’s processes. The current and proposed farm bills, though they were not conceived as such, represent our main policies and incentives on energy, on water, on carbon, and on biodiversity for most of the nation’s privately owned land (see previous post).

Soil organic matter

Often called humus, soil organic matter is usually about 58% carbon by dry weight. Plants capture carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. This plant material, traveling through complex foodwebs both above and below ground, is broken down and eventually some of it forms soil organic matter.

In temperate zones, this soil organic matter can last for generations, unless it is exposed to air and microbes that can rapidly oxidize the carbon into atmospheric carbon dioxide. This reaction is much like combustion: carbon and oxygen are combined into carbon dioxide, releasing energy.

In tropical areas, soil organic matter tends to oxidize more rapidly because of the higher temperatures.

Perennial grasslands in temperate zones have the greatest capacity to form and store soil carbon. Much of these black, carbon-rich prairie soils were plowed in the last two centuries and have released much of their carbon into the atmosphere. In the last generation or two, alternative agriculture practitioners on all continents have discovered how to restore organic matter to their soils through management. A key principle is to keep the soil covered with plants and plant material, which feeds the soil microbes that create humus.

And it is these fundamental biospheric processes that could be a new compass for this battleship that we call the farm bill. With it we could navigate toward something far more fundamental to agriculture, and to our entire civilization, than subsidies or crop insurance. We could set a course toward increasing soil organic matter.

More people are beginning to realize how global warming represents an unparalleled opportunity for us to address poverty, inequality, and conflict, and revitalize our industrial base and infrastructure while switching to energy sources that do not add carbon to the atmosphere. But there is also a huge opportunity in transforming our land management so as to increase soil organic matter, which may be the only rapid, practical, and economic way to reduce atmospheric carbon.

The 2012 farm bill could provide major motion in this direction, while achieving most of the other goals that have come up around the farm bill in past cycles. Instead of a politics of win/lose, of scarcity and zero sum, we would need a politics that wanted to address causes rather than symptoms, and create multiple, interlocking benefits.

The methods of increasing soil organic matter have been well demonstrated by various practitioners of alternative agriculture, including managed grazing, pasture cropping, no-till, and organic. No new technology is required. With soil organic matter as the primary direction of our farm policy, we would:

Take excess carbon out of the atmosphere, where it is dangerous, and put it back in the soil where it belongs, and where it will enhance every aspect of our lives. Much of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been released from our soils via tillage, chemical applications, and exposure (and it’s still going on). In the atmosphere, this carbon contributes to greenhouse warming. If we can get it back into the soil, using free solar energy, we will be able to grow food with fewer inputs and stabilize our climate.

More, better water. Soil organic matter increases infiltration and retention of rainwater, often several hundred percent. Soil holds more water than the atmosphere, more than the reservoirs behind all the dams in the world. Organic matter greatly enhances this storage, which also increases groundwater recharge, and improves water quality both in groundwater and streams.

Moderate floods and droughts. Small increases in organic matter can double soil moisture retention. We reduce flooding at the source, moderate the effects of drought, and ensure more reliable streamflow.

Reduce agricultural inputs and increase real farm income. Soil organic matter is the greatest factor that reduces the need for inputs, including nitrogen fertilizer (the greatest use of fossil energy in agriculture), irrigation water, tillage, and chemicals. Input costs are in turn the single greatest factor in farm profitability.

Increase food quality and human health. Soil organic matter is the basis for food and nutritional quality. More soil organic matter will favor quality over quantity.

Create smaller-scale farming opportunities for young people and beginning farmers. When it takes 28 minutes of high-capital, mechanized “labor” to grow an acre of commodity corn, there is very little opportunity for passionate and creative people to become farmers. If we reward soil carbon, we reward hands-on management, and this is our greatest need on our farmlands. This is also what young farmers have to offer.

A farm program based on soil organic matter would lessen our commodity production, increase the grass base, ensure greater compliance with our trade agreements, help farmers in other countries, provide a safety net to both large and small landholders while maintaining the viability of midsize and small farms, give a decisive advantage to sustainability in the production of biofuels and other commodities, and diminish the separation of labor and management that is at the root of farm labor issues.

It would also make the best economic sense. What are the costs of one out of every three children born since 2000 coming down with diabetes? Of floods, of droughts, of rural depopulation, of the current farm labor system, of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico?

Regulation, or 40 different programs pulling in 40 different directions, won’t create the kind of results we need with our farm program. It’s going to take investment in soil organic matter. People who have worked long and hard on farm bill policy may continue to tell us that this is impossible. Given that it is impossible, what can we do to make it happen?

The other side of global warming

October 24th, 2007 by Peter Donovan
Note: an updated pdf version of this post is available here. Right click and choose Save Target (or Link) As to save to disk.

Both global warming and desertification are systemic problems. They have many possible meanings, and there is conflict and confusion about the causes. Desertification has been afflicting humankind for thousands of years. Global warming, the kind we’re facing now, is new. There is a connection between the two.

Today the dominant view of global warming is that it’s a technical problem. The burning of fossil fuels—often regarded as the lifeblood of modern economies—puts greenhouse gases into the air, mainly carbon dioxide, trapping more solar energy, which heats the planet and alters weather patterns. Methane and nitrous oxide also contribute. The solution is defined as reducing greenhouse gas emissions (pollution). The political, social, and moral campaign is directed at technological change, and at using our technology less.

But if everyone stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, global warming will continue for decades. We don’t have an economical technology for removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Limiting ourselves to technology-focused solutions doesn’t give us much leverage. It gives us an agenda of “let’s wreck the world slower.”

There is another side to global warming, one that existing scientific panels are ill-equipped to recognize and that existing institutions are ill-equipped to act on. Global warming is not just an atmospheric pollution problem caused by fossil fuel burning. It is also the result of changes in basic biospheric processes. Let’s look at some examples.

Carbon

Carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning represent less than 3% of the net annual flow of carbon into the atmosphere. The other 97% also results from combustion reactions—respiration, decay of organic compounds, and burning of biomass. These reactions emit carbon and yield energy.

The left hand bar below represents the flow out of the atmosphere. This is driven by the photosynthesis of green plants, which is the opposite reaction: consuming solar energy, plants take in carbon, and store both carbon and energy in complex organic compounds.

The difference between the two flows is less than 3%, which makes the fossil-fuel contribution loom large in the ongoing accumulation of atmospheric carbon.

There is also a guilt factor. Fossil carbon is a human add-on to the “natural” cycle of carbon from plants to atmosphere and back again.

But as a wealth of new findings are showing, the rest of the carbon cycle is also controlled or influenced by our decisions. Our human circle of influence is a good deal larger than our concerns over fossil fuels and deforestation.

Because humans exercise such dominion over plant growth, decay, and fire, most of these carbon flows represent our human desire to survive, and to prosper. They are our habits, and may be difficult to change. But they are also our decisions.

For thousands of years, way before we discovered fossil fuels, people have been burning and oxidizing carbon compounds that were formed by photosynthesis. Cutting down and burning trees, or burning grass, brush, or crop residue are obvious examples, and still popular.

Less obvious but more significant is the release of stable soil carbon to the atmosphere through plowing and other forms of soil exposure, whereby aerobic microbes rapidly oxidize or “burn” the carbon compounds. Today our soils still contain twice the carbon that the atmosphere does, and these historic and prehistoric losses of soil carbon to the atmosphere can only be guessed at. And it’s ongoing. Tillage continues worldwide, productive grassland turns to dusty desert, and millions of tons of soil carbon are oxidized into the atmosphere.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Quite a few farmers and graziers have accomplished some spectacular and rapid reversals of this soil carbon loss, at little additional cost. That’s right, reversals. In some cases this is a byproduct of their search for sustainability, for maintaining or increasing production while decreasing their dependence on fossil-fuel inputs such as fertilizers, chemicals, and tillage. Unlike vegetation (even trees), the carbon in soil organic matter is fairly stable, lasting more than a generation on average.

Pasture cropping

Colin Seis, an innovative grain and sheep farmer near Gulgong in Australia, has doubled the organic carbon in his soil in little more than a decade. He didn’t set out to do this. In order to make his operation profitable, and to regenerate the fertility lost by a century of misguided farming practices, he began sowing cereal crops directly into perennial pasture, thus combining farming and intensive grazing while reducing herbicides and tillage. Profits increased because inputs decreased. Another thousand Australian farmers are following his lead, and the system is spreading to North America and Europe.

“The hardest thing to change is your head. Once you’ve done that, the rest is easy,” he says. “Don’t spend a cent,” he advises farmers. “Throw away your disc plow. Put your animals into large mobs and start moving them around.”

These approaches increase photosynthesis while slowing decay or respiration. No, this isn’t a secret technology. It’s management, enhancing and working with biospheric processes instead of going to war against them. It’s not abandoning all technology and modern knowledge, going back to some mythical past. It’s new knowledge, based on mimicking natural patterns.

Let me repeat that—with good management, it’s possible to take carbon out of the air, rapidly and cheaply. But good documentation is scarce, because in our technology-focused society these achievements, and the tremendous opportunities they represent, are seldom recognized. Instead, we regard land use as a fixed category, and don’t pay attention to how it is managed. Researchers familiar with conventional and industrial agriculture tend to underestimate the soil carbon opportunity.

Many are hoping for some kind of technology to capture carbon out of flue gases or out of the air. So far, it’s not practical or economical. Reversing combustion requires energy, and any recovered carbon or carbon dioxide becomes a disposal problem. But with good management, photosynthesis can turn atmospheric carbon into valuable soil organic matter, using free solar energy.

Energy

As you might guess from the diagram, photosynthesis captures far more energy than all the world’s mechanical power. Even in the industrialized U.S., with all our spinning shafts and gas rings, and with all our plowing, paving, burning, and herbicide spraying, those ridiculously inefficient green plants capture more energy.

Carrying capacity?

On his small grassland farm in Virginia, Joel Salatin produces more pounds of beef, chicken, eggs, pork, lamb, and rabbit than most conventional farms or extension agents would consider possible. He does this with few outside inputs, and builds soil, organic matter and carbon, and increases fertility in the process.

Salatin’s methods are described in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Salatin produces such quantity and quality by working with and enhancing the biospheric processes such as water cycling, nutrient cycling, solar energy flow, and synergy among species (rather than separation and confinement). By selling his products directly to his loyal customers, he makes a white-collar income from his 100+ acres of grass.

The Farm Bill is likely the biggest energy policy we have. It pays farmers to refuse the free gift of solar energy by subsidizing short-season annual row crops such as corn and soybeans, and a style of agriculture that keeps mostly bare ground between plants and between crops. Nebraska and Iowa look impressively green in July and August, but much of the rest of the year they are brown, with few perennial plants growing. Soil is America’s biggest export, far surpassing empty shipping containers even. Much of our agricultural “production” is really consumption.

Instead of free solar energy, the Farm Bill encourages the heavy use of fossil energy in agriculture, again by favoring high-yielding monocultures dependent on nitrogen extracted from the atmosphere by fossil fuels, plus herbicides and pesticides. This nitrogen (usually anhydrous ammonia) contributes to the “burning” of soil organic matter, compounding the debt.

It doesn’t have to be this way. People have figured out how to raise excellent food using mostly solar energy while building soil—but this isn’t at all popular with fossil carbon lobbyists, or with their many influential friends.

Water

Among greenhouse gases, water vapor is the gorilla. There’s more of it, and it traps lots more heat. Yet the world’s soils, even in their currently dried-out state, hold five times as much water as the atmosphere.

With the loss of sponge-like organic matter, soils lose much of their ability to absorb and retain water. With a magnifier, compare a bit of onion skin to a grain of sand. It’s like the difference between a balloon and a brick. You can wet a brick, but you can put a quart in a balloon. Add lots and lots of zeroes.

If the drying of the continents keeps more heat-trapping water vapor airborne, our current rather top-down and linear climate models don’t account for it. Large-scale land clearing and tillage, along with the continued desertification of rangeland soils, lets an invisible Columbia River’s worth of water evaporate skyward from the soils of the American Southwest. Our federal policy either ignores this, or doesn’t care.

The Rafter F

After taking a course in the Holistic Management decision framework, Roger Bowe made big changes on his ranch in eastern New Mexico by transforming his grazing management. Instead of continuously grazing his herd over a wide area, he bunched them so as to intensify grazing and then give the plants an adequate recovery period. Careful monitoring of the soil surface conditions enabled him to adjust his grazing for best results. Over ten years, plant cover doubled, undesirable snakeweed declined by 90%, and pounds of beef produced per acre more than doubled. His costs decreased significantly, giving him more profit.

“The words water cycle, mineral cycle, energy flow, and succession became the words we used to describe the landscape,” Roger says. “This is like a foreign language to most ranchers and it is sure not what I was taught in school.”

With less bare soil, rain infiltrates better, less of it evaporates, and more is available to grow plants and recharge groundwater. A well on the property that ran dry in the 1950s came back with 10 feet of water in it. Roger says that during a heavy rain from a thunderstorm, his rangeland soils can absorb two inches of rainfall before it begins to flow across the surface. On similar land, managed in a more conventional way, rain began running off after only half an inch.

Legal protections or land idleness won’t fix this situation, at least not on a timescale that matters to us or our descendants. What has proven to get more water in the soil in these environments is intensive grazing, carefully managed.

The opportunities

We’ve got to reduce fossil fuels. In their new book Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus have pointed out how transforming both our energy systems and efficiency is a huge opportunity to create millions of good jobs and revitalize our industrial base, and to move toward a positive future rather than merely try and avoid a negative one.

But to really address the problem, we will need to look beyond technology to the way we manage land. We do not have, nor will we be able to afford, technological replacements for photosynthesis, for water cycling, or for the majority of carbon cycling—all of which support and sustain our life.

Transforming human land management is also a tremendous opportunity. It promises engagement, revitalization of rural economies, a better grounded food system, and enhanced human and environmental health. Taking full advantage of this opportunity will involve new paradigms and a new politics.

If we regard nature as a kingdom or category separate from humanity, the human is often seen as a habitual criminal who can be counted on to vandalize nature for personal gain. Many prosperous developed countries have adopted a policing role intended to protect nature from the human criminal.

Zoetvlei

Near Vryburg, South Africa, rancher Sandy Speedy has been keeping records of rainfall and kilograms of beef produced since 1972. Using the Holistic Management framework, Speedy and his family have tripled the amount of beef they produce from an inch of rainfall-by managing grazing to increase soil cover, water infiltration, and soil moisture.
“The limiting factor is not rainfall, as we have been told, but management,” Sandy Speedy says.
The South African government has done away with agricultural subsidies, which Sandy says will be “better for the soil, for the water cycle in a country short of water, and for the agricultural community. It is an opportunity for sound agricultural management.”

Though it may be a necessary stage of development or a process of maturity, this cops and robbers game offers little opportunity for creating the kind of land management we need on our working landscapes. For this we need to move in the opposite direction—toward the results we need rather than just punishing what we don’t want. This means incentives and opportunity for the farmer, the villager, the grazier, the peasant to enhance these basic biospheric processes. By tying incentives to results, rather than practices, we could empower people to come up with their own creative, locally adapted, low-cost methods.

The land management we need, and that provides such an opportunity for addressing both desertification and global warming, brings with it a new paradigm, a new understanding of the foundation or center of gravity of what we regard as nature.

The next chapter will explain this new understanding through solar energy flow, water cycling, nutrient cycling, and community dynamics and succession. Then we’ll practice with issues: biofuel crops, the Farm Bill, urban sprawl, invasive species, and more.

The final chapter will outline the new politics that we need to take advantage of these opportunities, and how to practice it.

This paper (version 10/24/07) is a draft of the first chapter of a forthcoming short book about the opportunities inherent in global warming. See http://managingwholes.net for updates and links to related projects and materials.

A new water paradigm

October 3rd, 2007 by Peter Donovan
Four Slovakians and a Czech, some connected with the People and Water NGO in Slovakia, have written a short, powerful book on the water cycle. Water for the Recovery of the Climate–A New Water Paradigm is available in English from waterparadigm.org as a 15 MB, 94-page pdf (under “Downloads“).

For those interested in the influence of water vapor and water cycling on climate, and in the worldwide loss of soil moisture, this is an important read. In Slovakia, the authors describe how the water cycle has been compromised by urbanization (impervious surfaces), large-scale agricultural drainage, and deforestation. Soil moisture has been depleted over large areas, leading to increasing heat buildup and a loss of rainfall in the lowlands, which the authors attribute to an impaired “small” or regional water cycle, where water falls close to where it has evaporated or transpired. In Slovakia, there has been an increase in rainfall in the highlands, which exacerbates flooding.

The new water paradigm they advocate involves understanding the water cycle, not just the supply or deficit which is the usual focus of water policies. The new paradigm shares much in common with the understanding of the water cycle described in Allan Savory’s book Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making, but lacks the dryland dimension, and overlooks the supreme importance of the condition of the soil surface (presence of litter, organic matter, etc.) to well-functioning water cycling.

The energy carried by the water cycle dwarfs the energy captured by photosynthesis, which in turn is far greater than all industrial power use. The water cycle transports immense amounts of thermal energy from one place to another.

The authors estimate that, worldwide, soil moisture makes up about .005% of earth’s water. The atmosphere only holds a fifth as much in the form of clouds and vapor. Because water vapor is the most significant greenhouse gas, the balance of soil and atmospheric moisture is of major importance. A warmer atmosphere holds more vapor. Soil that holds more moisture for longer periods will be a critical part of global warming solutions. In addition, a well-functioning water cycle will favor the development of soil organic matter, and soil is the largest carbon sink over which we have some control.

Global warming: pathway to a new politics?

September 11th, 2007 by Peter Donovan
We’re losing. With all the articles, books, films, conferences, events, Congressional hearings, with billions spent, we can’t even slow down global warming. Climate scientists say we have ten years or less to make a difference.

An alien invasion, a flu epidemic, or an impending asteroid impact would generate a better response from us. We might not be successful or in total agreement, but we’d do something.

But global warming is impersonal and systemic, and we’re not well adapted to respond to these kinds of things. The symptoms, causes, effects, and meanings are multiple, ambiguous, and disorienting. Bananas might grow in Oklahoma. Refugees from Bangladesh might harvest them. No one can predict with certainty what will happen, or what the ripple effects might be.

Global warming seems to indict our entire society and economy. We are all culprits, and all victims in some way or other. In such a situation the politics of blame and fear, of crying wolf, are starkly dysfunctional—although they remain broadly popular with most sides of the various climate controversies.

What we need is not just modification—the usual ten things to save the planet, or hugely expensive revisions to our coal-burning technology—but transformation, not only of our energy sector but of our land stewardship and even our politics and decision making. And blame and fear, even bolstered by watertight scientific or rational arguments, aren’t any good at creating transformation. What enables transformation is opportunity.

Many have recognized that transforming our energy systems, in addition to being necessary to address the climate problem, is also an opportunity to create millions of new jobs, improve our trade balance, and lessen our dependencies on Mideast oil and coal mining.

Another huge but less-recognized opportunity is that of transforming the way we are managing land and soil. No new technologies are required, and the basic principles and practice have already been established—see the earlier post on the soil carbon opportunity.

A different politics and decision making would help us realize both these opportunities. The current situation of strongly held and defended positions on global warming and its causes and meanings doesn’t allow the needed movement toward effective responses and solutions. We need success more than we need to be right.

These beliefs or opinions form a kind of global warming orthodoxy. (1) It’s happening. (2) It’s generally a bad thing. (3) We’re causing it. (4) Energy systems are mainly responsible.

People are responding to this orthodoxy, and to its messengers and presentations, along an emotional spectrum. This spectrum has little to do with rational arguments or climate science, and much more to do with attitudes, power, and trust.

Wrong. These are people who disagree with one or more aspects of the orthodoxy. Common labels for these people are deniers, crackpots, heretics, skeptics, contrarians, naysayers.
Blamed. These are people and corporations who feel blamed or punished for the problem. Things that they have done for a long time are now condemned, or punished with higher energy costs.
Powerless. They are aware that there might be a big problem. But changing lightbulbs is inadequate, and reforming our energy system seems politically impossible, so the problem is not actionable, not high on the list of priorities. This is the broad middle, the “silent majority.”
Sympathizers. They might change lightbulbs and carpool, and they support the activists.
Activists. They are engaged with the problem, which is urgent and all-encompassing.
Because the spectrum is emotional, people may feel they belong to more than one group. There is a certain poise to the spectrum. Major shifts are less likely to result from proselytizing, argument, or exclusion from participation, and more likely to come from easing the resisting or contrary forces, and from the passage of events.

To succeed against a systemic problem we are likely to need perceptions and creative solutions from all the bands on the spectrum. Such inclusive consensus-building will rearrange the spectrum into new and different configurations, and give us the motion we need. For example, preparing for climate change (pdf) rather than continuing the debate over climate certainty would tend to rearrange the spectrum.

The skin of the soil

August 8th, 2007 by Peter Donovan
The ecological issue of the future is not between extraction and “protection.” It is between bare soil and covered.

Framing the climate crisis

July 29th, 2007 by Peter Donovan
A few weeks ago in Creighton, Nebraska, at Terry Gompert’s high-density grazing workshop, Allan Savory noted that the problem of climate change, and that of desertification, were two sides of the same coin: ecosystem malfunction. Over more and more of the globe, water cycling, carbon cycling, nitrogen cycling, solar energy flow, and community dynamics are not functioning as they could or should.

Chad Peterson’s ranch in Nebraska

But so much of the climate discussion is about tools, proposals, or species that are labeled “bad” or “good.” Are methane-emitting ruminants bad or good? What about nuclear power, fluorescent bulbs, biofuels, trees, oil palm trees, a carbon tax, “invasive species,” or electric cars? What about iron fertilization of the ocean, or putting up reflectors in space, or carbon capture and storage from coal plant exhausts?

It seems we will try anything rather than fix what’s broken. We prefer to address symptoms rather than causes. If we consider trees good, then we’d like to plant trees rather than improve carbon cycling, water cycling, and energy capture on the forest we already have through better management.

If we use these ecosystem or biospheric processes—water cycle, nutrient cycle, solar energy, and synergy, succession, or community dynamics—to frame the climate crisis, we have so many more opportunities to affect the outcomes.

Global warming’s invisible solution

July 23rd, 2007 by Peter Donovan
Suppose we cut fossil fuel emissions to zero by dawn tomorrow. Could we put a stop to global warming?

No. Yet reducing emissions seems to be the only prescription available. We argue about dosage and timing, whether it’s bitter or sweet, whether x or y is a better approach. No wonder most of us aren’t very motivated, and progress has been slight. Try as we might, we will only delay the inevitable planetary wreck.

Unless we also reclaim the extra carbon—the extra greenhouse blanket—from the atmosphere. This takes energy. It’s combustion in reverse. Where do we get the energy, and how do we dispose of all the resulting carbon dioxide? This is a very tough problem for our favored rocket-science approaches.

The elemental and sobering reality is that technology is not the answer to this problem. But the good news is that there is a huge opportunity to pull the excess carbon out of the air—using abundant, cheap, current solar energy. Not techno-green, but chlorophyll-green. Grass.

In wet places, trees extract more carbon from the atmosphere than grass. But even trees don’t hold this carbon very long before returning it to the air via decay or fire. Oceanic plankton fix a lot of carbon, but can’t hold much of it out of circulation either. To fix the other half of our climate problem, we need a large, long-term reservoir of carbon, supplied at a good rate by green plants, and over which we have lots of influence.

When we’re in the pasture, the field, or the garden, we’re standing on it. Even in its presently depleted state, the soil holds more carbon than the atmosphere plus all the world’s vegetation combined. Soil organic matter (which is mostly carbon) can last for centuries—barring exposure to the elements, tillage, harsh chemical applications, or significant warming. Unlike carbon dioxide burial, organic carbon in the soil enhances every aspect of our life-support system: water-holding capacity and drought resistance, water quality, biodiversity including underground and marine, human health, true fertility, viable rural communities, and the stability of the soil itself. In temperate climates under intense but observant management, perennial grasses can grow a huge underground crop of soil carbon as they periodically shed their roots.

Colin Seis, an innovative grain and sheep farmer near Gulgong in Australia, has doubled the organic carbon in his soil in little more than a decade. He didn’t set out to do this. In order to make his operation profitable, and to regenerate the fertility lost by a century of misguided farming practices, he began sowing cereal crops directly into perennial pasture, thus combining farming and intensive grazing while reducing herbicides and tillage. Profits increased because inputs decreased. Another thousand Australian farmers are following his lead, and the system is spreading to North America and Europe. “The hardest thing to change is your head. Once you’ve done that, the rest is easy,” he says. “Don’t spend a cent,” he advises farmers. “Throw away your disc plow. Put your animals into large mobs and start moving them around.”

Seis’s pasture cropping is only one of many branches of a growing rebellion against the input/output, monocultural, confined livestock, soil-wasting, and life-denying travesties of industrial farming. What these various branches have in common is a decreasing reliance on fossil fuels and chemicals, synergy between animals, grass, and soil, and the habit of enhancing natural processes such as water and carbon cycling, biodiversity, and solar energy in order to cut costs and enjoy a better life. In countless cases the result is a rising spiral that is totally at odds with the scarcity-based, zero-sum beliefs and behaviors of both industrial agriculture and protectionist environmentalism.

Were we to wean ourselves from fossil fuels and manage soils for rising spirals of organic matter, as Colin Seis and many others have already demonstrated, the ongoing destabilization of the world’s climate could be stopped. We could reverse the desertification and land degradation that drive the Dust Bowls and the Darfurs.

This marvelous opportunity is all but invisible. Why?

Basic knowledge and awareness of soil processes and potentials is not widespread. With cheap fossil energy and chemical farming, it hasn’t seemed all that important.
Because human impact is so often the villain, many of us believe that ecological problems will fix themselves if we simply restrict or reduce human impact. (They might, but not on a timescale that favors us or our descendants.)
Our special interests–which influence our media, our government, and the research priorities of universities–aren’t fond of cheap low-tech solutions. They benefit, in both money and power, from things staying more or less the way they are.
Most of the academic research on soil carbon looks only at industrial agriculture, and what happens when you stop tillage, chemicals, or idle the land. The resulting modest gains suggest that soil might be able to mitigate or offset further fossil fuel burning, so as to extend business as usual a little longer.

We citizens can opt out of this madness in lots of ways. First is simply recognizing the huge opportunity we have to solve the problem if we stop fossil fuel burning and store the atmospheric excess carbon as beneficial soil organic matter while revitalizing agriculture, soil stability, drought resistance, and human health worldwide. With enough grass-roots recognition, the ongoing racket of prescribing partial or ineffective solutions will ebb, along with the backlash it produces. Priority One: Together We Can Beat Global Warming by Allan Yeomans simply describes this opportunity in detail, as well as the forces that oppose it.

Second, support the growing number of farmers, ranchers, and land managers who are enhancing soil with passion and skill. These people are engaged in transformational change, to a new postindustrial agriculture. They are not polished executives or experts from the centers of power. They are from the edge, and they are ahead of us all, already doing what needs to be done. Let’s buy our food from them, and learn from them. Our current farm policies abet the continued release of soil carbon into the atmosphere, along with rising obesity and disconnect from our life-support system. Soil carbon could connect farm policy with what we all want.

Global warming requires us to transform our energy policy and technology. But solving it also requires us to keep our soils covered with plants, which feed the complex underground foodwebs that form soil organic matter. We could not ask for better opportunities.

Don’t just stop global warming, REVERSE it with soil carbon

February 21st, 2007 by Peter Donovan
“Let’s wreck the world more slowly.” This is the agenda and platform of the second generation of ecological literacy. Nature consists of species, human impact is bad, and the best we can do is to slow down the damage and hope for the best. Do you find this lacking and indifferent?

Climate change is driving an increasing awareness of the carbon cycle, the water cycle, and other biospheric processes. Allan Yeomans in Australia has written an intriguing and intrepid book about the politics of carbon cycling in Priority One: Together We Can Beat Global Warming. His message is that by increasing organic matter in agricultural and rangeland soils, we can pull the excess carbon out of the atmosphere. By switching energy needs to biofuels and nuclear, we can keep it that way. The fossil fuel lobby has long worked against both strategies, often with the cooperation of major environmental movements. It’s a disturbing message (don’t claim you weren’t warned) but also a hopeful and exciting one. Biosphere Media plans to have a US/UK edition available by 7 June 2007.