Tropical rainforest is often on leached soil where most of the nutrients are actually in the trees. Saying that this environment doesn't accumulated soil and therefore no forest will do so does not necessarily follow. Particularly where temperate forests were cleared for crop land you can certainly increase the amount of carbon stored by converting them to pasture or back to forest. But your point about reaching a maximum and then not storing any more is correct. Evan so I don't think carbon sequestration is anything more than a side show when it comes to managing climate change.
You are right that it is not a panacea but wrong in saying we cannot build soil or sequester carbon by altering land use.
It worked for the buffalo and those that tended them.
Citation, please.
All fixes are temporary, and all analogies fall apart somewhere. Still, it is something that we could do right now, and have an impact on environmental, and human health.
Note that we were talking about changes to land use not sequestering carbon in less decomposable forms. I was told the amount that can be stored has limits in a course by Dr Judi Earl who put me on to Dr Christine Jones. The latter is the local guru on agricultural carbon sequestration. The reason given is that as decomposable carbon builds up the microbes that break it down also build up until the rate they are breaking down reaches the rate of build-up, in other words an equilibrium is reached. The position of the equilibrium depends on the land use and methods but you will still get one sooner or later. This is ignoring the carbon stored above ground in forests etc but you can see that it also has a maximum value depending on what is grown.
Here is one quote:
"The capacity of soil to store decomposable organic carbon by physical protection within micro-aggregates or other organomineral complexes seems to be finite. Once these complexes are saturated any added decomposable organic carbon cannot be protected from decomposition. Even if this capacity has been severely depleted it can be resaturated rapidly (e.g. within 30 years by growing pasture)."
Which is from here:
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a huge amount of material on this topic. I haven't read it all. If you also google on:
carbon sequestration "christine jones" site:.au
you will get much more. She is of the view that paying farmers to do sequestration is a solution to climate change. I think we must try many solutions because until you try you don't know for sure what the effect will be and also there are political, economic and social limits on the extent that any given solution can be adopted thus we are likely to need a multi-pronged approach to succeed.
Also I would not want to push only sequestration solutions because the fossil fuel industry will try to seize on any method of dealing with climate change (eg "clean coal") as long as it allows them to keep on burning and that is very undesirable for many reasons apart from the increase in atmospheric CO2.
No doubt they would, this was from a food book not an agriculture book.
I have toyed with the mobile coop idea. I am quite attracted to the mandala garden where the coop move around a series of beds but I can't see how to make it work with the succession of seasonal planting, nor how to make it fox proof.
I will allow my chooks to range over the pasture during the day but first I have to build a secure coop for them at night or the fox will have them.
I am a serious cook that's why I read books like McGee. My understanding is that the qualities that he praises are mainly from freshness.
Rustic people are smarter than this lot. It's a puzzle.
I already have a master plan for the erradication of the rodents since they ate the weather seal off my shed door to get in and they attack the produce on the verandah. It doesn't work of course but I do fight them to a draw. People comment on how generous I am with feed for them. Them pellets ain't chook food.
Keep the foxes
Foxes are a real problem, such destructive buggers, the chook house will be metal with buried barriers, the yard will have a loop off the electric fence around it as well.
How do you stop them scratching all the mulch off your fruit trees?
Must be quite a good book. It has held its price. Shame it's not available from our local library.
The following is a bit of over kill, but to the subject at hand. Omnivor's Dilemma
pg. 266 - 269
I had made pretty much the same meal on several occasions at home, using the same basic foodstuffs, yet in certain invisible ways this wasn't the same food at all. Apart from the high color of the egg yolks, these eggs looked pretty much like any other eggs, the chicken like chicken, but the fact that the animals in question had spent their lives outdoors on pastures rather than in a shed eating grain distinguished their flesh and eggs in important, measurable ways. A growing body of scientific research indicates that pasture substantially changes the nutritional profile of chicken and eggs, as well as of beef and milk. The question we asked about organic food?is it any better than the conventional kind??turns out to be much easier to answer in the case of grass-farmed food. Perhaps not surprisingly, the large quantities of beta-carotene, vitamin E, and folic acid present in green grass find their way into the flesh of the animals that eat that grass. (It's the carotenoids that give these egg yolks their carroty color.) That flesh will also have considerably less fat in it than the flesh of animals fed exclusively on grain?also no surprise, in light of what we know about diets high in carbohydrates. (And about exercise, something pastured animals actually get.) But all fats are not created equal?polyunsaturated fats are better for us than saturated ones, and certain unsaturated fats are better than others. As it turns out, the fats created in the flesh of grass eaters are the best kind for us to eat.
This is no accident. Taking the long view of human nutrition, we evolved to eat the sort of foods available to hunter-gatherers, most of whose genes we've inherited and whose bodies we still (more or less) inhabit. Humans have had less than ten thousand years?an evolutionary blink?to accustom our bodies to agricultural food, and as far as our bodies are concerned, industrial agricultural food?a diet based largely on a small handful of staple grains, like corn?is still a biological novelty. Animals raised outdoors on grass have a diet much more like that of the wild animals humans have been eating at least since the Paleolithic era than that of the grain-fed animals we only recently began to eat.
So it makes evolutionary sense that pastured meals, the nutritional profile of which closely resembles that of wild game, would be better for us. Grass-fed meat, milk, and eggs contain less total fat and less saturated fats than the same foods from grain-fed animals. Pastured animals also contain conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a fatly acid dial. some recent studies indicate may help reduce weight and prevent cancer, and which is absent from feedlot animals. But perhaps most important, meat, eggs, and milk from pastured animals also contain higher levels of omega-3s, essential fatty acids created in the cells of green plants and algae that play an indispensable role in human health, and especially in the growth and health of neurons?brain cells. (It's important to note that fish contain higher levels of the most valuable omega-3s than land animals, yet grass-fed animals do offer significant amounts of such important omega-3s as alpha linolenic acid?ALA.) Much research into the role of omega-3s in the human diet remains to be done, but the preliminary findings are suggestive: Researchers report that pregnant women who receive supplements of omega-3s give birth to babies with higher IQs, children with diets low in omega-3s exhibit more behavioral and learning problems at school, and puppies eating diets high in omega-3s prove easier to train. (All these claims come from papers presented at a 2004 meeting of the International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids.)
One of the most important yet unnoticed changes to the human diet in modern times has been in the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6, the other essential fatty acid in our food. Omega-6 is produced in the seeds of plants; omega-3 in the leaves. As the name indicates, both kinds of fat are essential, but problems arise when they fall out of balance. (In fact, there's research to suggest that the ratio of these fats in our diet may be more important than the amounts.) Too high a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 can contribute to heart disease, probably because omega-6 helps blood clot, while omega-3 helps it flow. (Omega-6 is an inflammatory; omega-3 an anti-innammatory.) As our diet?and the diet of the animals we eat?shifted from one based on green plants to one based on grain (from grass to corn), the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has gone from roughly one to one (in the diet of hunter-gatherers) to more than ten to one. (The process of hydrogenadng oil also eliminates omega-3s.) We may one day come to regard this shift as one of the most deleterious dietary changes wrought by the industrialization of our food chain. It was a change we never noticed, since the importance of omega-3s was not recognized until the 1970s. As in the case of our imperfect knowledge of soil, the limits of our knowledge of nutrition have obscured what the industrialization of the food chain is doing to our health. But changes in the composition of fats in our diet may account for many of the diseases of civilization?cardiac, diabetes, obesity, etc.?that have long been linked to modern eating habits, as well as for learning and behavioral problems in children and depression in adults.
Research in this area promises to turn a lot of conventional nutritional thinking on its head. It suggests, for example, that the problem with eating red meat?long associated with cardiovascular disease? may owe less to the animal in question than to that animal's diet. (This might explain why there are hunter-gatherer populations today who eat far more red meat than we do without suffering the cardiovascular consequences.) These days farmed salmon are being fed like feedlot cattle, on grain, with the predictable result that their omega- 3 levels fall well below those of wild fish. (Wild fish have especially high levels of omega-3 because the fat concentrates as it moves up the food chain from the algae and phytoplankton that create it.) Conventional nutritional wisdom holds that salmon is automatically better for us than beef, but that judgment assumes the beef has been grain fed and the salmon krill fed; if the steer is fattened on grass and the salmon on grain, we might actually be better off eating the beef. (Grass-finished beef has a two-to-one ratio of omega-6 to -3 compared to more than ten to one in corn-fed beef.) The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you're eating has itself eaten.
The fact that the nutritional quality of a given food (and of that food's food) can vary not just in degree but in kind throws a big wrench into an industrial food chain, the very premise of which is that beef is beef and salmon salmon. It also throws a new light on the whole question of cost, for if quality matters so much more than quantity, then the price of a food may bear little relation to the value of the nutrients in it. If units of omega-3s and beta carotene and vitamin E are what an egg shopper is really after, then Joel's $2.20 a dozen pastured eggs actually represent a much better deal than the $0.79 a dozen industrial eggs at the supermarket. As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go on unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.
yeah! and whole milk yogurt from raw milk is wonderful too. i can imagine what a good raw cream cheese, brie, camembert, etc. would be like.
how large a press are you talking here?
gravity, water in buckets and the right surfaces, forms and inserts are not that tough to figure out nor horribly expensive, what am i missing here?
sure, if you go all stainless steel with a hydraulic press and all sorts of gizmos you'll be out some major bucks, but improvise with some woodworking skills and i think you can get by for much less.
that derivative use of a sliderule wasn't covered!
that wasn't me (FarmI is quote level >>> not me, i am quote level >> )
yea, but i'm pretty sure the difference between growth on the prairie vs. eastern grassland is closer to an order of magnitude which to me is a significant difference not so easily ignored.
for building topsoil. one inch a year on the eastern grassland (reasonably heavily managed otherwise it converts to woodland) as compared to how much per year on the prairie.
wow, that's 5x worse than what i thought it was. but i'd not looked into that specific detail yet. i'm just noodling about numbers and wondering why some things don't seem to add up right about certain claims.
i wonder if anyone has broken down how much of that is char.
if we're talking carbon effectively removed from the atmosphere and not easily returned via rot then yes. didn't you say something like 55,000 years? that's sequestered. :)
a forest at maturity is not sequestering much in the way of carbon, it's cycling it (i.e. i agree with DHS).
not forgotten, it just seems that if the forests were so good at sequestering carbon in the soil (that is what we were talking about was soil building) then the Amazon would be much different than it is and the eastern USoA would have much thicker soils too than it has.
reforestation is what happens to eastern land when left alone. so to keep it from turning to forest means some kind of management (which means energy expenditure of some type to keep it clear of trees be that via grazing or mechanical means the effort is the same no matter what). grazing unfortunately does not keep land clear.
i'd say that the stats say we don't need more meat, we need more exercise and more fruits and veggies.
yes, this is good to do, 100% with ya on this one.
in addition to the energy taken to produce the fertilizer to begin with.
i think those are not eliminated with our current river management, wastewater and drainage systems. reduced would be nice though -- i agree as it would return large areas of the Gulf to productive use.
this is good and i'm all for it, but i don't see how you get from point A to B without a massive labor shift. not many of the kids today have any plans of working on the farm at minimum wage with no benefits. only some small percent of the people have the dedication this type of change takes.
even for me to go all organic would be tough here, but i'm doing better each year. that's all i can do and try to get people around me to see easy things they can do to improve.
this is only partially true. large sections of agricultural land is ditched, drained, drain tubed and trenched. to restore it to the previous state would involve a lot more than letting it go back to green and then putting livestock on it to keep it short and having chickens pick their piles apart. for mosquito control too. you're not going to get people back to where they'll want more mosquitoes (even if i think the current spraying program is poisonous, dangerous and wasteful -- i'm not going to get many others around here to agree with me as it is very flat and swampy with a lot of mosquitoes if left alone).
add to that the runoff troubles from streets, parking lots, storm sewers, rooftops, and then add the waste from treatment plants and then make it even worse by draining all the lowlands and farming them, building levees so the rivers cannot flood, etc. well, we're nowhere near getting a handle on groundwater restoration.
getting the farmers to stop dumping nitrogen is only a small part of the problem. getting people to stop burning ditches would do a lot too (stopping erosion), getting people to stop using pesticides would accomplish a lot more for the long term health, nitrogen is quite simple a poison in comparison to the others. we've got timebombs ticking on a long slow fuse. at least we are looking now, but so many years from now it will take to fix and trillions of dollars. instead we will spend them on wars in far off places to support criminally insane or corrupt gov'ts, etc.
i know, once i heard about that use of antibiotics i got sick to my stomach. f'n idiots. it should be banned outright immediately (along with feeding chickens arsenic, feeding cattle bubble gum or any other animal byproducts, etc.).
but i disagree about meat production needing to be increased.
fine by me.
yea, we had someone doing a feedlot down the road a ways. luckily we are miles away and not downwind. but i felt sorry for any neighbors. a dairy farm smells good when run correctly. a CAFO smells nasty.
there is a bison farmer on the opposite corner and the CAFO is now returned to corn and soybeans so i'm thinking the corn and soybeans are a better tradeoff.
too much protein already for most people. the kids (who don't usually eat it anyways) they like hotdogs, macaroni and cheese and ice-cream -- nothing green please.
won't work for many crops, they don't do well with any competition -- variety in diet being important and i like some of those grains. if they can eventually come up with perennial versions that would be great. i know that is being worked on. that would go a long ways towards stablising the soils and improving the soil community/structure and it would also reduce weed troubles if you could get a field going full of mixed grains and legumes which could fruit at different times and thus be harvested at different times using different means. we're only starting on this sort of figuring.
so while i agree that bare soil can be troublesome, it can be worked around in some ways and at other times it's necessary (to switch crops or to deal with certain types of weeds -- beans and sow thistle being specific examples) and then there are certain perennials and annuals that only get going in disturbed soils. do you suddenly want to remove that type of plant from the diversity of life?
no, probably won't. it would help some things for sure, but it is only scratching the surface.
My eggs have an deep orange yolk, the shells are thick and the eggs have a rich taste. I have dropped them to the floor and have not cracked enough to leak out. Also I have to keep the eggs in the fridge for a week if I want to hard boil them. Fresh eggs out of the henhouse are great for frying and other uses. Except hard boiling them, the shells are like glued to egg whites. After a week in the fridge the shell comes off easily after hard boiling. It has do with PH levels, eggs are porous and lose some of their carbon dioxide. I learned about waiting a week from the book "Cookwise by Shirley O. Corriher" page 198. Book is on the science of cooking.ISBN-10: 0688102298
OK. I have to dig through them to let someone on another ng know aobut why lime is used in the henhouse so when I do that for her, I'll look for the article for you.
Unlike mice, rats are much harder to kill off. We've done the hose pipe from the car exhaust down the tunnels, the Jack Russells and a shovel and posion but the sods keep coming back. I'm advised by the chooky people I know that traps don't work like they do for mice. I think far more concrete might be the next strategy.
Also lay about 30 cm of wire out from the fence towards where the foxes would be coming from. They don't think to step back and then to burrow under so it's more efficient than burying it. Also use a heavy guage netting on the bottom part of the pen. The idiot who built ours used a very light guage and the foxes worry at it till they get a hole and you'd be surprised at how tiny a hole is needed to let a fox through. I've had to progressively go round that blasted orchard and add new wire in addition to the old stuff.
I don't. I chuck piles of weeds under the fruit trees and the chooks go in and forage and scratch it around and while they're doing that they're leaving droppings and getting rid of excess grass growth. My garden is not a pristine, neat place but it is productive. Me and the willing but ignorant undergardener have 2 farms to look after and 2 houses and 2 gardens so there is not a lot of time for 'neat'.
Oh yes. I have run into them in daylight on our place in the rougher area over the river. I have a kelpie who is very protective, he rid me of rabbits near the house (where the chooks will live) and I trust him to do the same of foxes, at least for a few years yet. He patrols most carefully, repelling evil with both noise and spray.
Peter Bane was speculating that "if" you drew a line across the top of Missouri to the East Coast, and a line down the western borders of Missouri and Arkansas to the Gulf, it would describe an area that now is mostly planted in soy and corn. Corn seems to be a great sponge for chemical fertilizers. In any event, the speculation was that if this area was returned to permanent ground cover, using the techniques of Joel Salatin, i.e. to successively rotate beef and chickens on the same pasturage, (not left wild), we could sequester the annual out put of American produced CO2.
Another, less elegant but needed none the less, technique, would be to would be to manure from barns or corrals to polycrop truck gardens operated by the farmer (CSA). The goal would be the same as any gardener; rotate crops, don't till, grow topsoil. You would get the fresh fruits and vegetables that you say you want. The farmer would cut out the middle man and make money. Yes, by and large, food would go back to being seasonal, but what you had would be fresh.
There still would be monocultures for the demands of baking but these could be rested, and rotated to avoid the pests associated with monocultures.
The above, with more reliance on Integrated Pest Management (IPM), would reduce our nation's need for petroleum for fertilizers, pesticides, and shipping.
Native Americans used fire for many reasons, among them to improve buffalo habitat. The First Forest Managers
The point here is that the land was used, and still the topsoil grew, as did the population.
"MANAGED" grassland develops more quickly. Even Salatine didn't just flip a switch and get 1" of topsoil/year right away.
What does that have to do with anything?
Funny, I thought we were talking about sequestering CO2 in topsoil, as was speculated about by Peter Bane (see above).
On it's way to becoming a "climax forest", the forest litter would have accrued into the soil as humus, i.e. topsoil, where earthworms could be found. At some point, the products of organic decomposition "out", would equal organic products "in", and there would be a dynamic equilibrium of organic material in the soil. Point being, there would be sequestered CO2.
Totally forgotten, in the tropics vegetation rots quickly, that's why we use refrigeration on our produce. Heavy rains wash away organic materials and leave laterite soil types, rich in iron and aluminium, and porous. Except for the Amazon rain forests, which were managed with charcoal, all other tropical soils (laterites) are ephemerally useful for agriculture.
It would be interesting to know if "terra preta" soils have increased in topsoil (been able to incorporate more organic material into themselves).
Are we still talking about sequestering CO2 in top soil à la Salatin?
And we need calories. The 2 options are fats, which humanity has eaten for at least 2,000,000 years, or grains, which civilized humanity has eaten in quantity for the last 10,000 years to great enjury to our health. The best indicator of cardiovascular disease is high triglycerides (and their carrier; Very Low Density Lipids[VLDL]) and low HDL. Saturated fat lowers triglycerides and raises HDL. Carbohydrates raise triglycerides, and lower HDL. (Yes, there is a bit more to it, but this is the nut of the problem.) Fruit, veggies, meat, and a greatly reduced intake of grains and processed carbohydrates, is what we should be looking at for health.
We were talking about topsoil sequestration of CO2.
And who says that's the way it has to be? In Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) the farmer doesn't get 4¢ for the corn in a 14 oz box of corn flakes, they get 50¢-$1/ear of corn. The middle men are gone, except perhaps those that you rent your space from at a farmers market. Peter Bane opined that using the Salatine model, 5,000,000 jobs could be created. Know anyone out of work?
So, this wouldn't change.
And of course, the loss of wetlands, the building of levees, and the land that has been ditched, drained, drain tubed and trenched, or paved over, is exactly why we have floods. We give the water no place to go, so it breaks out.
Burning ditches(?) you'll have to explain this one.
Depends on the pesticide, and the form of the nitrogen.
I like your passion, but what are you talking about with time bombs?
Not a problem with pastured beef.
Both GMOs.
Not that much protein in any of these. They are mostly carbohydrates. Food manufacturers already know how to get you to eat the greatest amount of salt, soy oil, and high fructose corn syrup now. It is a very bad combination for your health. Fructose doesn't satisfy your hunger. If you eat glucose, you will arrive at a point and say, "that's enough". Won't happen with fructose, and you'll just keep shoveling the food into your mouth. Carbs elicit an insulin response. Insuline is responsible for fat storage and metabolism (type2 diabetes, triglycerides, and stimulating cancers).
You're on your own with the grains, but the rest can be grown "no-till" right now. Many in this group do it. Even grains are being grown no-till but they use a hellacious amount of herbicides.
Another strawman, my garden beds are disturbed to the extent that I spread my amendments on them, cover them with mulch, and push a dibble into them for planting. No rototiller here. Most of the land is untouched, except for where I plant the damn potatoes.
So let's do nothing? If we don't try, we'll never know.
i don't think the timescale of the glaciers melting (who knows how long that took?) vs. what is there now and how the growth took place is really critical in determining the longer range productivity of the area.
if it was a straight slope, an elliptic one or one interrupted (seesaw) it really wouldn't matter as it would only be a slight ragged left edge when compared to the broader time line (essentially flat).
how is it faring under the onslaught of the dammed river (not being allowed to flood any longer) and industrial scale agriculture (and modern fertilizers)?
right, why is that though? you'd figure that if it was truely good for the ecosystem to have deep soil that it would have figured that out by now (millions of years of selective pressure).
again true, but only to a point and i think there is a need now to go beyond what can be accompished this way.
i'd change my statement to "not storing much more" because i do think that periodic fires do store some more. just not that much at a time.
yeah, i mispoke somewhat there, but what i meant was that the need for carbon storage is now more than what is going to be achieved using either of those two methods. building soil would help out all around, i won't argue against that.
my wondering about topsoil is that if it is so good for overall life then you'd think that by this time (after millions of years) it would be selected for and there would be much more of it than there is instead of what we do find. so my curiousity is engaged on the topic of the disappearing topsoil.
so much topsoil is lost to erosion and biological processes that it ends up in the ocean and then turned into coal and oil but the timescale for that process is geological (not historical). the balance needed is the use of the energy to match what the ocean is capable of storing. we're way past that (i'm not sure what that amount is), but we'd know we've gotten there if the ppm of CO2 stablizes and then starts falling and the ocean acidity does the same.
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