Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Marty Kraft <martyk@allspecies.org>]

Paul

I sent this article to a friend and am including his response in this email. Are we talking about commercial no-till vs an organic no-till methods here? My friend raises organic wheat and is conscientious in his work. 

Marty,

You had better check your facts on this. The way no-till makes the grade is by cheating on the soil tests. The main reason that KSU is behind this is to sell new farm equipment and make a name for mr. Charles Rice. There is more research showing that organic farming will sequester more carbon than ANY other form of farming. And another point, the no-till idea does NOT take into account the CO2 that gets released during the manufacturing of nitrate fertilizer. Of course, organic does not use manufactured fertilizer.

On Dec 10, 2007, at 6:16 PM, TradingPostPaul wrote:

NO-TILL FARMING OFFERS A QUICK FIX TO HELP WARD OFF HOST OF GLOBAL PROBLEMS

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/notill.htm

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Increase no-till farming practices across the planet or

face serious climate, soil quality and food production problems in the next

20 to 50 years. That warning from scientists appeared in the journal

Science this week.

Rattan Lal

No-till farming helps soil retain carbon. Healthy topsoil contains

carbon-enriched humus – decaying organic matter that provides nutrients

to plants. Soils low in humus can't maintain the carbon-dependent nutrients

essential to healthy crop production, resulting in the need to use more

fertilizers.

A lack of carbon in soil may promote erosion, as topsoil and fertilizers

are often washed or blown away from farm fields and into waterways, said

Rattan Lal, the paper's lead author and the director of the carbon

management and sequestration center at Ohio State University.

In no-till agriculture, farmers plant seeds without using a plow to turn

the soil. Soil loses most of it carbon content during plowing, which

releases carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere. Increased levels of CO2 in

the atmosphere have been associated with global climate change.

"If every farmer who grows crops in the United States would use no-till and

adopt management practices such as crop rotation and planting cover crops,

we could sequester about 300 million tons of soil carbon each year."

Traditional plowing, or tilling, turns over the top layer of soil. Farmers

use it for, among other reasons, to get rid of weeds, make it easier to use

fertilizers and pesticides and to plant crops. Tilling also enriches the

soil as it hastens the decomposition of crop residue, weeds and other

organic matter.

Still, the benefits of switching to no-till farming practices outweigh

those of traditional planting.

Since the mechanization of agriculture began a few hundred years ago,

scientists estimate that some 78 billion metric tons – more than 171

trillion pounds – of carbon once trapped in the soil have been lost to

the atmosphere in the form of CO2.

Lal and his colleagues estimate that no-till farming is practiced on only 5

percent of all the world's cultivated cropland. Farmers in the United

States use no-till methods on 37 percent of the nation's cropland, which

results in saving an estimated 60 million metric tons of soil CO2 annually.

"If every farmer who grows crops in the United States would use no-till and

adopt management practices such as crop rotation and planting cover crops,

we could sequester about 300 million tons of soil carbon each year," said

Lal, who is also a professor of soil science at Ohio State.

"Each year, 6 billion tons of carbon is released into the planet's

atmosphere as fossil fuels are burned, and plants can absorb 20 times that

amount in that period of time," he said. "The problem is that as organisms

decompose and plants breathe, CO2 returns to the atmosphere. None of it

accumulates in the soil."

Lal admits that full-scale no-till farming practices are a short-term fix,

but it's one that will give researchers enough time to find alternatives to

fossil fuels.

"There needs to be a global effort to adopt no-till farming practices soon.

Governments need to mandate these practices or to provide financial

incentives to farmers to adopt them," said Lal, adding no-till methods may

reduce a farmer's annual crop yield by 5 to 10 percent, at least for the

first few years.

It's also tough to ask farmers who lack the necessary financial resources

to switch to no-till methods, especially in African and Asian countries

where no-till levels are the lowest, Lal said.

"No-till isn't readily practiced in most of these areas due to the lack of

available financial resources and government support," he said. "Farmers

often lack the seeding equipment necessary to drill through crop residue.

And many farmers use leftover residue from the previous year's crops for

fuel or animal fodder. So the cultivated soil gets compacted or eroded by

water and wind."

Topsoil is also a lucrative commodity – an acre of it can bring in $1,300

for a farmer in India, where the first few feet of soil are often removed

for brick making.

"No-till farming isn't a substitute for finding alternatives to fossil

fuels," Lal said.

"No-till is definitely a short-term fix, but it may buy us up to 50 years

to find alternatives to fossil fuels. If we don't heed this warning, our

planet may change drastically. There's no other choice."

Lal co-authored the paper with Michael Griffin, Jay Apt, Lester Lave and M.

Granger Morgan, all with Carnegie Mellon University.

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