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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] New way to farm boosts climate, too
  • Date: Sat, 28 Mar 2009 07:34:42 -0700


New way to farm boosts climate, too
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/HealthandScience/New-way-to-farm-boosts-cli
mate--too

Organic 'no-till' combines best of two methods, but many worry about
consistency

Jared Flesher/The Christian Science Monitor |

3/27/2009 - 3/28/09
Some scientists say an ice age was prevented thousands of years ago by the
dawn of human agriculture — deforestation and farming released enough
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to prevent another global cool down,
the theory goes.

Now, millennia later, researchers hope new farming techniques will put some
of that carbon back into the ground and help stem the rising tide of global
warming.

No-till agriculture, in which farmers don't plow their fields anymore, is
one practice said to promote carbon sequestration in the soil. Organic
farming is another. Researchers here at the nonprofit Rodale Institute are
now developing a hybrid "organic no-till" farming system that they say
could sponge up more carbon than any other way of growing food.

The claim: If organic no-till agriculture were used successfully on all of
the earth's 3.5 billion tillable acres, it would absorb and sequester more
than half of all present-day CO2 emissions every year, according to Rodale
Institute research director Paul Hepperly.

At the same time, the practice would also curb soil erosion and the dangers
of chemical runoff.

"No-till organic is probably one of the best systems for helping to
sequester carbon," says John Reganold, a soil scientist who has studied
sustainable agriculture at Washington State University at Pullman for 25
years. "What Rodale is doing is the best of both worlds."

Jeff Moyer, farm director at The Rodale Institute, says his quest for
organic no-till began as a fortuitous accident 18 years ago. As part of an
agricultural experiment, researchers had planted a field with a cover crop
called hairy vetch. One end of the field wasn't part of the experiment,
though, so they just drove over it with tractors, crushing down the cover
crop in the process.

Some time later, after the field had been planted with corn, Moyer noticed
something interesting was happening where the tractors had trampled
everything: Corn plants were growing through the crushed vetch crop, which
now looked like a mat of brown cardboard and was acting as a sort of mulch.

"Everybody stood there and looked at it and went, 'Wow, you did organic
no-till,' " says Moyer. "So we've spent the last 18 years trying to figure
out a system that will allow us to replicate that accident over and over
and over again."

The paradigm shift represented by organic no-till is that it strives to
eliminate the use of both herbicides and tillage. But for it to work
effectively, the cover crop suppressing the growth of weeds must be knocked
down in just the right way and at just the right time. This lets a farmer
plant cash crops directly through the cover crop at the same time it's
being rolled down.

In 2002, after experimenting for more than a decade with existing farm
equipment, Moyer custom-engineered a corkscrewed roller-crimper that does
the knockdown job from the front end of a tractor. The first roller-crimper
prototype was built in a neighbor's weld shop and now, seven years later,
they are being sold commercially by an independent manufacturer. Dozens are
being used across the country by agricultural researchers and early-adopter
farmers.

Bill Mason, a farmer on Maryland's Eastern Shore, is one such early
adopter. His reason for the switch had nothing to do with carbon
sequestration; he was drawn by another promise of organic no-till: better
economics. Organic crops sell for more than conventionally raised ones,
while no-till cuts down on tractor use, reducing a farmer's fuel and labor
costs.

In 2005, Mason purchased a 15-foot roller-crimper for $4,000 and decided to
give it a try with a field of soybeans. He felt he was taking a gamble.

"When you go out and roll a 120-acre field down and pray that it's going to
work, it's a good portion of your income," he says. "You're taking a little
bit of risk there."

Mason says his results for that first year were "excellent." His organic
soybean yield was as good as his best conventional yields had been, and he
was able to reduce his pre-harvest trips across the field in a tractor from
eight passes (plowing, harrowing, planting, and multiple rounds of rotary
hoeing and cultivation) to just one. He figures he is saving about $50 per
acre in fuel and machinery costs alone. He has been using organic no-till
for three years now, and says he would recommend it to anybody, at least
for soybeans.

Corn has been a different story. His results so far with this crop have
been disappointing, plagued by insects and poor yields. Across the country,
USDA-sponsored research into organic no-till has been conducted in Georgia,
Iowa, Michigan, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and California.
Experimenting with different variables of climate, soil, and crop variety,
researchers have reported results ranging from excellent to abject failure.

The Rodale Institute and others have found it's only possible to no-till a
field a few years in a row before more aggressive perennial weeds start to
gain a foothold. Moyer has been tilling two or three times every five years
at the Rodale farm. Still, that represents a reduction in tillage of 40 to
60 percent.

Research continues on perfecting organic no-till, which is still a work in
progress.

The Rodale Institute made news in 2003 when it released research results
from its Farming Systems Trial - the longest-running side-by side
comparison of conventional and organic farming in the country — that
showed its organic (tilled) cropland was sequestering 1,000 pounds of
carbon per acre per year. The high number surprised soil scientists because
it showed that organic farming — even though it relies on extensive
tillage - was outperforming no-till farming in terms of storing carbon.
Since then, additional studies by other soil researchers have arrived at
the same conclusion.

Agricultural practices that promote carbon sequestration can be "stacked,"
says Moyer, so the idea now is to combine them into one farming system for
the best results. Rodale researchers say stacking no-till farming, organic
farming, and composting has the potential to sequester 3,000 pounds of
carbon per acre per year, ten times the amount typically achieved through
no-till farming alone.

Lee Burras, a soil scientist at Iowa State University, agrees that
agriculture can help fight global warming, but he is tempered in his view
of how large a role it might play.

"Can it help mitigate? Yes," he says. "Is it the long-term, major solution?
No."

Part of the reason organic and no-till farming are only temporary
solutions, he says, is that the ability of soil to sponge up more and more
carbon eventually runs out.

"My own work shows (that) the more beat-up (the soil) is to begin with, the
better response you get subsequently with carbon sequestration," he says.
"But after 10 years, 20 years, maybe it's 50 years, we're going to plateau
out."

Another important question is how to get farmers to embrace new methods.

"Farmers are very conservative people by nature," farm director Moyer says.
"When you ask a farmer to adopt a new technology, they are literally
risking the farm, their home, and their income on this new technology."

The allure of reduced fuel costs and better prices for organic produce may
not be enough. Hepperly, the Rodale Institute research director, says that
for a switch-over to occur in this country, the government must enact a
system that pays farmers to sequester carbon. Carbon trading is already
being experimented with at the Chicago Climate Exchange and elsewhere. The
Rodale Institute is advocating that such a trading system be enacted in the
next farm bill in 2012.

"This will allow farmers to see a real economic motivation to resolving
these core issues," Hepperly says.

Burras concurs: "I strongly support the idea of green payments," he says.
"Any practice that results in better carbon sequestration results in better
environmental quality across the board."

One of the challenges of growing crops is controlling weeds, but different
types of farmers come at the problem in different ways. "No-till" farmers
use large amounts of chemical herbicides to kill weeds, but don't plow the
soil. "Organic" farmers plow and cultivate extensively — another way to
manage weeds — but don't use any herbicides. Although each method has its
advantages, until recently it seemed they were incompatible: Organic
farmers till often; "no-till" farmers use herbicides.

The key to organic no-till is that it relies instead on a third method of
weed control: cover crops. Cover crops are planted between rotations of
food crops and, besides holding soil in place and crowding out weeds, also
serve to replenish soil nutrients.

For example, if an organic no-till farmer intends to plant corn in the
spring, he might plant that field the previous autumn with a cover crop of
hairy vetch. The hairy vetch will put nitrogen back into the soil (which is
important, because corn requires a lot of nitrogen to grow) and also keep
the ground covered through the winter.

In the spring, once the hairy vetch crop is in full bloom, the farmer will
roll it down using a special piece of equipment called a roller-crimper
attached to the front of a tractor. At the same time, a no-till planter
attached to the back of the tractor will plant the corn crop.

When the cover crop dies, killed by the roller-crimper, it functions as a
weed-suppressing mulch. If everything goes as planned, the corn will grow
up through the mulch, while the weeds will be stifled.

Researchers point out that organic no-till is not necessarily an
all-or-nothing proposition. No-till farmers can incorporate elements of it
to reduce the amount of herbicide they use, and organic farmers can employ
it to reduce their tillage.

The same concepts of organic no-till farming can be applied on a much
smaller scale to home gardening, although the actual equipment and methods
involved are different. Here's a link to an organic gardening blog that
describes how to do it.










  • [Livingontheland] New way to farm boosts climate, too, Tradingpost, 03/28/2009

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