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Carbon Farming & Improving Resilience on Working Lands
Carbon Farming & Improving Resilience on Working Lands
As a whole farm approach to maximizing carbon capture on agricultural lands, carbon farming capitalizes on the understanding that capturing, transforming, and storing solar energy and atmospheric carbon on working lands is the driving force of farm ecosystem dynamics. Through maximizing carbon capture within the agroecosystem as a whole, the cascading co-benefits of carbon gains can improve the farm system’s resilience to climate change impacts while mitigating and reducing emissions that contribute to the climate crisis.
The graphic below, adapted from Dr. Rattan Lal's work in 2015, describes the relationship between farm energy, productivity, carbon and the ecosystem co-benefits that help improve a working land's resilience towards extreme weather changes associated with the climate crisis.
How do we build resilience and adapt to the climate crisis?
How do we build resilience and adapt to the climate crisis?
A key component of carbon farm planning is reading the landscape for opportunities for carbon capture and diversifying the agroecosystem to support carbon capture. Let’s think about some of the conservation and carbon farming practices that do this:
Diversifying crop rotations
Reducing bare fallows and incorporating cover crops
Increasing soil organic matter to improve soil food web diversity and increase soil water holding capacity
Integrating agroforestry practices for structural, microclimate, and wildlife diversity
Different systems and regions may call for different practices or adapted forms of practice implementation. Throughout Module 1, we will look at how certain practices can build soil health and improve resilience; Module 2 will discuss how to read a landscape, and will provide interactive examples.
❓Check your knowledge!
Match the following climate related agricultural threats (left) to how carbon farming can help a farm or ranch adapt to climate change by increasing resilience on the working land (right):
Pests and diseases
Drought and flood
High winds
Increasing agricultural biodiversity
Improving soil water holding capacity
Establishment of windbreaks and shelterbelts
Discussion board: If you have any questions throughout Module 1, please use the discussion board to below to post.
Continue to
Principles of Healthy Soils
Citations
Citations
(1) Soil Management Bank. Australian Soil Management. 2019. https://www.australiansoil.com.au/soil-management-benefits (2) Follett, R., Mooney, S., Morgan, J., Paustian, K., Allen Jr., L., Archibeque, S., … Robertson, G. (2011). Carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas fluxes in agriculture: challenges and opportunities. Ames: Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST). (3)Paustian, K., Six, J., Elliott, E. et al. Management options for reducing CO2 emissions from agricultural soils. Biogeochemistry 48, 147–163 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1006271331703(4)L. E. Flint, A. L. Flint, M. A. Stern, A. Myer, W. Silver, C. F. Casey, F. Franco, K. Byrd, B. Sleeter, P. Alvarez, J. Creque, T. Estrada and D. Cameron, California's Fourth Climate Change Assessment, Increasing soil organic carbon to mitigate greenhuose gases and increase climate resiliency, 2018.(5) J. Lavelle, F. Cotrufo, Soil carbon is a valuable resource, but all soil carbon is not created equal. The Conversation (2020), (available at https://theconversation.com/soil-carbon-is-a-valuable-resource-but-all-soil-carbon-is-not-created-equal-129175). (6) The Keeling Curve. The Keeling Curve (2020), (available at https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/). (7) B. Deluisi, ESRL Global Monitoring Laboratory - Education and Outreach. Esrl.noaa.gov (2020), (available at https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/education/carbon_toolkit/basics.html). (8) Jonathan Sanderman, Tomislav Hengi, and Gregory J. Fiske. 2017. Soil carbon debt of 12,000 years of human land use. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Sep 2017, 114 (36) 9575-9580; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1706103114(9)J. Hansen, M. Sato, P. Kharecha, K. V. Schuckmann, D. J. Beerling, J. Cao, S. Marcott, V. Masson-Delmotte, M. J. Prather, E. J. Rohling, J. Shakun, P. Smith, A. Lacis, G. Russell and R. Ruedy, Earth System Dynamics, 2017, 8, 577–616.(10)Paustian, K., Lehmann, J., Ogle, S. et al. Climate-smart soils. Nature 532, 49–57 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17174 (11) Hansen, J et al. : Young people's burden: requirement of negative CO2 emissions, Earth Syst. Dynam., 8, 577–616, , 2017
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