Drawing down atmospheric carbon
There are two ways of addressing rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon; reduce the amount of carbon emissions or increase the amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere. Most of our efforts have been focused on reducing emissions. I’d like to shift the conversation to drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The picture above was taken in the corn field near my home showing the hard and cracked soil in this field. The picture below was taken in my garden earlier this spring. I simply turned over a shovel of soil and you can see worms, roots, and soil structure all indicating a healthy soil. These pictures should make clear the differences between the degraded conventional farmland and healthy organic rich soil. My garden soil contains about 9% organic matter, which is refreshed each year with mulch used to suppress weeds and feed the soil. Most Midwestern farmland has been degraded and contains a small fraction of the organic matter it had when it was first farmed.
In our county we often see a decrease in organic matter from 5% to less than 1%. The soil in the farm field is little but dust particles. The surface cracks are an indication of what happens when the soil loses organic matter. It dries out and the surface hardens. This farm soil has no soil structure because it has lost it’s thriving microbial life, the bottom of the food chain. Without worms and fungi there is nothing working to form and hold opens pores, the soil surface becomes a hardened crusted surface soon after plowing and planting.
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