Article 1.
September 12, 2020

By Dr. Ray Seidler, Cultivate Oregon

Greetings to all “regenerators” and "future regenerators". This is the first in a series about healthy soil, regenerative agriculture, and climate mitigation as it relates to our November 10th and 17th symposium  Enabling Regenerative Agriculture: Getting Paid for Improving Soil Health”, and beyond.  In the News is intended as an educational column to summarize recent and ongoing discussions that are related to the upcoming symposium. The issue of soil health and its nexus with crop production and mitigating global warming is over the last 10 years, perhaps the most studied and the least publicly understood of the natural processes on the planet. It would take at least two full-time scientists to keep up with and adequately write about the emerging topics and issues since there is so much going on. You all can help by sending me emails and materials to fill in what I may have missed. Please use the email heading: “In The News”. Send them to [email protected].

First, let me briefly point you in the direction to answer a common question I get - "Who is Dr. Ray Seidler?" Just go to this link to find out.

Why should we care about a relationship between climate change and agricultural practices? We all need food, right? Today, global warming already impacts significant agricultural and forestry issues. Plants, including crops and forests, are being found at new  latitudes, animal life cycles  highly dependent upon temperature are changing, insect pests including those that cause human and crop diseases are migrating to northern latitudes, water is growing scarce, drought conditions are expanding throughout the world, and weather extremes are more common. Many of us realize that serious action to mitigate climate change can begin today by changing certain agricultural practices that enable carbon sequestration. Farmers and working landowners have the opportunity to assist with the solution to these problems. 

I was disturbed to learn that in the last 60 years the atmospheric CO2 increased from 320 parts per million (ppm) to 415ppm . Climate scientists stated that 400ppm was a clear redline into a danger zone of climate change. Humans did not previously exist the last time the atmosphere contained a similar amount of carbon dioxide!

In 1997, 192 nations came together in Japan and agreed to the Kyoto Protocol, a promise to decrease greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions. That year, global energy-related  CO2 emissions  stood at around 24 billion metric tons. In  2018, it was about 36 billion metric tons of  carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas). With this 50% increase over 21 years, attempts at reducing global CO2 emissions have obviously not been successful largely because of diverse economic, and political issues. In 2019, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) stated "to achieve  world   goals for climate  while maintaining  economic growth, 'negative emissions technologies' (NETs) that remove and sequester carbon dioxide from the change. Storing the carbon dioxide from NETs has the same impact on the atmosphere and climate as simultaneously preventing an equal amount of carbon dioxide from being emitted. Regenerative agriculture is a NET that works, and more people need to know how to implement these practices. This suggestion from the prestigious NAS verifies the viable, accessible, and validated practices of carbon sequestration achieved through regenerative strategies in hundreds of studies throughout the world. For sure we do not yet know everything about what impacts the amounts, and rate of buildup of soil organic carbon with all crops  in all the thousands of soil types, under all weather conditions, but scientists on most continents are working on it.

We know enough now to get fully started in sequestering carbon.  Here is what I know. If just 20 percent of Oregon’s 16 million acres of farm/ranching lands would begin practicing regenerative agriculture, the carbon sequestered will be sufficient to cancel out the entire state’s agricultural emissions even using calculations with the lower recorded carbon sequestration rates for croplands. NETs are being emphasized these days to help mitigate climate change because we are in a climate emergency situation!

Many farmers, ranchers, vintners, orchardists, and others may have a crop to sell and not even know what it is. It’s soil carbon taken from the atmosphere (explained more in our second article of In the News.) And, many city folks don’t realize the difference between soil (with soil organic matter or "SOM") and dirt (without SOM) let alone the significance of this difference. It’s like the difference between life and death. Let’s change this void of information. We have work to do!

The essence of regenerative agriculture is to improve soil health by increasing the amount of SOM. Where does this SOM come from and why does it sometimes stick around and accumulate in the soil? Scientists around the globe are researching this topic and some of the amazing results will soon be shared in this space. Regenerative agriculture consists of scalable practices that can be carried out on a potted plant in our backyards, or on working land crops and forests (farms, ranches, vineyards, orchards, grasslands) that remove gaseous carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and convert that CO2 into healthy plants. The accumulation of plant residues and the associated soil food web organisms improve the biological, physical, and chemical characteristics of soil health, increase soil water holding capacity (better moisture maintenance), and improve soil fertility and stability from erosion processes. This soil organic matter accumulates over time as more carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere during subsequent growing seasons. Everyone can help do their part to mitigate climate change regardless of their scale of activity. The significant biological processes begin whenever invisible water vapor plus invisible atmospheric carbon dioxide combine through the processes of photosynthesis producing visible plants, trees, and shrubs, leaves, branches, roots, and invisible oxygen to breathe.

Soil carbon can also be increased by the addition of leaves, through the addition of kitchen vegetable scraps, wood chips, or by growing cover crops, adding livestock manure, compost, and recycling vegetable-based undesirable/spoiled crop leftovers, and more. Working lands also benefit from increased soil organic matter because of numerous biological, physical, and chemical changes that improve soil health properties. Organic matter in soil along with maintaining a green plant-soil cover reduces substantial topsoil loss from erosion. Biodiversity, or plant variety, is also a key component of a regenerative agriculture practice. Biodiversity is useful in attracting a variety of beneficial insects - both pollinators and predators - and also provide an increased variety of critical soil food web species and nutrients within the soil. Biodiversity of plants and insects makes for healthy soil and healthy crops and increases the ability of soil to sequester carbon. Variety is a good thing, both above and below the soil surface. Below you will find a brief discussion on this topic of biodiversity in a scientific study published a few months ago. See, number 1 in “Recently In The News”, below.

While growing, plant roots excrete microbial “candy”- substances that stimulate the attraction and growth of largely beneficial soil microbes that are in intimate contact with roots. When plants and roots die, they undergo decomposition as do some other soil life forms. Under optimal soil, biological, and physical management conditions (regenerative agriculture) some decaying plant residues return to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The remaining plant residues in the soil may be stored as long term components representing what we call sequestered carbon. This material regenerates and makes the soil “healthy” because soil organic matter (SOM) is the nutritional force that supports a robust living soil community and nurtures the next crop. The large family of plant residues (like humic compounds) persists from years to decades in the soil. The material represents the sequestered carbon (i.e., soil organic matter). These healthy partially decomposed plant residues feed the entire soil food web complement of organisms directly or indirectly. Organic matter is not the only important material in the SOM. It also has a diversity of micronutrients complexed with it including magnesium, manganese, iron, aluminum potassium, and other minerals including nitrogen-containing compounds.

Thank you for reading! Stay tuned for our second part of "In the News." Be sure to sign up for our symposium updates and register for our virtual symposium, Enabling Regenerative Agriculture: Getting Paid For Improving Soil Health on November 10th, and 17th.  We look forward to your attendance at our symposium where you will hear other experts discuss the nexus between regenerative agriculture, climate mitigation, and soil resilience.  

ADDITIONAL RECENT INFORMATION:

1. Scientists at the University of Massachusetts discovered soils  with the simplest variety and smaller numbers of germs did not sequester as much carbon as healthy soils with the highest numbers and greatest variety of germs. How do we get healthy soils and more germs? Increase the soil organic content! This serves as habitat, enduring moisture, and food for soil germs. Once seeds arrive, many of the soil microbes grow in intimate contact with plant roots and together this ecosystem produces healthy soil, nutritious crops and ultimately provides a global food security system, especially for small average farmers and those in undeveloped nations who cannot always afford to purchase or have access to mineral fertilizers and pesticides.
   
   
2. This highly awarded scientist has been called the  “Prophet of Soil”. He says soil should have rights and be protected analogous to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts passed years ago by the U.S. Congress. Dr. Rattan Lal, distinguished University Professor of Soil Science and Director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University received both the Japan Prize in 2019 than the 2020 World Food Prize for his 50 years of studies recognizing his amazing work on global food security and sustainability for the coming 10 billion inhabitants while maintaining an eye on the necessity for mitigating climate change by restoring soil carbon stocks. This amazing scientist will participate  on the first day of our symposium, on November 10, 2020, 5PM Pacific standard time! His presentation theme is, “Putting Science into Action”.
   
   
3. Dr. Lal was asked, “Soil is one of five big carbon sinks (reservoirs) on the planet, and it traditionally held a great deal of carbon. How much has been lost to the atmosphere?
   
   Here are a few of the staggering statistics in quotes directly from Dr. Lal in this recent interview. Between 110-130 billion tons of carbon have been lost from agricultural soils (about over the last 150 years, my comment). This compares with the annual global fossil fuel emissions for each of the last few years of about 10 billion tons of carbon. “Soil can sequester 180 billion tons. Vegetation can take up another 150 billion tons; in total, about 330 billion tons of carbon could theoretically be added back over the next 80 years.  This would draw down the atmospheric carbon dioxide by about 150 ppm.”
   
   Dr. Lal made it very clear, soil by itself, cannot solve the climate problem, but it has to be part of the solution. Soil carbon sequestration is “the most economic, natural, low-hanging fruit in restoring soil."