The Dirty Secret Behind Soil Carbon Sequestration

One big benefit that changing in farming practices brings to the table is the reduction of the use of chemical and associated run off and increasing biodiversity by keeping living plants and insects, birds, snakes mice etc etc. I don't know if measuring the carbon in the living organisms, and the food web that lives off a rich soil and supporting the whole food chain above right up to top predators has come into the equation but that is carbon sequestered too. Also the impact on retaining water in the land by increasing organic matter content. I have heard for an increase organic matter of 1% organic matter, between 20-25000 gallons of water per acre can be held on the land. So by keeping the land covered and building rich soils you also have a lot more photosyntheses going on. Feeding a greater range of biodiversity and this also increases transpiration from the plants cooling the land instead of re re-radiating heat from bare ground. The increased quality of the food and more $$ to the farmers is an additional win too. Too bad the governments don't have programs to help farmers transition to more biological practices for carbon sequestration, increasing biodiversity, reduction of toxic chemicals on the land and in the water while producing nutrient dense foods. Seems like a win win program. Bayer has deeper pockets that mother nature though.

I absolutely could not agree more with Chris' statement on how it is often people who are saying "everyone should cover crop or invoke no-till practices" that don't actually farm... It was refreshing to hear the acknowledgment of the complexities that exist surrounding carbon sequestration and current farm management systems. Cheers

PLEASE SOMEONE SHOULD HELP ME WITH OR ON HOW TO CALCULATE OR MEASURE CARBON SEQUESTRATION IN SOIL

Alit of this becomes even worse in gardening dig or not? Just my own bodys power used but alot of the science is about if you are useing machines.

soil carbon is hard to measure because it's constantly being utilized by the ecosystem, trying to look at it from a different angle the ozone opens up to let radiation in to process the carbon/pollution in the atmosphere land and ocean all while trying to maintain a balanced livable entropy in the atmosphere land and ocean due to fact that the ecosystem is eroded by man made operations and natural disasters, the ecosystem captures carbon but it gives it back in correct usable forms of carbon

I can't find "Figure 7 Afforestation, reforestation, ..." in an IPCC report. It seems to have been cut and pasted from Vivideconomics 2020 report 'An investor guide to negative emission technologies and the importance of land use' which was based on Fig. 14 by Fuss et al 2018 Environ. Res. Lett. 13 063002.

CO2 is irrelevant. What is really important are functioning biosystems. These biosystems are responsible for the mild climate we had on this planet until now. So regenerative agriculture (using animals) is our only chance to overcome the climate crisis - but not because of the C sequestration per se but because a soil with high organic matter percentage enables the biosystem to function well, enables the longevity of the vegetation which in turn prevents reradiation from the surface of the soil (preventing vastly the GH-effect irrespectable of the GHG in the atmosphere) and and the same time through transpiration and water cycling is cooling the planet.

Sugar might just be the ticket. Sugar and a reflective additive we can see as it's being processed by the soil. A measure of calories a meter of soil can consume over a fixed period of time on a scale relative to temperature should correlate very succinctly with overall carbon exchange and therefor carbon storage. Sort of in the way we can find the rest of a triangle with a single line, and an angle. It just so happens that sugar is a highly subsidized, readily available, and highly renewable product that can be deployed over the millions of acres of land needed to sequester a statistically significant amount of atmospheric carbon, which undoubtedly a serious firm would need to confirm before justifying investment in the process. We should also celebrate in unbridled jubilation that Sugar happens to coincidentally be the fuel needed to breed, accelerate, and globally proliferate that carbon basement... of all terrestrial Life. +1 if you see what I did there. Unfortunately a cultural system that adequately supports the development of this kind of 'public work' undermines the scarcity economy at its core and the 'motivation of poverty' would need to be replaced with the motivation to escape one of these carbon farms. Which would likely need to replace all entitlement services as an AIO solution that magnifies unrealized human potential rather than ridiculing and diminishing it as the life of a sub human. I have a strong inclination, based on close contact with copious amounts of information, that this could however, be done in a way that would increase the GDP of some states in the US that aren't historically considered 'highly productive'. In a counter intuitive way, spreading out and increasing distributed efficiency can be organized to produce gains. Consolidation in many ways is accelerating the carbon crisis. This is counter intuitive for many. Yet seems to hold up. It is better in the model to spend more on supporting carbon farms that fund entitlements through providing unskilled yet gainful work, than it is to consolidate the process into an automated carbon farm for example. The costs exponentially grow with too many unsolvable variables. At scale the dirty solution of just using human hands the sun, and sugar, ends up costing less than the infrastructure to support a consolidated model. And empowering the productivity of vastly more people through gainful participation in the economy ends up causing runaway exponential productivity in the model in comparison. The thriving traditional families that these low production states desperately want can move in a Hectare or two at a time. Slowly and comfortably rebuilding the natural landscape. Spreading the traditions and values of those low population agrarian cultures. And connecting them to modernity and representation rather than trying to label them outdated. The process is so simple that unskilled child labor and a picture based instruction manual are all that are needed. A simple family operated carbon farm can be incredibly profitable at this point in history. Sugar can theoretically end poverty and the carbon crisis at the same time. Put that in your 64oz Sluprie and suck it. Making America Great Again like it was in the 50's but where the bulk of the working class is employed as Family Carbon Farmers, is horrifically and ironically, the right answer. Or maybe, Make America Green Again, if you wanted to hijack the momentum of a juxtaposed political movement of the same abriviation, that's probably how I would do it. Green MAGA hats and an appeal to the bible belt to put Families to work their highly qualified agrarian wings in the gainful rehabilitation of North American carbon-based ecosystems. Drastically accelerating their GDP growth models in the process... Sorry, what do I know? I'm just an Internet Hobo and you could just be a trash bin I decided to yell at. What could I possibly know about basements? Let alone the Rhizosphere. Anyone have a dollar for a burger? I get a little hangry sometimes. Well a lot of the times... Do I know you?