Climate Change

Regenerative 21st Century Farming: A Solution to Global Warming
by Tim LaSalle and Dr. Paul Hepperly [Source: Rodale Institute]

"In the FST organic plots, carbon was sequestered into the soil at the rate of 875 lbs/ac/year in a crop rotation utilizing raw manure, and at a rate of about 500 lbs/ac/year in a rotation using legume cover crops.

"During the 1990s, results from the Compost Utilization Trial (CUT) at Rodale Institute—a 10-year study comparing the use of composts, manures and synthetic chemical fertilizer—show that the use of composted manure with crop rotations in organic systems can result in carbon sequestration of up to 2,000 lbs/ac/year. By contrast, fields under standard tillage relying on chemical fertilizers lost almost 300 pounds of carbon per acre per year. Storing—or sequestering—up to 2,000 lbs/ac/year of carbon means that more than 7,000 pounds of carbon dioxide are taken from the air and trapped in that field soil.

"In 2006, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion were estimated at nearly 6.5 billion tons. If a 2000 lb/ac/year sequestration rate was achieved on all 434 million acres of cropland in the United States, nearly 1.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide would be sequestered per year, mitigating close to one quarter of the country’s total fossil fuel emissions. This is the emissions-cutting equivalent of taking one car off the road for every two acres under 21st Century regenerative agricultural management (based on a vehicle average of 15,000 miles per year at 23 mpg; U.S. EPA)."


Organic no-till leads to updating of Farming Systems Trial
by Dan Sullivan [Source: Rodale Institute]

"Earlier this year, Rodale Institute began an aggressive campaign to show how organic farming can fight climate change. Part of that message has been that converting all U.S. agricultural lands to management practices utilizing cover cropping, crop rotation and compost application instead of farming with mineral fertilizers and synthetic pesticides could be the carbon-offsetting equivalent of removing nearly 80 percent of all operational vehicles from U.S. roadways. The Institute believes that the addition of organic no-till would significantly increase that mitigation capacity."
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Organic Agriculture contributes to a low carbon economy
[Source: Fresh Plaza, 6/6/08]

"The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) offers with great consciousness Organic Agriculture as a tool in countering climate change. Organic Agriculture not only mitigates climate change, it also helps farmers to adapt to it."