1.Organic agriculture, practiced worldwide, could sequester nearly 40% of current CO2 emissions
2.Peak Soil Has a Simple Fix, But Will We Manage It?
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Organic agriculture, practiced worldwide, could sequester nearly 40% of current CO2 emissions
Biological Farmers of Australia Media Release, 4 December 2009    

"Agriculture is an undervalued and underestimated climate change tool that could be one of the most powerful strategies in the fight against global warming." Rodale Institute*

Organic farming's contribution to ameliorating global warming will be a focus of the Brisbane's Walk Against Warming on Saturday 12th December. Walk Against Warming is part of a global initiative hoping to influence leaders at the UN Climate Change Meeting in Copenhagen to agree on a safe climate future.

Organic farming has the potential to make a major contribution to reduction of greenhouse gases through natural carbon sequestration and reduction of nitrogen-based synthetic fertiliser use.

Australian Certified Organic (ACO), Australia’s premier organic certification body and Wray Organic (organic retailer and winner of the 2009 National Organic Week’s Organic Retailer Award) will host an information stand at King George Square, staffed by the Australian Certified Organic team, where people can learn about the global benefits of organic food and farming.

The Biological Farmers of Australia (BFA) is the parent company for ACO. BFA General Manager, Ms Holly Vyner, says that organic farming is in the front line of defence against greenhouse emissions and that BFA has been lobbying with governments for several years for climate change deliberations to acknowledge the contribution made by organic farming.

"Discussions prior to and at Copenhagen must address the crucial role of organic farming and examine the potential role that it can play in helping stabilise the world’s environment," she says.

Deborah Wray, owner of Wray Organic, agrees that there are several ways in which organic production contributes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.    

"Countless studies have found that organic farming requires only about half the amount of energy required by non-organic farming to produce the same amount of food, because it uses organic matter for crop nutrition instead of energy-intensive synthetic fertilisers," she says.   

"As well, because one of the main principles of organic production is increasing the levels of organic matter in the soil, carbon sequestration takes place, locking carbon back into the soil and reducing the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."

Ms Vyner says that research findings from the Rodale Institute in the USA indicate that a concerted effort to convert to organic farming could have a massive beneficial impact on reducing greenhouse gases.       

"A nearly 30 year trial conducted by the Rodale Institute as reported last year has found that practical organic agriculture, if adopted for the planet's 3.5 billion tillable acres, could sequester nearly 40 percent of current CO2 emissions."

Ms Vyner adds "The agricultural sector is responsible for about seventeen per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gases, with fertilisers accounting for two-thirds of all cropping emissions. Organic certification prohibits the use of nitrogen-based and other synthetic fertilisers responsible for these emissions."

Colman Ridge (director of Greenfest - Brisbane Walk Against Warming event organisers) says he is excited to have the support of BFA at this year’s event.

“When you boil it down, climate change is about health individual, community and economic health, and the health of the planet. Organic food from fantastic, certified regional farmers provides the healthiest choice for those conscious about ‘eating for the environment’,” he says.

To learn more about these and the other environmental benefits of organic farming, visitors to King George Square on 12 December should seek out the Australian Certified Organic Team - just look for the ACO “Bud” logo, the Wray Organic sign - and the friendly folk in ACO bucket hats.

ENDS

References

Tim J. LaSalle, Ph.D., CEO & Paul Hepperly, Ph.D., Director of Research and Fulbright Scholar Rodale Institute Regenerative Organic Farming: A Solution to Global Warming
http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/files/Rodale_Research_Paper-07_30_08.pdf

Learn more at the Australian Certified Organic information stand at Brisbane's Walk Against Warming, Saturday 12 December

Brisbane's Walk Against Warming
From 10am Saturday 12th December

The event will be centred in King George Square, with stalls, food, entertainment and addresses by eminent speakers.

The route of the walk will be across new Kurilpa Bridge and back to King George Square over Victoria Bridge (route maps are available).

More information at www.greenfest.com.au/walk_against_warming / www.bfa.com.au

Media Contacts:

BFA Media Department:           
Jaime Newborn  Ph: +61 (0)7 3350 5716 ext. 222
Holly Vyner +61 (0)7 3350 5716 ext. 233; M: 0431 632 809
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2.Peak Soil Has a Simple Fix, But Will We Manage It?
Amy Westervelt
Solve Climate, Nov 19 2009
http://solveclimate.com/blog/20091119/peak-soil-has-simple-fix-will-we-manage-it

At the Carbon Farming conference in Australia earlier this month, speakers pointed to a problem that has worried environmentalists for about a decade: peak soil.

China is losing soil 57 times faster than nature can replace it, according to John Crawford, a professor at the University of Sydney’s Institute of Soil Sciences. In the United States, conservation practices have helped reduce soil loss, but top soil is still being eroded 10 times faster than it can be replaced, according to the National Academy of Sciences.

This is a concern, not only because it limits the amount of food-producing land, but also because soil and the crops that grow in it can help sequester carbon, so the more of it we lose, the more carbon we leave out in the atmosphere.

The cause of all this soil loss? Ostensibly wind, rain and other natural forces, but industrial agriculture is also partly to blame, particularly the practices of monoculture, overgrazing, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and a lack of cover crops.

When there is no crop residue (leaves, stalks, etc.) or cover crop on fields, the soil is left unprotected and can easily be lifted away by winds and rain. Meanwhile, the application of chemicals to the soil break down its structure over time, causing further erosion.

"Industrialized high-input agriculture can increase [food] production, but it can also contribute to global warming, loss of biodiversity, loss of soil fertility and over-consumption of water," Lars Peder Brekk, minister of food and agriculture for Norway, told the World Summit on Food Security this week in Rome.

"Strategies must therefore be based on sustainable production methods and recognize the role of small-scale agriculture.”

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been warning for nearly a decade that 140 million hectares of high quality soil, mostly in Africa and Asia, would be degraded by 2010 unless better methods of land management were adopted. In 2006, researchers at Cornell University reported that soil around the world was being
depleted at a rate that was 10 to 40 times faster than the rate it was being replenished. Current statistics from Worldometers puts the total amount of arable land lost this year alone to erosion at over 5 million hectares and growing.

When the Cornell study was published, co-author David Pimentel called soil erosion second only to population growth as the biggest environmental problem the world faces and lamented the fact that the problem was being ignored, particularly when the solution was relatively easy.

"Controlling soil erosion is really quite simple," Pimentel said then. “The soil can be protected with cover crops when the land is not being used to grow crops."

Now, experts are promoting such practices not just to save land for more food production, but also to help sequester carbon.

Rattan Lal, director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University, writes in a briefing paper for the Copenhagen negotiations that soil could sequester 3 billion tons of CO2 per year for the next 50 years, equivalent to a reduction of 50 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 by 2100.

The Rodale Institute’s 23-year study comparing organic and conventional farming found that organic grain production systems increase soil carbon 15 to 28 percent and that soil nitrogen in the organic systems increased 8 to 15 percent.

    “Practical organic agriculture, if practiced on the planet’s 3.5 billion tillable acres, could sequester nearly 40 percent of current CO2 emissions,” Rodale Institute CEO Tim LaSalle wrote.

So why haven’t we heard more about peak soil and carbon farming?

In part, LaSalle says, because soil could sequester so much carbon so easily that promoting such a thing could make people drop the idea of cutting emissions.

In the farm bill that passed in 2008, the U.S. government scaled back the conservation reserve program (CRP), which had been paying U.S. farmers to keep grass on their land as a way to reduce soil erosion. The bill capped the acreage in the CRP at 32 million acres, leaving millions of acres that were previously protected out of the program. That land began to be released from the CRP program in September 2009.

Meanwhile, although critics of cap-and-trade legislation have argued that farmers should be exempt from emissions caps, sparking protest from those who don’t want to see the likes of Monsanto getting a free pass on its emissions, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has found that the economic benefits to agriculture from cap-and-trade legislation will likely outweigh the costs.

It still remains to be seen whether the legislation will help address the peak soil problem and provide incentives and opportunities for all farmers to make good on carbon farming or whether it will, as some environmentalists fear, simply give another boost to industrial agriculture.