How the brown stuff (soil, that is) is the great untapped resource to fight climate change
By By Susie Weldon
Get a group of farmers around the table and sooner or later they’ll start talking about the brown stuff. Soil, that is.
As any amateur gardener knows — and as any organic farmer will tell you — it’s the quality of your soil that is the secret to your success as a grower.
Yet, for all that humans have been farming for approximately 10,000 years, there’s a great deal that we still don’t understand about what happens beneath the ground. But we’re about to hear a lot more about soil — because it appears that it could play an enormously important role in mitigating against climate change.
Just as plants can take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, so can soil. And so effectively does it lock carbon into place that it has been described as “one of the great sleepers in the carbon debate”.
Now the Bristol-based Soil Association has presented new evidence that soil’s ability to store carbon is far greater than had been appreciated — and that it is organic farming methods that are the key to dramatically boosting that ability.
In what was described today as an incredibly exciting study, the Soil Association presented the results of the first comprehensive, in-depth analysis of research into how far soil can be used to take carbon out of the atmosphere and fix it in the ground.
Speaking before a packed audience at the Association’s annual conference, held yesterday and today in Birmingham, the study’s author Gundula Azeez, of the Soil Association, said a tenth of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850 was due to soil carbon being released into the atmosphere, mainly through agriculture.
“However, unlike the carbon released from fossil fuels, we have the potential to put carbon back into soil if appropriate farming practices are used,” she said. “The main use of land globally is agriculture. It’s the cause of the problem — and it’s hopefully the solution.”
Her analysis looked at 39 studies comparing carbon levels in organic and non-organic farming across the world. It found the average soil carbon levels were 28% higher in organic farming in the European Union, and 20% higher across the world, than in conventional agriculture.
Azeez said these were very conservative conclusions — the real figures were likely to be very much higher.
But they make it clear that boosting soil carbon sequestration — ie, removing carbon from the atmosphere and fixing it in the soil as humus — would make an immediate and significant contribution to climate change mitigation, she said.
She estimates that adopting widespread organic farming across the UK could offset nearly a quarter (23%) of British agriculture’s official greenhouse gas emissions.
Soil carbon locked into pastureland could also offset some of the methane produced by cows’ burps and farts – provided they’re grass-fed, not grain-fed as often is the case in intensive agriculture.
Yet not only is soil’s role in locking carbon in place being completely overlooked by policy makers worldwide, so too is the damaging effect of releasing carbon from soil, said Azeez — for example, by ploughing up rainforest or grassland to plant grain for cattle.
This is a huge and growing problem, Azeez said: So is there anything consumers can do? She said we should:
- Avoid beef unless it’s British;
- Avoid anything made with vegetable oil — “it’s very likely certainly palm oil”;
- Avoid eating grain-fed animals at all; eat only grass-fed animals.
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