At the 2016 Young Farmers Conference held at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, AppleSeed lead designer Connor Stedman gave a talk on Carbon Farming titled, Regenerative Agriculture for Climate Stabilization. 

In his talk, Connor shares frameworks for understanding the climate crisis and explores in depth the science of agricultural carbon sequestration and the wide range of carbon farming practices utilized around the world.  AppleSeed Permaculture specializes in designing and implementing these regenerative agriculture systems on the ground for farms and working landscapes around the Northeast US.

Watch the lecture below!

By Alastair Bland for NPR.org. Reposted with permission. Full attribution below.

This week, world leaders are hashing out a binding agreement in Paris at the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. And for the first time, they’ve made the capture of carbon in soil a formal part of the global response to the climate crisis.

“This is a game changer because soil carbon is now central to how the world manages climate change. I am stunned,” says André Leu, president of IFOAM — Organics International, an organization that promotes organic agriculture and carbon farming worldwide.

Leu is referring to the United Nations Lima-Paris Action Agenda, a sort of side deal aimed at “robust global action towards low carbon and resilient societies.” On Dec. 1, countries, businesses and NGOs signed on to a series of new commitments under the agenda, including several on agriculture.

Currently, the Earth’s atmosphere contains about 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Eric Toensmeier, a lecturer at Yale and the author of The Carbon Farming Solution, a book due out in February, says the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide levels must be cut to 350 parts per million or lower to curb climate change.

Toensmeier and Leu are among a growing number of environmental advocates who say one of the best opportunities for drawing carbon back to Earth is for farmers and other land managers to try to sequester more carbon in the soil.

“Reducing emissions is essential, but eventually it still gets us to catastrophic climate change,” says Toensmeier, who’s attending the Paris talks on behalf of the group Project Drawdown. “The level of emissions in the atmosphere now is already past a tipping point. That means we have to sequester carbon.”

Las Cañadas is an ecological cooperative in Veracruz, Mexico that’s working to sequester carbon and mitigate climate change while producing food, materials, chemicals. Courtesy of Ricardo Romero/Chelsea Green Publishing

Using photosynthesis, plants draw carbon from the air and deposit it in the soil. And farming is a simple way of growing crops and managing soil that, under the right conditions, encourages the buildup of carbon in the ground. In addition to countering global warming, carbon-rich soil can be more productive and hold water better than soil with lower carbon content.

There are two basic ways for farmers to capture it, says Connor Stedman, an agricultural consultant in the Hudson Valley with the firm AppleSeed Permaculture.

“You can put carbon in soil, and you can put carbon in long-lived perennial plants, especially trees,” says Stedman.

And you can start, according to Torri Estrada, managing director with the Carbon Cycle Institute in northern California, by disturbing the land as little as possible.

In conventional industrial agriculture, the soil is often tilled or plowed to disrupt weeds and prepare the land for planting. But turning the soil this way (or overgrazing animals on rangelands) introduces oxygen to the carbon. The carbon and oxygen then can bond into carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas.

As food production has intensified, between 50 and 80 percent of the soil carbon has been lost around the world, according to researchers at the Ohio State University’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Center.

Gabe Brown grows oats, alfalfa, peas, clover and other field crops in North Dakota. He says that when he bought his land in 1991, his soil’s carbon level registered at a dismal 1.9 percent on average. “It was a tan, lifeless powder,” says Brown, who delivers seminars around the nation on carbon farming and has become a sort of guru of the movement.

But then he decided not to till or plow to boost carbon levels in his soil. And his efforts have paid off. “Now, [the soil] looks like black cottage cheese,” he says, adding that his yields are as much as 25 percent greater than those of conventional farms nearby, and his soil is up to 6 percent carbon on average.

According to Stedman, healthy, undisturbed soil rich in organic matter can contain anywhere from 8 to 20 percent carbon. In addition to minimal tilling and plowing, another way to sequester carbon in soil is to add compost. Cover crops add carbon, too, and also reduce erosion.

But to make a real dent in the carbon dioxide emissions – and climate change — with carbon farming, Stedman says farmers globally would have to deposit on average just over 25 tons of atmospheric carbon into each acre of the Earth’s arable land. That could take decades. And that assumes carbon emissions could also be halted and that all farmers in the world actually participate. Stedman says that, realistically, since only some farmers will be actively trying to sequester carbon in coming decades, it may require depositing much more than 25 tons per acre.

There’s another possible wrinkle in the scheme, says Peter Donovan, a board member of the Soil Carbon Coalition. As carbon is drawn from the atmosphere and into the Earth, the ocean will release some of its own carbon into the air, which could substantially offset the progress of sequestration.

Ecologist Brock Dolman agrees the task at hand is massive.

“Business as usual with conventional agriculture is just contributing to greenhouse gases, soil erosion, ocean dead zones, all of the above,” says Dolman, co-founder of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in northern California, which promotes sustainable agriculture. “But to not move forward with carbon farming … well, somebody would have to tell me what else we are going to do.”

There are signs beyond the Lima-Paris Action Agenda, announced in Paris on Dec. 1, that the carbon farming movement is moving forward.

The Carbon Cycle Institute is working with local governments to teach the basics of carbon farming to growers and ranchers around California.

In France, the Ministry of Agriculture, Agrifood and Forestry has launched an international campaign to increase soil carbon content.

There are other ways to sequester carbon besides agriculture and forestry, such as capturing emissions from power plants and piping the carbon to underground storage spaces.

But Estrada says doing so by farming makes the most sense.

“Photosynthesis and soil has been working for billions of years,” he says. “It’s the longest running [research and development] project around, so why not use the simple, well proven one that we know works?”

Alastair Bland is a freelance writer based in San Francisco who covers food, agriculture and the environment.

This article was originally posted on NPR.org. You can find it at: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/12/07/458063708/carbon-farming-gets-a-nod-at-paris-climate-conference

Follow Alastair Bland on Twitter @Allybland

Click here to see this article which was originally posted by Shane Hardy on rocklandfarm.org.

Our new South field is wrapped around slopes and ridges where plowing nice straight rows can lead to erosion and soil loss in a heavy rain. To solve this problem we used a system called “keyline design” to plot our furrows so each one remains level.

Although our wee little plants are still rather small, visit this dosage I post this picture to show how this new system is working.  The large quantity of rainfall we had Tuesday evening through this morning would normally have caused water to go coursing down the pathways of our raised beds, medications see taking some of our precious topsoil with it.  As you can see in the pathways shown in the photo, water is held along the entire length of the pathways, meaning it will soak deeply into our soil for future use by the plants, and the nutrients and soil will be retained where they are in the field, rather that racing away into the nearest stream.  How exciting when things actually work out like you planned!  Thanks again to Ethan Roland at Appleseed Permaculture for helping us lay this out.
-Shane

Read Shane’s post about Ethan Roland’s visit and more about keyline design at Cropsey Community Farm.

This is a guest post from the Rockland Farm Alliance. AppleSeed Permaculture consulted with their community farm earlier this year to implement a keyline layout for their organic vegetable production CSA.

You may have seen the fence go up around our new south field this winter, more about either on Facebook or in person. And you may have seen the lush cover crops of oats, approved field peas, rye and hairy vetch growing that we planted last fall to improve the soil for this year’s crops. Wednesday of last week was another exciting day for us at Cropsey Community Farm. Ethan Roland, of Appleseed Permaculture, came down to help us lay out our beds using the principles of Keyline Design. It was truly great to work with Ethan, an expert permaculture designer, teacher, and researcher based in the Hudson River Valley.

Ethan Roland of Appleseed Permacuture works with farmer Jose Romero-Bosch.

Jose, Ryan and I witnessed more erosion than we were comfortable with on the north field last year. Our fragile, sandy soil would wash down the pathways between our raised beds during heavy rains, taking nutrients along, and leaving the crops growing near the ridge in the middle of the field to struggle along with less food, humus, and topsoil. We’re not talking landslides here, but over time, this is one of the same processes that is leaving much of the incredibly fertile Midwest of our country with less than four thin inches of dying, drought-vulnerable dirt. Virgin prairie soils that settlers plowed up there were often two feet thick of dark earthen gold.

Maybe that comparison is a little severe, but we were not comfortable with what we saw, and were determined to set up our beds to minimize erosion. After trying to figure out how best to do this on our own, we finally decided to call someone with experience. 

When Ethan showed up, I grabbed a bucket of landscaping flags and his clipboard, and he shouldered his tripod and laser level. The wind was whipping as we trudged up to the field and set up the laser level. We commenced straight away with marking contours in a few spots. Ethan quickly trained Jose and I to use the laser level ourselves, and with his keen eye for the land and experience we laid out the longest contour on the field, as well as a few that crossed the steepest, most erosion-susceptible spots on our hilly south field by lunchtime.

After lunch we went inside and mapped out the contours on paper. Ethan saw four distinct sections to the field. There are two little “bowls,” a ridge, and a corner where the land drops away again in the northwest corner of the field. In each of these sections, we chose a particular contour line, from among the ones we had staked out that morning, to base our plowing and beds off of. Here is a very abridged version of using Keyline Design to lay out a field like ours: you choose a basic contour in a given area so that when you plow or form your beds parallel to that contour, and they inevitable become slightly off contour due to the radius of the curve becoming greater or narrower, the water’s charge down the hill is stopped and directed ever so gently away from valleys and out towards ridges. The idea is that erosion is nearly stopped, water is dispersed more evenly through the field, and substantially more water soaks into the land than before.

This should result in healthier soil, and healthier, tastier crops. I think it will be really beautiful to behold. Though it will make some elements of our job more complex, such as planning where to put each crop since all of the rows will be different lengths, to us this choice was absolutely necessary. So thank you, Ethan for guiding us in this process. We are excited to see our the new field blossoms this year. Keep an eye out for us in the fields. If the ground dries up we’ll be out there real soon.

Shane Hardy, Farm Manager
Cropsey Community Farm