Someday, the ranches of West Marin could become a battlefield in the fight against climate change through reducing the carbon dioxide in the air. Rangeland soil could become a tool used to sequester atmospheric carbon, a major greenhouse gas.
“Our earliest soil survey results strongly suggested that management can enhance carbon sequestration, which is very important,” said John Wick, director of the Nicasio-based Marin Carbon Project. “Based on that we designed a set of experiments here on my ranch and on the sister site up in the Sierra foothills.”
Wick and, a team of local scientists, ranchers and nonprofit organizations, formed the Marin Carbon Project last year. The Marin Community Foundation recently gave them a $240,000 grant as part of their new “Climate change strategic initiative” that was launched earlier this month.
“The majority of that has gone to set up, execute and begin doing analysis on John Wick’s property,” said Torri Estrada, manager of the foundation’s new initiative. “They are doing controlled experiments with different applications of land management techniques on the ground and demonstrating which of those are carbon neutral, sequester carbon or emit carbon. It’s really basic research.”
For some, the idea that dirt could hang on to carbon for long enough to make a difference to global warming is counterintuitive. But the idea makes more sense when you realize that all soil contains organic matter – and that is roughly 50 percent carbon. All living plants trap carbon in their flesh, pulling it from the air to build new cells. After the plant dies, the carbon-rich stems and roots become part of the soil when they are buried or decomposed.
Some of the carbon that is trapped is prevented from re-entering the atmosphere. “It’s very chemically sticky,” explained Dr. Whendee Silver, a scientist at UC Berkeley who is heading up the Marin Carbon Project’s research. “It can bind onto soil surfaces, it can bind onto other organic matter surfaces. When it does that it’s hard for the microbes to break it down.”
Since the plants vacuum carbon out of the air and bury it under ground, researchers want to see how they can maximize the amount of carbon that is trapped. Traditional agricultural methods actually deplete levels of soil carbon.
“There certainly is certainly the potential to increase soil carbon in many regions and we can say that in Marin confidently,” Silver said. “What we can’t say yet is that we can’t walk into a ranch and say, ‘This is exactly what you should do.’”
This is the question that the Marin Carbon Project is trying to answer. And the methods they use aren’t rocket science – applying compost, rotating pastures and using a different kind of plow are all being studied. So far, they’ve been getting good results.
“This is an amazing model for leadership,” said Estrada. “People came together and put a vision together and are spending the time to commit to something that we thing has a lot of potential but hasn’t been fully demonstrated yet.”
“You’ve got to invest in the tried and true things but you’ve also got to invest in some things that might be a little more risky but have the potential to make huge impacts,” he added.
Someday, this research could lead to a profit for ranchers through “carbon farming” and participating in a carbon market, but today that’s still a long way off.
[Originally broadcast as a news report on KWMR radio news. Click below or go to www.kwmr.org/news to listen to the audio version.]
Carbon Farming by JacobaCharles
