Gage County
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Beatrice NE 68310
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News Column

Paul C Hay, Extension Educator

More Than One Answer to Carbon

Last week I attended the National Society of Agronomy meetings in Seattle, Washington. I went to these professional meetings to update my skills in cropping system research, soil microbiology research efforts and to get a better understanding of soil carbon. It is healthy at such conferences to have passionate discussion on how we can use information to improve or agricultural production and our environment. There is no question that our world, our life here on earth is changing. There is lots of dispute on whether the increase in carbon dioxide levels are man induced and how and if they could be addressed by future carbon storage efforts.

Dr Lovejoy is a Yale educated Biologist and head of the Heinz Center in Washington D.C., an environmental information and policy center. He delivered a guest lecture on Biodiversity and it's importance to our world in and out of agriculture. He highlighted every major research and non-research based threat to the world identified in the past twenty years. He highlighted natural systems being altered by man. He did not mention or attend the afternoon session on carbon which highlighted the aftermath of Mount St Helen's eruption in 1980. Our federal government re-designated the public land which was part of the 150,000 acres destroyed the Mount St Helen's National Volcanic Monument. The policy statement for the Monument is "where nature will be permitted to recover, unaided by human beings, for the discovery of science." Dr Lovejoy was proud of this effort. The Monument area is an essential desert with a few hardy nitrogen fixing shrubs beginning to sparsely cover the dead trees covered by the thick ash.

Man, in the form of mega-giant Weyerhaeuser, salvage logged 85,000 three-bedroom homes worth of lumber off the land they controlled. The action of the heavy equipment doing the two year salvage job broke up the ash cover. The two-year old Douglas fir seedlings they planted are now 20 feet tall and are on-line for commercial harvest in 2026. It seems to me the about 9.3 million tons of carbon tied up in the new tree crop is a clear discovery of the science.

An interesting note of the trip was the Swedish experiment in soil carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus losses from soils under organic and conventional production. At the Swedish experiment station with relatively thin soils, and considerable rainfall, the organic production system actually lost more nitrogen to the groundwater than conventional systems. The carbon and phosphorus losses were also greater than the conventional system largely due to surface erosion and tillage factors which were greater in the organic system. I am not condemning organic agriculture -as a matter of fact I endorse it and conventional systems adapting more environmental and organic friendly practices. All systems need to adapt to improved management of their practices to reduce environmental impacts.

View other Gage County News Columns & News Letters: http://gage.unl.edu/news/news.htm

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