Why doesn't our forests and no till farming qualify ...

[helmsdale]

You have some very good points .
But sometimes land needs to be worked to be productive. Not all land or area is the same

Try convincing a beurocrat of that...

[AlbertaFarmer5]

No you don't.

My math says otherwise.

Take an acre furrow slice of topsoil at 2,000,000 lbs. Having 2.5% OM (50,000 lbs OM per acre).

Add 400 tons of peat or compost at 40% moisture per acre. It is essentially 100% OM, which is why peat soil is called organic soil, it has no mineral component. 480,000lbs of OM per acre are being added. That puts the total OM up to 21% immediately after. It slowly breaks down and will not remain that high, but with no till, and the additional OM added from residue every year thanks to the drastically increased yield, it never gets back to the 2.5%

I don't always add that much, depends on how drastic the problem was to start with.

[grassfarmer]

My math says otherwise.

Take an acre furrow slice of topsoil at 2,000,000 lbs. Having 2.5% OM (50,000 lbs OM per acre).

Add 400 tons of peat or compost at 40% moisture per acre. It is essentially 100% OM, which is why peat soil is called organic soil, it has no mineral component. 480,000lbs of OM per acre are being added. That puts the total OM up to 21% immediately after. It slowly breaks down and will not remain that high, but with no till, and the additional OM added from residue every year thanks to the drastically increased yield, it never gets back to the 2.5%

I don't always add that much, depends on how drastic the problem was to start with.

I don't think peat is really 100% OM - more like 60-70%. Regardless, adding like this comes with it's challenges - how do you upscale it to do it by the quarter section, by a million acres? where does the peat come from? What is the carbon footprint of extracting peat and trucking it to elsewhere? How much lime do you need to add to counter the acidity of peat?

For sure amendments like this is what a lot of prairie farmland could use but it's hard to see how it's achievable even on a farm scale given the size of farms.

I was discussing this with my Dad recently and he was recalling the crop rotation our family used from the mid 1800s until after WW2 when chemical fertilizers became available. Went like this:
Year 1 plow down a legume/grass stand (ie the whole "2nd cut" crop in the fall)
year 2 grow oats then spread 30-40 tons/acre farmyard manure on stubble and plow in.
year 3 grow a root crop (typically turnips, potatoes and kale - a little bit of each grown separately in the same field)
year 4 seed oats undersown with a legume (clover)/grass mix.
years 5-8 graze and occasionally hay.

That was likely done with the addition of slag, lime and later phosphate. In worked fairly well on the scale they were on back then with the numbers of livestock per farm they carried. I'd love to do something like this and get these soils producing to their potential but it's hard to find a way to scale it up.

[Braveheart]

My math says otherwise.

Take an acre furrow slice of topsoil at 2,000,000 lbs. Having 2.5% OM (50,000 lbs OM per acre).

Add 400 tons of peat or compost at 40% moisture per acre. It is essentially 100% OM, which is why peat soil is called organic soil, it has no mineral component. 480,000lbs of OM per acre are being added. That puts the total OM up to 21% immediately after. It slowly breaks down and will not remain that high, but with no till, and the additional OM added from residue every year thanks to the drastically increased yield, it never gets back to the 2.5%

I don't always add that much, depends on how drastic the problem was to start with.

I just wonder what that much peat would do to your soil ph. Might lower it to an undesirable level for a few years.

[jimmy]

Not sure about the tonnages needed or the timescale but you can probably increase OM substantially that way. We had a little mound on our last farm that was insanely productive - something like 300 cow days/acre production from quackgrass. We sampled it and found 14% OM and every other nutrient through the roof. It had been a bedding pack at one time that grew over.

On the payment for carbon sequestration topic I can see merit in paying for good practices - but it works both ways - every tree, wetland and slough a farmer terminates costs them. Every time you "work it black" costs you, every time pasture is converted to crop land it costs you. Payment for zero tillage practices can't be based on historic events as the goal would be to increase sequestration going forward. If you've zero tilled since 1989 you are not increasing sequestration from 2018 to 2019 but another farmer zero-tilling for the first time this year is making a difference.
Not immune on the ranch either as we'd have to keep increasing sequestration year on year to generate value to get paid on. Not so easy to do once you've made the transition from overgrazed to well managed and grazed. You sequester less in a drought, if you're growing cattle feed from annual crops you're in the same boat as the grain farmer in terms of cultivation/fertilization methods. You can increase production better with high legume pastures but that generates more damaging emissions. If you convert crop land to pasture you get paid but if you break it up to go back to grain it's going to cost you.

In short it would be a bureaucratic nightmare and I'm not sure any of us would want to operate within these constraints.

We have a guy in Ottawa at the moment if he read this he could do it. Imagine the thousands of government jobs that could be created down east to get this program running and all the taxes that could be collected off peasants that leaked Co2

[AlbertaFarmer5]

Back on topic. If anyone has any doubts about the the promoters of CO2 schemes being genuine in their mission to cut CO2 emissions and save the world from climate improvement, look no further than the wood burning Drax power plant in Britain. They converted perfectly fine coal fired power plants to burn wood biomass. Which comes from clearcut forests primarily in US and Canada, ground up into pellets, shipped across the ocean, hauled by train into the plant, subsidized generously, and all is done without emitting any CO2 according to the rules, therefore is green energy. At least one former politician who masterminded this is now profiting well from his new private sector job making wood pellets...

[Guest]

Back on topic. If anyone has any doubts about the the promoters of CO2 schemes being genuine in their mission to cut CO2 emissions and save the world from climate improvement, look no further than the wood burning Drax power plant in Britain. They converted perfectly fine coal fired power plants to burn wood biomass. Which comes from clearcut forests primarily in US and Canada, ground up into pellets, shipped across the ocean, hauled by train into the plant, subsidized generously, and all is done without emitting any CO2 according to the rules, therefore is green energy. At least one former politician who masterminded this is now profiting well from his new private sector job making wood pellets...

1.They are co-firing with biomass so they didn't convert 100% as you'd like everyone to believe
2.Some of the coal comes from Australia so lots of co2 burning miles there just like the biomass
3.15% lower co2 emissions overall
4.Nice try

https://sustainablepulse.com/2017/09/11/new-groundbreaking-study-shows-organic-farms-store-more-carbon/#.XNLoYmTmg0M

[AlbertaFarmer5]

1.They are co-firing with biomass so they didn't convert 100% as you'd like everyone to believe
2.Some of the coal comes from Australia so lots of co2 burning miles there just like the biomass
3.15% lower co2 emissions overall
4.Nice try

https://sustainablepulse.com/2017/09/11/new-groundbreaking-study-shows-organic-farms-store-more-carbon/#.XNLoYmTmg0M

As usual, you missed the point completely. In the context of this thread, The bureaucracy has concluded that Burning wood does not emit CO2, Therefore a completely on sustainable practices such as this is now environmentally friendly. Where as farmers in this country Who have made agriculture multiple times more sustainable through no till, Are still being demonized by trolls such as yourself While you simultaneously support deforestation in the name of saving the planet.

As for you link, lots of studies showin , net harm that Organic farming is causing, both CO2, CO2, actual environmental of you might want to broaden your propaganda sources.

After all we al know that summerfallow , intensive tillage are proven methods o building soil OM...

[Guest]

As usual, you missed the point completely. In the context of this thread, The bureaucracy has concluded that Burning wood does not emit CO2, Therefore a completely on sustainable practices such as this is now environmentally friendly. Where as farmers in this country Who have made agriculture multiple times more sustainable through no till, Are still being demonized by trolls such as yourself While you simultaneously support deforestation in the name of saving the planet.

As for you link, lots of studies showin , net harm that Organic farming is causing, both CO2, CO2, actual environmental of you might want to broaden your propaganda sources.

After all we al know that summerfallow , intensive tillage are proven methods o building soil OM...

You managed to fool three people with your rhetoric, well done.
6Co2+6H2o--C6H12o6+6o2
Remember that equation from grade 7?
Most readers see right through your bs, thanks for being so transparent That biomass is sustainably farmed, can you spell renewable? 12-15 yr cycle between tree crops, try to do that with coal
I'm starting to see more tillage and failed crops leaving bare fields on conventional farms due to ineffective chemistry and resistant weeds than most organic farms. Just ask Bayer. The shares are tanking today again reaching 7 year lows
In DEC 2000 they were 55, tonight they are closing around 57. What a poor investment this chemical romance.

[blackpowder]

Perhaps until everyone on Earth is rich enough to stop having children, we will need technology of some kind to make enough food. Otherwise those without will kill those with.
It's not a simple solution of just going organic.

[AlbertaFarmer5]

You managed to fool three people with your rhetoric, well done.
6Co2+6H2o--C6H12o6+6o2
Remember that equation from grade 7?
Most readers see right through your bs, thanks for being so transparent That biomass is sustainably farmed, can you spell renewable? 12-15 yr cycle between tree crops, try to do that with coal
I'm starting to see more tillage and failed crops leaving bare fields on conventional farms due to ineffective chemistry and resistant weeds than most organic farms. Just ask Bayer. The shares are tanking today again reaching 7 year lows
In DEC 2000 they were 55, tonight they are closing around 57. What a poor investment this chemical romance.

I'm surprised I fooled anyone with the abhorent grammar auto correct managed to mangle.

So if the world is ending in 12 years If we don't end all CO2 production. What good does it do to wait for a forest to regrow when we burn the CO2 in the meantime?