Organic Farming increases Global Warming

Glomalin: Hiding Place for a Third of the World's Stored Soil Carbon is a soil "super glue" was mistaken for an unidentifiable constituent of soil organic matter. Rather, it permeates organic matter, binding it to silt, sand, and clay particles. Not only does glomalin contain 30 to 40 percent carbon, but it also forms clumps of soil granules called aggregates. These add structure to soil and keep other stored soil carbon from escaping.

There are conditions, however. Members of the cabbage and spinach families are oblivious to the fungi's courtship. Growing these crops is essentially a fallow period because glomalin production stops altogether. Frequent rotation with more friendly crops is recommended.

Organic farming has two strikes against it in maintaining soil health. To satisfy nitrogen needs, crops require substantial amounts of manure. Yet manure supplies a glut of phosphorous, which shuts down glomalin production. Another complication is the near limitless supply of weed seeds bankrolled in the soil. Plowing digs up and activates seeds, causing self-induced weed outbreaks. Without herbicides, the fallback has to be the plow.

In 1996, Dr. Sarah Wright and colleagues at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service isolated a glycoprotein called glomalin that literally "gums up" the soil rhizosphere (the interface between soil and plant roots) with carbon fixed from the atmosphere. The compound is produced by common soil fungi called mycorrhizae that frequent the roots of many crops.

When Wright removed glomalin from soil samples, the result was a lifeless mineral powder. The soil had lost its tilth - the substance that conveys texture and health. She had inadvertently discovered the fundamental factor of soil welfare, elusive for over 10,000 years. Humic acid, previously thought to be the main contributor to soil carbon, could muster only a tiny percentage of glomalin's carbon-storing capacity in the field.

Another extraordinary finding was that elevated carbon dioxide levels encouraged mychorrizae to work overtime. Working with a consortium of scientists from UC-Davis and Stanford, Wright simulated CO2 projections for the year 2100 and observed ramped up glomalin production, with thriving fungi.

Most importantly, the USDA research demonstrated glomalin's tendency to buildup in the soil. Intensively farmed fields consistently leveled off at 0.7 mg of glomalin per gram of soil, while undisturbed plots saw an increase from 1.3 to 1.7 within three years. In hindsight, the Dust Bowl of the 1930's wasn't a casualty of overfarming, but overplowing.

Conservation tillage maintains the supporting cast needed for soil stability, sparing mycorrhizae the stress of reestablishment every season. Aiming for at least 30% cover on the field, precision equipment gently seeds through crop residues, safeguarding soil against the elements and defending against drought.

Even before Wright's discovery, the National Soil and Water Conservation Society endorsed modern agriculture as the most sustainable in all history. According to the National Crop Residue Management Survey, 37% of corn and 57% of U.S. soybeans are now grown under some form of conservation tillage. Using herbicides and biotechnology, farmers can spray their fields with confidence, sparing produce, blighting weeds, and salvaging soil. Many more are following suit.

El Dorado The secret of the soils and the mystery of the carbon sinks part 2

As we previously noted here. Our current knowledge is ambiguous whether the rest of the CO2 is being detached by oceans or by terrestrial sinks (soil or vegetation) (Baldocchi et al., 1996).Indeed the missing carbon sink around 20% of the gcc is one of the unanswered questions for the IPCC.

Vesicular Arbuscular Mycorrhizal fungi (VAM, or just AM) for its role in phosphorus transport as well as sequestration of massive amounts of carbon in the durable form of glomalin which is the threadlike remains of dead VAM lacing undisturbed soil.
Phosphorous isn't the only thing VAM transports.

Fungal hyphae play a greater role in the spread of bacteria in the soil than was previously suspected. . . For the first time, scientists have been able to prove that bacteria are able to travel through the soil on the mucous membrane of living fungi. . .

As Science daily reports.

“For the bacterium a harmful substance is not harmful,” explains Wick. “It simply breaks down the carbon compounds, producing the energy and substances that it needs to live.” But before it can do this it has to get at its ‘food’. Air and lack of moisture present insurmountable obstacles. “This is why certain pollutants are broken down so slowly in the soil. Often it is not a lack of biochemical capacity, but rather a lack of contacts.” The scientists at the UFZ are therefore studying the paths followed by the bacteria.

Mycelia appear to act as a kind of underground highway for bacteria. This is the conclusion reached by Lukas Wick and his team. In the laboratory experiment they succeeded in demonstrating that the bacteria move through the soil on the mycelium. The ingredients: one pollutant, separating layers made of glass pellets, uncontaminated soil and a bacterium called Pseudomonas putida. The bacteria have to fight their way through all these layers to reach the phenanthrene, their ‘food’. This polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon is a widespread pollutant produced during every combustion process: at petrol stations, in car exhausts, during forest fires, in cigarette smoke and in old municipal gas works.

“We deliberately make the bacteria work their way upwards against gravity so that people can’t say there could be a small amount of water trickling down and carrying the bacteria with it,” says Wick. “We have tried to rule out any doubts and objections from potential critics.” The bacteria made it to the top only in places where there was a mycelium running through the soil. In the identical parallel experiment without a mycelium the bacteria were unable to surmount the barriers. “With this paper we have shown that there is an infrastructure.”

The fungi used in the experiment, Fusarium oxysporum, is not the only one in soil, and the pollution gobbling bacteria studie

When exploring the history of Geochemistry in Russia the first name one comes across is VladimirIvanovich Vernadsky (1862-1945). The Vernadsky Institute for Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry in Moscow is named after him. He is considered to be the father of geochemistry, biogeochemistry,radiogeology and cosmochemistry in Russia. L.Margulis states in the foreword of the English version of Vernadsky’s book The Biosphere that “Just as all educated westerners have heard of Albert Einstein, George (Gregor) Mendel, and Charles Darwin, so all educated Russians know of V. I. Vernadsky”

From 1881-1885 Vernadsky was a student of the physical-mathematical faculty (natural-scientific section) of St. Petersburg University. The most influential of his teachers was V. Dokuchaev, who was a founder of modern soil sciences and of a large naturalist school. V. Dokuchaev became the supervisor of Vernadsky’s master and doctoral theses. Dokuchaev’s integrative approach of considering soil formation as a product of different environmental factors, including the interactions between living and dead matter, might have laid the cornerstone of V. I. Vernadsky’s theory of biosphere. In 1888 V. I. Vernadsky left St. Petersburg to study mineralogy in Munich. He then moved to Paris in 1889 where he worked with Le Chatelier, who helped him to find his dissertation subject in the field of silicate mineralogy. One year later Vernadsky settled in Moscow, where he started a twenty-year professorship in crystallography and mineralogy at Moscow University. In this period, Vernadsky founded a new scientific school detached from soil sciences and mineralogy.

In the interaction between dead and living matter Vernadsky not only focuses on the solid Earth but also emphasizes the effect of living organisms on the composition of the atmosphere. Vernadsky points out that the “gases of the entire atmosphere are in an equilibrium state of dynamic and perpetual exchange with living matter”. He refers to a presentation of J. B. Dumas and J. Boussingault given at a conference at Paris in 1844 when stating that living matter can be taken as an “appendage of the atmosphere”

In his book The Biosphere Besides qualitative aspects of processes in the biosphere, Vernadsky also aims at a quantitative understanding of these processes. The numbers he derives for the quantity of free oxygen on Earth, the global net primary production, or for the total biomass on Earth vary significantly from recent data but the approach of creating global budgets of biogeochemical cycles was very innovative when The Biosphere was written and is still a major subject of present biogeochemical research. Vernadsky uses quantitative considerations in particular to illustrate the effect of the totality of living matter on element migrations on a global scale and to support his idea of living matter as a major geological force on the Earth’s surface. In addition to budget calculations Vernadsky derives an expression for the “kinetic geochemical energy of living matter”. The kinetic geochemical energy of an organism is related to its mass and its speed of transmission.The latter depends on the size of the organism and the optimal number of generations per day and is normalized to the surface area of the Earth. Vernadsky frequently refers to the geochemical energy in The Biosphere especially to emphasize the enormous biogeochemical potential of microorganisms.

As we previously identified in the terrestrial biosphere vegetation accounts for 20% of the carbon sink,the vadose zone the soils and detritus materials 80%.

Environmental groups who have other agendas argue against pastoral farming of livestock due to the emissions of methane.The methanogenic bacteria that inhabit all animals, as well as rice paddies and “conservation wetlands” are not alone in the microbiological biosphere.Other inhabitants are methanotrophic bacteria that inhabit soils.These are consumers of methane, we also observe they respond to increases in atmospheric methane.

These estimated cell-specific CH4 oxidation rates are sufficiently high to allow not only maintenance but even growth on atmospheric CH4 alone.

The constancy of biomass over geological time is a part of the empirical generalizations Vernadsky formulates at the beginning of The Biosphere:

1)During all geological periods there have never been traces of abiogenesis (direct
creation of a living organism from inert matter).

2)Throughout geological time no azoic geological periods have ever been observed.

3a)Contemporary living matter is connected by a genetic link to the living matter of
all former geological epochs.

3b)The conditions of the terrestrial environment during all this time have favored the existence of living matter and conditions have always been approximately what they are today.

4) In all geological periods the chemical influence of living matter on the surrounding environment has not changed significantly; the same processes of superficial weathering have functioned on the Earth’s surface during this whole time, and the average Chemical compositions of both living matter and the Earth’s crust have been approximately the same as they are today.

5) From the unchanging processes of superficial weathering, it follows that the number of atoms bound together by life is unchanged; the global mass of living matter has been almost constant throughout geological time. Indications exist only of slight oscillations about the fixed average.

6) Whichever phenomenon one considers, the energy liberated by organisms is principally (and perhaps entirely) solar radiation. Organisms are the intermediaries in the regulation of the chemistry of the crust by solar energy.

In The Biosphere, Vernadsky extensively discusses the different roles of chemo- and photoautotrophic bacteria in the biosphere and he highlights the importance of anaerobic bacteria in biogeochemical processes occurring in subsurface environments in several sections. The appreciation of the importance of microorganisms in element
transformations at the Earth’s surface is another example of Vernadsky’s scientific foresight.

El Dorado The secret of the soils and the mystery of the carbon sinks

The global transport of carbon (partly in the form of CO2) among the large reservoirs is called the global carbon cycle. Carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere together with the uptake by the terrestrial sinks and oceans governs the carbon dioxide content observed by the global sampling networks. Currently 40-60% of the anthropogenically released carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere. Our current knowledge is ambiguous whether the rest of the CO2 is being detached by oceans or by terrestrial sinks (soil or vegetation) (Baldocchi et al., 1996).Indeed the missing carbon sink around 20% of the gcc is one of the unanswered questions for the IPCC.

The rhectoric of the sustainable carbon neutral society modification experiment is indeed just that. Propaganda from lobbyists and politicians who want us to lock up forests,or reafforestation programmes that which will have adverse daisyworld climatic effects in the future. Indeed increased forestry in non-tropical climates such as NZ have the effect of decreasing the albdeo(reflection of longwave radiation) and INCREASING local temperatures!

In the terrestrial biosphere vegetation accounts for 20% of the carbon sink,the vadose zone the soils and detritus materials 80%.

Here any policies that impact on the biosphere-atmosphere need to account qualitatively for the adverse effects prior to any policy change.ie that will have any equal adverse response.

Here we look at 2 of the mysteries of the vadose zone ,the greatest change mechanism the bacterial transformers 50% of the worlds biomass will be covered in a later post.

It has long been known that soil carbon, aka organic matter, greatly increases soil fertility by making soil nutrients more available to plants. Several processes have been identified related to soil chemistry and texture, the size and shape of soil particles is important too in supporting chemical processes. This is another way that soil carbon is important for fertility since a shortage would reduce the ability of VAM to transport nitrogen.

Vesicular Arbuscular Mycorrhizal fungi (VAM, or just AM) for its role in phosphorus transport as well as sequestration of massive amounts of carbon in the durable form of glomalin which is the threadlike remains of dead VAM lacing undisturbed soil. Phosphorous isn't the only thing VAM transports.

It seems a mighty feat for a microscopic fungus built from threadlike filaments. But collectively, these spindly mushroom relatives help move several billion tons of nutrients out of the soil and into plants each year. . .

"Ignorance (about the movement of nitrogen) limits our understanding ... in what is arguably the world's most important symbiosis," says Yair Shachar-Hill, the lead MSU author on the study. . .

The fungus-plant partnership is one of the planet's oldest and dates back more than 400 million years, when plants began to move out of the oceans and onto land. Plants trade a bit of their sunlight-made sugars for building block nutrients that fungi wring from the soil. Scientists have understood broad outlines of this evolutionary bargain for years, but specific details remained fuzzy, especially those related to nitrogen.

To learn more about nutrient uptake, MSU researchers led by Shachar-Hill, along with collaborators at New Mexico State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture research center near Philadelphia, tagged nitrogen with easy-to-spot atomic markers and then watched as it traveled from soil to fungus to plant roots.

Many had assumed that the fungus would play a modest role. The team found, however, that the fungus acts more like a four-lane highway than a two-track country road in shuttling the nitrogen into plant roots. More than a third of the total nitrogen taken up by the plants came by way of the fungus,

"The really fascinating part is the mechanism underlying the transfer process," says Maria Harrison, a plant biologist at Cornell University's Boyce Thompson Institute and an expert on fungus-facilitated movement of other soil nutrients into plant roots. "Dr. Shachar-Hill and his colleagues were able to show that the fungus acquires the nitrogen from the soil and then links it to carbon and moves this combination molecule towards the plant. Then just before delivery to the plant cell, it unhitches the carbon and releases only the nitrogen to the plant.

There are many implications. Agronomic practices that impede or destroy VAM hugely impact the functional fertility of soil. If the only nutrients available to plants are those in the immediate vicinity of their roots then they can starve in the midst of plenty. This leads to excessive use of fertilizer which is not only an expense that is increasing it is a pollution hazard since excess nutrients end up in ground and surface water.Around 20% of the dark fertile soils of Amazonia are man made,an area around twice the size of the UK.They date to around 2500 years are a product of char and burn agronomy.

"Terra Preta de Indio" (Amazonian Dark Earths; earlier also called "Terra Preta do Indio" or Indian Black Earth) is the local name for certain dark earths in the Brazilian Amazon region. These dark earths occur, however, in several countries in South America and probably beyond. They were most likely created by pre-Columbian Indians from 500 to 2500 years B.P. and abandoned after the invasion of Europeans (Smith, 1980; Woods et al., 2000). However,many questions are still unanswered with respect to their origin, distribution, and properties.

The global carbon cycle has been brought to wide attention due to its importance for the global climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Global Change (IPCC, 2001) recently confirmed that the anthropogenic greenhouse effect is a reality, which we have to deal with in the future. The atmospheric CO2 has increased from 280 ppm in 1750 to 367 ppm in 1999 and today's CO2 concentrations have not been exceeded during the past 420,000 years (IPCC, 2001). The release or sequestration of carbon in soils is therefore of prime importance.

Soil organic carbon is an important pool of carbon in the global biogeochemical cycle. The total amount of organic carbon in soils is estimated to be 2011 Gt C, which constitutes about 82% of the global organic carbon in terrestrial ecosystems (Watson et al., 2000).

Amazonian dark earths have high carbon contents of up to 150 g C/kg soil in comparison to the surrounding soils with 20-30 g C/kg soil (Sombroek, 1966; Smith, 1980; Kern and Kämpf, 1989; Sombroek et al., 1993; Woods and McCann, 1999; Glaser et al., 2000). Additionally, the horizons which are enriched in organic matter, are not only 10-20cm deep as in surrounding soils, but may be as deep as 1-2m (average values probably around 40-50cm)! Therefore, the total carbon stored in these soils can be one order of magnitude higher than in adjacent soils.

Furthermore, the organic matter in the dark earths is persistent since we find these elevated carbon contents even hundreds of years after they were abandoned.The reason for the high stability of the soil carbon is currently under discussion. So-called black carbon was identified as a probable reason for the high stability (Glaser et al., 2000). Further research is necessary to quantify the recalcitrance of the soil carbon over long periods of time and determining techniques for creating such soils through application of black carbon (or called "bio-char). The structural similarity to charcoal led the authors to assume that accumulation or purposeful application of organic carbon from incomplete combustion may have been the primary reason for the high carbon contents and fertility of these soils (Glaser et al., 2001), a theory that had been proposed by Smith (1980).

Thus any policy change,or incentive/disincentive mechanism must include the total kinetic geochemical cycle in the carbon neutral algoritmn if not it should be shredded and recycled immediately.This will I predict, see the demise of the "carbon balance" industry and its associated ambulance chasing salesman such as Al Gore and his "vested interests"