Back to the Soil

Dan Wolf’s neighbors have been laughing at him since 1997.

That’s when he stopped plowing his wheat fields on the Palouse and started growing no-till crops.

“I was tired of watching all the dirt run down the creek,” Wolf says.

But nowadays, some of the locals’ chatter has died down. Wolf’s shaggy-looking fields produce the same yields as those of his neighbors, there’s hardly any erosion-and he’s helping to save the planet by sequestering carbon in the soil.

No-till farming means not plowing or turning over the soil. Usually, Palouse wheat growers plow their fields before sowing new seeds. But farmers like Wolf use a sophisticated drill that injects both seed and fertilizer into the ground, and only disturbs a few inches of earth. By using this system, Wolf doesn’t introduce a lot of oxygen into his fields. That means microbes don’t break down organic matter as fast, and some carbon is trapped beneath the surface. No-till planting also helps reduce erosion by wind and water because the soil is kept in place by the old roots and stalks of the previous year’s crop.

Wolf and other farmers may soon be paid for their no-till efforts though a government cap-and-trade program. Legislation in Congress seeks to reduce carbon emissions and pay those who take the pollution out of the atmosphere, with the House already passing a bill and the Senate working on another.

The legislation would require carbon emissions to be cut to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. But it’s unlikely that power plants, transportation companies and other industries can cut their emissions this quickly. So the plan would allow those businesses to buy “carbon offsets” or support other carbon sequestration programs.

Alexia Celly is the senior associate in the climate and energy program for the Washington, D.C.-based think tank World Resources Institute. Her organization helped draft the bill. Celly thinks that, because of global warming, a shift to a lower carbon economy is overdue in the United States.

“There is no doubt that this is a pretty fundamental shift,” she says. “The rest of the world has been doing this for 10 years and we are late to the party.”

Celly says under the current legislation, farmers like Dan Wolf could be compensated, but many of the big details aren’t worked out yet.

She explains that what practices will count as carbon offsets and how much those people will be paid are items that have to be worked out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency through the rulemaking process. Celly adds that those agencies will need to come up with a way of policing carbon credits.

Sequestering carbon by using advanced crops is a good idea, but there are so many variables, says Justin Brant, the climate change technical analyst for Washington state’s Department of Ecology. Different soil types, fertilizers and models of farm equipment can all influence the carbon capture process, he says. Who will measure and track all those things?

In addition, farmers may choose to abandon carbon sequestration practices after 10, 15 or 20 years. What then?

“Offsets are a real complicated issue; people have been working on these problems for 10 years and haven’t come up with an answer,” Brant notes. “There need to be permanent reductions in carbon. The management systems will have to last for a long time.”

Figuring out those nitty-gritty details on dirt is Blaine Metting, a product line manager at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland responsible for biological and environmental sciences. He is the principal investigator on a Department of Energy project that studies fundamental processes that control carbon storage in soil. Metting says scientists can model how much carbon is sequestered in certain soil types, with certain practices.

“With what we know, we could start yesterday,” he says. “You just have to have the right political, social and regulatory environment in which to do that.” He adds that many tons of carbon could be sequestered in the soil just by changing agricultural practices.

“At some point, the ecosystems will saturate, but we can at least put back what we’ve taken out from forestry and farming. And that’s a lot,” he explains.

Metting says scientists now are able to examine proteins in the soil and shed light on how carbon cycles in soil with huge machines like mass spectrometers.

“Instead of taking soil apart, now we’re able to look at the soil as a whole,” he says. “We’re trying to figure out what kind of organisms are there, how that relates to the chemistry of the soil and what all that stuff is doing.”

Back in the Palouse, Dan Wolf admits he enjoys digging holes in his field and seeing the worm casts and the spongy texture of his soil. It’s no longer dead hardpan. He’s glad his farmland is healthier now than when he inherited it from his father and grandfather. Wolf has nearly 10 grandchildren who are eager to sow their own crops on this same piece of earth.

It’s the future generations that motivate him now: “We’re here to save the soil, to make our livelihood last a lot longer.”