LB5C. Stay Current—The Living Skin of the Earth

2024-08-10. Can Dirt Clean the Climate? By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times. Excerpt: Across 100,000 acres in the vast agricultural heartland of Australia, an unusual approach is taking root to slow down the wrecking ball of climate change. Farmers are trying to tap the superpowers of tiny subterranean tendrils of fungus to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and stash it underground. It’s part of a big bet that entrepreneurs and investors around the world are making on whether dirt can clean up climate pollution. They are using a variety of technologies on farmland not just to grow food but to also eat the excess carbon dioxide produced by more than a century of fossil fuel burning and intensive agriculture. Why fungus? Because fungi act as nature’s carbon traders. As they sow their crops, farmers are adding a pulverized dust of fungal spores. The fungus latches on to the crop roots, takes carbon that is absorbed by the plants from the air and locks it away in subterranean storage in a form that may keep it underground for much longer than the natural carbon cycle. The fungal venture, the handiwork of an Australian company called Loam Bio, is among several start-ups to have mobilized hundreds of millions of dollars in investments in efforts to use soil to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere…. Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/10/climate/climate-change-fungus-carbon-australia.html.

2024-06-11. Agricultural Lands Are Losing Topsoil—Here’s How Bad It Could Get. By Nathaniel Scharping, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Good topsoil does not accumulate quickly. Less than a tenth of a millimeter of soil forms per year in some places, though the amount can vary depending on the environment. Compare that to the rate of topsoil erosion in agricultural regions of the United States: around half a millimeter per year, or 5 times as much, according to a recent study in the journal Catena. That imbalance is imperiling our ability to grow food in large swaths of America’s breadbasket. …Croplands see far higher rates of soil erosion than other places, often because tilling leaves soil exposed. It’s in croplands that erosion is most impactful, however. Past studies estimated that erosion costs the United States about $8 billion each year and that globally, it reduces agricultural food production by 33.7 million metric tons per year. Rates of soil erosion have likely worsened over the past decade, and climate change will probably make that trend worse. …Researchers have suggested potential strategies for reducing soil loss. Increasing the use of cover crops, which Basso said act as “an umbrella” for soil by reducing the impact of raindrops, is one. Alley cropping, or planting rows of trees and shrubs in fields to shield soil and hold it in place, is another strategy…. Full article at https://eos.org/articles/agricultural-lands-are-losing-topsoil-heres-how-bad-it-could-get.

2024-06-05. How Soil Symbionts Could Unlock Climate-Smart Agriculture. By Uta Paszkowski, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Rising temperatures and more extreme weather are exacerbating inequalities in global food systems. More than enough food is already produced to feed the global population, but roughly 783 million people worldwide currently experience hunger as a result of systemic inequalities related to gender, geography, conflict, and resources. Warming of 2°C will drive an estimated 189 million additional people into hunger. …Farmers in predominantly high-income countries (and elsewhere, when possible) apply vast amounts of inorganic fertilizers to their fields to ensure high yields. Perversely, however, the synthetic fertilizer supply chain is contributing to the very changes in climate that are acutely harming food production worldwide. For example, synthetic fertilizer application and livestock production together are responsible for up to 70% of emissions of nitrous oxide—a greenhouse gas that is almost 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Thankfully, nature offers a solution that is of increasing interest to scientists. This solution—crop-fertilizing soil microbes—could help to break the cycle of synthetic fertilizer use and its attendant environmental impacts and usher in more sustainable food production systems…. Full article at https://eos.org/opinions/how-soil-symbionts-could-unlock-climate-smart-agriculture.

2024-04-17. How Are Deep Soils Responding to Warming? By Fabrizzio Protti Sánchez, Avni Malhotra, Michael W. I. Schmidt, Cornelia Rumpel and Margaret S. Torn, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Soil ecosystems play fundamental roles in sustaining food and fiber production, improving water quality and availability, sequestering carbon, and providing other societal needs. Climate warming affects the ability of soils to provide these ecosystem services, likely posing broad consequences for food security and the stability of ecosystems belowground and aboveground. To predict and manage these consequences effectively, it is crucial to understand how soil processes respond to rising temperatures. Scientists worldwide have been conducting deep-soil-warming experiments, in which soil layers are deliberately heated to observe how plants, soils, and microbes respond. Recently, though, researchers have recognized the importance of comparing and integrating findings from these experiments to help reveal new insights. The global DeepSoil 2100 network emerged from conversations among soil scientists convened in 2020 by one of us (M.W.I.S.) in response to this need for coordination…. See article at https://eos.org/science-updates/how-are-deep-soils-responding-to-warming.

2024-02-27. Our Breathing Earth: A Review of Soil Respiration Science. [https://eos.org/research-spotlights/our-breathing-earth-a-review-of-soil-respiration-science] By Aaron Sidder, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The ground beneath our feet is exhaling. Steadily and without pause, through a process called soil respiration, plant roots and microbes release carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere. The amount of CO₂ that passes from the soil to the air is significant—almost an order of magnitude greater than human emissions. Computing this flow for the whole planet, and understanding how it may be changing, is complicated and uncertain because of gaps in observational data. Yet the calculation is essential for understanding the global carbon cycle and climate change feedbacks. In a new review paper, Bond-Lamberty et al. summarize the past 2 decades of progress in soil respiration science. In one cited study, researchers evaluated how respiration responds to soil wetted by rainfall. In another, researchers girdled trees, or removed their outer layers, to mimic the effects of insects and tracked how tree stress influenced respiration….

2023-09-26. If earthworms were a country, they’d be the world’s fourth largest producer of grain. [https://www.science.org/content/article/if-earthworms-were-country-they-d-be-world-s-fourth-largest-producer-grain] By ERIK STOKSTAD, Science. Excerpt: According to the first worldwide estimate of the invertebrates’ contribution to crop yields, earthworms add more than 140 million tons of food each year. For wheat harvests alone, that’s roughly equivalent to one slice in every loaf of bread. Earthworms do many things to make soil more fertile. By feeding on dead plant matter, they release nutrients much faster than soil microbes would by themselves. They also improve the physical structure of soil. As worms digest plant matter, they excrete tiny, stable clumps of particles. Together with the earthworm burrows, these aggregates make soil more porous. This allows rainwater to soak in and enables roots to grow more easily. …To calculate how much these silent soil engineers augment food production worldwide, Steven Fonte, a soil and agroecosystem ecologist at Colorado State University, and colleagues combined a global atlas of earthworm abundance with maps of agricultural harvests. They also factored in previous estimates of their enhancement of plant productivity. The team found that earthworms are responsible for nearly 7% of global grain harvests, such as rice, wheat, and corn. The contribution is smaller—about 2%—for legumes, including soybeans and lentils, because these crops can cooperate with microbes to produce their own nitrogen and are therefore less reliant on the worms to make that nutrient available….

2023-07-25. Alien-looking viruses discovered in Massachusetts forest. [https://www.science.org/content/article/alien-looking-viruses-discovered-massachusetts-forest] By Christie Wilcox, Science. Excerpt: Researchers have unearthed a trove of wonders in the soil of a Massachusetts forest: an assortment of giant viruses unlike anything scientists had ever seen. The find suggests this group of relatively massive parasites has an even greater ecological diversity and evolutionary importance than researchers knew. Giant viruses can exceed 2 micrometers in diameter, on par with some bacteria. They can also harbor immense genomes, which reach 2.5 megabases—larger than the genomes of far more complex organisms. …DNA sequencing has long indicated that giant viruses are diverse and abundant elsewhere, too—especially in sediments and soils, which are estimated to host some 97% of all the viral particles on Earth…. See also Science article An entire ecosystem lives beneath scorching hydrothermal vents (2023 August 9).

2023-05-12. Solar Panels Nurse Desert Soil Back to Life. [https://eos.org/articles/solar-panels-nurse-desert-soil-back-to-life] By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Cultivating delicate soil crust in the shade of solar panels might boost the recovery of arid land. Biological soil crusts go by many names. A living ecosystem of cyanobacteria, lichen, moss, and algae, the crusts grow on arid soils on all continents, even Antarctica. Biocrust coats 12% of the planet’s surface and contains most of a desert’s ecological diversity in just the first few centimeters of soil. But the crust is easily broken (even a footstep can crush it), and operations such as ranching and farming have destroyed crust around the world. …In a new study, the researchers claimed that solar farms within the Phoenix metro area could serve as biocrust nurseries for little cost; a large-scale effort could supply enough biocrust to cover most of the fallow farmland in surrounding Maricopa County within 5 years….

2022-07-27. Unearthing the Secret Superpowers of Fungus. [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/27/climate/climate-change-fungi.html] By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times. Excerpt: Some species of fungi can store exceptional levels of carbon underground, keeping it out of the air and preventing it from heating up the Earth’s atmosphere. Others help plants survive brutal droughts or fight off pests. There are those especially good at feeding nutrients to crops, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers. …By one estimate, 5 billion tons of carbon flow from plants to mycorrhizal fungi annually. Without help from the fungi, that carbon would likely stay in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the powerful greenhouse gas that is heating the planet and fueling dangerous weather. “Keeping this fungal network protected is paramount as we face climate change,” Dr. Kiers said. In addition, the biodiversity of underground fungi is a huge factor in soil health, which is crucial to the world’s ability to feed itself as the planet warms.…

2022-04-11. Climate change is killing off soil organisms critical for some of Earth’s ecosystems. By Elizabeth Pennisi, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Lichens can’t take the heat, with disastrous implications for arid places Just as our skin is key to our well-being, the “skin” covering desert soils is essential to life in dry places. This “biocrust,” made up of fungi, lichens, mosses, blue-green algae, and other microbes, retains water and produces nutrients that other organisms can use. Now, new research shows climate change is destroying the integrity of this skin. …in 2013, scientists discovered climate change is changing the microbial composition of biocrusts. A new survey of these organisms in a pristine grassland in Canyonlands National Park in Utah has uncovered a hidden vulnerability of some of the lichens in these crusts. …The U.S. Southwest is rapidly warming, and Canyonlands is no exception, says USGS ecologist Rebecca Finger-Higgens, who led the analysis. Weather measurements over the past 50 years reveal temperatures in that park have increased 0.27°C each decade, and recent summers have been particularly warm. At the same time, almost all the lichens have been waning, particularly the kinds that help convert nitrogen in the air to a form organisms can use, Finger-Higgens and her team report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1967 and in 1996, those nitrogen-fixing lichen made up 19% of the biocrust, even though the percentage did fluctuate from year to year. Since then, that percentage has shrunk to just 5%, and it shows no sign of increasing again.… [https://www.science.org/content/article/climate-change-killing-soil-organisms-critical-some-earth-s-ecosystems]

2022-03-29. Traditional Fertilizers Beat Out Industrial Chemicals in Soil Health Test. By Andrew Chapman, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: …Since the 1960s, the Indian government has subsidized chemical-intensive fertilizers to enhance crop growth. Now, new research from western India has shown that in a head-to-head test of soil properties, organic fertilizer based on Traditional Ecological Knowledge encouraged better soil structure and fertility, even during drought periods. Only about 10%–15% of farms in the region studied use the traditional fertilizer, but studies like this one could incentivize more sustainable agricultural practices.… [https://eos.org/articles/traditional-fertilizers-beat-out-industrial-chemicals-in-soil-health-test]

2021-11-09. Regenerative Agriculture 101. By Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Excerpt: NRDC interviewed more than 100 farmers and ranchers who are building healthy soil and growing climate-resilient communities across the country. …the holistic principles behind the dynamic system of regenerative agriculture are meant to restore soil and ecosystem health, address inequity, and leave our land, waters, and climate in better shape for future generations. …this is not a new idea…. In fact, Indigenous communities have farmed in nature’s image for millennia. “The regenerative agriculture movement is the dawning realization among more people that an Indigenous approach to agriculture can help restore ecologies, fight climate change, rebuild relationships, spark economic development, and bring joy,” says Arohi Sharma, water and agriculture policy analyst at NRDC. …“When we speak with farmers and ranchers focused on regenerative agriculture, they tell us that their notion of ‘success’ goes beyond yield and farm size,” says Lara Bryant, deputy director of water and agriculture at NRDC. “It includes things like joy and happiness, the number of families they feed, watching how the land regenerates and flourishes, the money saved from not purchasing chemical inputs, the debt avoided by repurposing old equipment, and the relationships built with community members.” …when we took animals out of cropping systems (a practice that started with poultry in the 1950s and expanded to beef and pork in the ’60s) and separated them into confined facilities and feedlots, we introduced a host of ethical and ecological problems, including the rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria and harmful algal blooms. But fostering relationships between animals and the land can help cycle nutrients, increase water retention (from the organic matter left behind by animal manure), and curb weed and pest problems without the use of chemicals. —Prioritize Soil Health— While the techniques for caring for the soil vary with the context of each farm, generally, regenerative growers limit mechanical soil disturbance. Instead, they feed and preserve the biological structures that bacteria, fungi, and other soil microbes build underground—which provide above-ground benefits in return…. [https://www.nrdc.org/stories/regenerative-agriculture-101]

2021-01-11. European Colonists Dramatically Increased North American Erosion Rates. By Rachel Fritts, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: …human activities like farming can dramatically accelerate natural erosion rates. The arrival of European colonists in North America, for instance, sped up the rate of erosion and river sediment accumulation on the continent by a factor of 10, according to a new study. An international team of researchers from China, Belgium, and the United States analyzed 40,000 years of accumulated river sediment from sites across North America to determine the natural background rate of erosion on the continent. …During the past century alone, humans moved as much material as would be moved by natural processes in 700–3,000 years, the team reported in November in Nature Communications. “By having this huge compilation [of data] that stretches back many thousands of years, we’re able to contextualize the human impact against that natural geologic variability,” said lead author David Kemp, a geologist with the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan. “It was a surprise to me that the jump was there and that it seemed to be so neatly coincident with European arrival.”…. [https://eos.org/articles/european-colonists-dramatically-increased-north-american-erosion-rates] 

2020-12-04. There’s an ecosystem beneath your feet—and it needs protection, new report says. By Elizabeth Pennisi, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Reach down and scoop up some soil. Cupped in your hands may be 5000 different kinds of creatures—and as many individual cells as there are humans on the globe. That random handful might hold microscopic fungi, decomposing plant matter, a whisker-size nematode munching on the fungi, and a predatory, pinhead-size mite about to pounce on the nematode. One bacterium may fend off another with a potent antibiotic. It’s a whole world of often overlooked biodiversity. Today, on the eve of World Soil Day, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has released its first ever global assessment of the biodiversity in this underground world. …Hidden below ground, these ecosystems seemed immune to aboveground disturbance, Wood says. “For a long time, soil scientists thought that soil microorganisms were so well spread around the world that land management would not harm them,” he explains. “We now know that soil microorganisms can be very specific to very specific habitats and species,” habitats that are rapidly disappearing as farms and cities expand. The report lists a dozen human activities taking a major toll on soil organisms. They include deforestation, intense agriculture, acidification due to pollutants, salinization from improper irrigation, soil compaction, surface sealing, fire, and erosion. “If you pave over a site, you are sealing off an entire belowground ecosystem,” Fierer says. “And that’s happening all over the globe.”…. [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/there-s-ecosystem-beneath-your-feet-and-it-needs-protection-says-new-report]

2020-10-20. Dust Bowl 2.0? Rising Great Plains dust levels stir concerns. By Roland Pease, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Earlier this month, a storm front swept across the Great Plains of the United States, plowing up a wall of dust that could be seen from space, stretching from eastern Colorado into Nebraska and Kansas. It was a scene straight from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when farmers regularly saw soil stripped from their fields and whipped up into choking blizzards of dust. …According to a new study, dust storms on the Great Plains have become more common and more intense in the past 20 years, because of more frequent droughts in the region and an expansion of croplands. “Our results suggest a tipping point is approaching, where the conditions of the 1930s could return,” says Gannet Haller, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah who led the study. …Lambert came across the trend unexpectedly, while reviewing data from NASA satellites that remotely measure atmospheric haze due to smoke and dust. No matter how far back he went in the data, the trend remained. Using a network of dust sensors in the region, Lambert and his colleagues were able to corroborate the satellite data and push the trend back more than 20 years. The findings, reported on 12 October in Geophysical Research Letters, show that across large parts of the Great Plains, levels of wind-blown dust have doubled over the past 20 years. One clue that agriculture is responsible is that the dust levels tend to peak during spring and fall—planting and harvesting seasons, Hallar notes…. [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/dust-bowl-20-rising-great-plains-dust-levels-stir-concerns] 

2020-08-21. Five charts that will change everything you know about mud. By David Malakoff, Nirja Desai, Xing Liu, Science Magazine. Excerpt: …mud—a mixture of fine sediment and water—is one of the most common and consequential substances on Earth. Not quite a solid, not quite a liquid, mud coats the bottoms of our lakes, rivers, and seas. It helps form massive floodplains, river deltas, and tidal flats that store vast quantities of carbon and nutrients, and support vibrant communities of people, flora, and fauna. But mud is also a killer: Mudslides bury thousands of people each year. … humans are a dominant force in the world of mud. Starting about 5000 years ago, erosion rates shot up in many parts of the world as our ancestors began to clear forests and plant crops. Even more sediment filled rivers and valleys, altering landscapes beyond recognition. In some places dams and dykes trapped that mud, preventing fresh sediment from nourishing floodplains, deltas, and tidal flats and causing them to shrink (see graphic below). And industrial processes began to produce massive quantities of new forms of mud—mine and factory waste—that is laden with toxic compounds and often stored behind dams that can fail, unleashing deadly torrents. …Although the Nile carries one of the world’s largest sediment loads to the sea, dams across Africa now block up to two-thirds of the sediment that flowed downstream just decades ago. …Deforestation has increased sediment loads in the Amazon and other South American rivers in recent decades, helping expand the continent’s river deltas by some 16 kilometers per year…. [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/five-charts-will-change-everything-you-know-about-mud] See also four other articles in the sam issue of Science: 

Red mud is piling up. Can scientists figure out what to do with it? [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/red-mud-piling-can-scientists-figure-out-what-do-it]

‘Electric mud’ teems with new, mysterious bacteria [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/electric-mud-teems-new-mysterious-bacteria]

Catastrophic failures raise alarm about dams containing muddy mine wastes [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/catastrophic-failures-raise-alarm-about-dams-containing-muddy-mine-wastes]

A secret hidden in centuries-old mud reveals a new way to save polluted rivers [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/secret-hidden-centuries-old-mud-revealed-new-way-save-polluted-rivers]

2016-02-06. Cover Crops, a Farming Revolution With Deep Roots in the Past. By Stephanie Strom, The New York Times. Excerpt: Mark Anson…, 60, and his two brothers, together with assorted sons and sons-in-law, run Anson Farms, a big commercial soybean and corn operation in Indiana and Illinois. Concern about the soil quality of the family’s fields had nagged at him for some time. “Our corn was wilting when temperatures hit 103 degrees,” he said, and such heat isn’t so unusual in the summer. …What he learned about the benefits of cover crops gave him hope. But to [his brother] Doug, planting some noncommercial crops seemed an antiquated practice, like using a horse-drawn plow. Cover crops had long been replaced by fertilizers. Still, he shared his brother’s concern about their soil. Its texture was different, not as loamy as it had once been, and a lot of it was running off into ditches and other waterways when it rained. So in 2010 the family decided to humor Mark by sowing some 1,200 acres, which Mark describes as highly eroded farmland, with wheat cleanings and cereal rye. …The next spring, Doug had to admit that the soil texture on that strip was better. …But Doug didn’t become a believer until 2013, when the family was grappling with a terrible drought. “In the part of a field where we had planted cover crops, we were getting 20 to 25 bushels of corn more per acre than in places where no cover crops had been planted,” he said. “That showed me it made financial sense to do this.” Now some 13,000 of the 20,000 acres that the family farms across nine counties are planted with cover crops after harvesting, and farmers around them are beginning to embrace the practice. …The practice of seeding fields between harvests not only keeps topsoil in place, it also adds carbon to the soil and helps the beneficial microbes, fungus, bacteria and worms in it thrive. …Cover cropping is still used only by a small minority of farmers. When the Agriculture Department asked for the first time about cover cropping for its 2012 Census of Agriculture report, just 10.3 million acres — out of about 390 million total acres of farmland sown in crops — on 133,124 farms were planted with cover crops. …Before cultivation, Indiana was blanketed in prairie grasses and forest, and the carbon content of the soil was as high as 10 percent in places. Today, after decades of tillage, which moves carbon from the soil into the atmosphere, and monocropping, the level on many farms is below 2 percent…. Cover crops restore organic matter back into the soil, at a rate of about 1 percent every five years….  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/business/cover-crops-a-farming-revolution-with-deep-roots-in-the-past.html

2015-10-09. Symphony of the Soil. Lily Films. Excerpt: …artistic exploration of the miraculous substance soil. By understanding the elaborate relationships and mutuality between soil, water, the atmosphere, plants and animals, we come to appreciate the complex and dynamic nature of this precious resource. The film also examines our human relationship with soil, the use and misuse of soil in agriculture, deforestation and development, ….  [GSS: the trailer at the website is quite educational and inspriational unto itself.]  http://www.symphonyofthesoil.com/

2015-03-09. Farmers Put Down the Plow for More Productive Soil. Erica Goode, The New York Times. Excerpt: …Gabe Brown … a balding North Dakota farmer … is talking about farming, specifically soil-conservation farming, a movement that promotes leaving fields untilled, “green manures” and other soil-enhancing methods with an almost evangelistic fervor. Such farming methods, which mimic the biology of virgin land, can revive degenerated earth, minimize erosion, encourage plant growth and increase farmers’ profits, their proponents say. And by using them, Mr. Brown told more than 250 farmers and ranchers who gathered at the hotel for the first Southern Soil Health Conference, he has produced crops that thrive on his 5,000-acre farm outside of Bismarck, N.D., even during droughts or flooding. He no longer needs to use nitrogen fertilizer or fungicide, he said, and he produces yields that are above the county average with less labor and lower costs. “Nature can heal if we give her the chance,” Mr. Brown said…..  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/science/farmers-put-down-the-plow-for-more-productive-soil.html.

2014-02. A nanoscale look at how soil captures carbon.  Excerpt:  …Soil is a huge component of the global carbon cycle. Organic material in soil, stabilized by interactions with mineral particles, contains about twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. An accurate treatment of soil’s capacity to sequester carbon is thus an essential ingredient in climate models. It’s long been assumed that all mineral surfaces are equally good at stabilizing carbon, so a soil’s carbon-storage capacity is determined by its total surface area. But Ingrid Kögel-Knabner and colleagues at the Technical University of Munich have now laid that assumption to rest. Using nanoscale secondary-ion mass spectrometry (nanoSIMS), a technique for mapping chemical species on a surface, they’ve shown conclusively that organic matter binds to just 20% of the mineral surface area…. http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/10.1063/PT.5.7047. Johanna L. Miller, Physics Today.

2012 July 04. Searing Sun and Drought Shrivel Corn in Midwest. By Monica Davey, The NY Times. Excerpt: Across a wide stretch of the Midwest, sweltering temperatures and a lack of rain are threatening what had been expected to be the nation’s largest corn crop in generations. Already, some farmers in Illinois and Missouri have given up on parched and stunted fields, mowing them over. National experts say parts of five corn-growing states, including Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio, are experiencing severe or extreme drought conditions…Crop insurance agents and agricultural economists are watching closely, a few comparing the situation with the devastating drought of 1988, when corn yields shriveled significantly, while some farmers have begun alluding, unhappily, to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Far more is at stake in the coming pivotal days: with the brief, delicate phase of pollination imminent in many states, miles and miles of corn will rise or fall on whether rain soon appears and temperatures moderate…The driest, hottest conditions have steered clear of some crucial Corn Belt states, including Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and western Iowa, the nation’s most prolific corn producer…. 

2010 January. University of Michigan web page on Land Degradation. 

2008 August 9. Devastating Drought Settles on High Plains. By Rebecca Lindsey, NASA Earth Observatory. Excerpt: Devastating drought has returned to the heart of Dust Bowl country. On the High Plains of northeastern New Mexico, southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and northern Texas, drought has been creeping up since fall 2007. By mid-June 2008, the Oklahoma Panhandle and surrounding areas slid into “exceptional drought,” the most severe category of drought classified by the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center.
Cimarron County, Oklahoma, the westernmost county in the state, is “at the epicenter of the drought,” according to staff climatologist Gary McManus with the Oklahoma Climatological Survey (OCS). The land is occupied by wheat farms, corn fields, and pasture. It’s an area of periodic drought; the Dust Bowl years have not yet faded from living memory.
“The area has been in and out of drought since the start of the decade. Mostly in,” McManus said. “But fall of last year was when it really started to get bad. In some places, this year has been as dry or even drier than the Dust Bowl.” As of early August, the Oklahoma panhandle was experiencing its driest year (previous 365 days) since 1921, according to OCS calculations. Through July, year-to-date precipitation in Boise City, Cimarron’s County Seat, was only about 4.8 inches, barely half of average and drier than some years in the 1930s, the height of the Dust Bowl.
…Viewed from the ground, the situation is equally discouraging. According to Cherrie Brown, district conservationist for the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service in Boise City, subsoil moisture is virtually non-existent. “Any rain that falls is sapped by evaporation in two or three days. Four feet down, there is literally no moisture left in the soil. Recently we were digging as part of a project to decommission a county well, and we dug down to a depth of 7 feet, and there was still no moisture. Even irrigation can’t offset these deficits,” she said. As a result, crops have failed and pasture is severely degraded…. 

Summer 2008. Great Grasslands. Curtis Runyan, Nature Conservancy Magazine. Excerpt: While the Amazon rainforest gets much of the attention, most of the Brazilian land cleared for ranching and farming is in the Cerrado, a vast stretch of grasslands and savanna about half the size of North America’s Great Plains. In recent years more than 50 percent of the region has been cleared or plowed under; only 2 percent is protected.
But in one corner of the Cerrado-the 1,400-square-mile district of Lucas do Rio Verde-The Nature Conservancy is partnering with the local government and all 360 major landowners to help ensure at least 35 percent of their lands are protected as natural habitat, the amount required by Brazilian law…. 

2008 February 29. Transylvania: Welcome to the Future. By Bruce Stutz, OnEarth. Excerpt: The steeply rolling hills of the Transylvanian plateau lie within the gnarled grasp of the Carpathian Mountains, which curve down through Central Europe into the heart of Romania…
“In Transylvania you will see a preindustrial, self-sufficient agricultural system,” Jessica Douglas-Home, the slim, soft-spoken founder and chairwoman of the Mihai Eminescu Trust, assured me when I visited her London office. Since 1997, the trust, partnering at times with the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, and the European Union (E.U.), has worked to restore and maintain the region’s ancient villages, homes, churches, and, especially, agricultural traditions.
The region, Douglas-Home told me, is the very model of an integrated, sustainable world that consumes only what it can replenish, that treads lightly on its environment and leaves barely a carbon footprint behind. “When fuel shortages begin to make things bad for the rest of us,” she said, “Transylvania will hardly have to cough.”
With its small common grazing meadows and forested hilltops, this preindustrial landscape also holds great reserves of biodiversity, where rare wildflowers, insects, birds, reptiles, and amphibians thrive. According to the E.U., some two-thirds of Europe’s threatened and endangered bird species are found on such lands…
The effort to preserve these Saxon lands has become all the more urgent since Romania’s accession to the European Union in January 2007. E.U. regulations designed to standardize and modernize farming methods, milking and dairy production, as well as the breeding, grazing, transport, and slaughter of cattle, have created difficulties for small farmers throughout the E.U., but especially in countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, where subsistence farms number in the millions… 

10 October 2007. NEW FINDING: Organic farming combats global warming É big time. The New Farm — Rodale Institute. By Laura Sayre.Excerpt: Data from The Rodale Institute’s¨ long-running comparison of organic and conventional cropping systems confirms that organic methods are far more effective at removing the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere and fixing it as beneficial organic matter in the soil.
Kutztown, PA. Discussions of global warming in the popular press seldom fail to note its potentially disastrous consequences for agriculture as we know it: more extreme and unpredictable weather, coastal flooding, even the loss of pollen viability for some crop species at higher temperatures all threaten to push the usual unpredictability of farming into the realm of the completely unworkable. But while these threats are indeed grave–and many farmers believe they are witnessing such effects already–researchers at The Rodale Institute¨ have been looking at the problem from the other direction: what impact do agricultural practices have on global warming?
On October 10, The Rodale Institute¨ (TRI), the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PDEP), and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (PDA) signed a memorandum of understanding designed to help answer that question. Twenty-three years of ongoing research at The Rodale Institute Experimental Farm already provides strong evidence that organic farming helps combat global warming by capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide and incorporating it into the soil, whereas conventional farming exacerbates the greenhouse effect by producing a net release of carbon into the atmosphere.
Organic Farming -vs- CO2 Fast Facts
If only 10,000 medium sized farms in the U.S. converted to organic production, they would store so much carbon in the soil that it would be equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road, or reducing car miles driven by 14.62 billion miles.
Converting the U.S.’s 160 million corn and soybean acres to organic production would sequester enough carbon to satisfy 73 percent of the Kyoto targets for CO2 reduction in the U.S.
U.S. agriculture as currently practiced emits a total of 1.5 trillion pounds of CO2 annually into the atmosphere. Converting all U.S. cropland to organic would not only wipe out agriculture’s massive emission problem. By eliminating energy-costly chemical fertilizers, it would actually give us a net increase in soil carbon of 734 billion pounds. 

5 May 2007. Switch to organic crops could help poor. By NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press Writer. Excerpt: ROME – Organic food has long been considered a niche market, a luxury for wealthy consumers. But researchers told a U.N. conference Saturday that a large-scale shift to organic agriculture could help fight world hunger while improving the environment. …Nadia El-Hage Scialabba, an FAO official who organized the conference, pointed to other studies she said indicated that organic agriculture could produce enough food per capita to feed the world’s current population. One such study, by the University of Michigan, found that a global shift to organic agriculture would yield at least 2,641 kilocalories per person per day, just under the world’s current production of 2,786, and as many as 4,381 kilocalories per person per day, researchers reported. …The United Nations defines organic agriculture as a “holistic” food system that avoids the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, minimizes pollution and optimizes the health of plants, animals and people. It is commercially practiced in 120 countries and represented a $40 billion market last year, Scialabba said. …FAO conference is athttp://www.fao.org/organicag/ofs/index_en.htm

15 December 2005. Prairie: Long-Range Forecast. By Candace Savage, Forest Magazine, Winter 2006. Excerpt: In 1960, 3 million acres of land were designated national grasslands, and put under U.S. Forest Service purview. There are twenty national grasslands, all managed by the Forest Service. … the Loess Hills in Iowa, the Mescalero Dunes in New Mexico, the Black Hills Coniferous Forest in South Dakota, the Little Missouri Mountains in Montana-and others in almost every region. Candace Savage’s book Prairie: A Natural History explores these remarkable ecosystems, celebrating this oft-unsung landscape with perspective and affection. …when the Earth is losing species at an average rate of one every twenty minutes-the wide-open spaces of the Great Plains are a landscape of hope. …According to a recent “biological-trends assessment” conducted by a team of researchers from several western universities, a total of about 1.2 million square kilometers (465,000 square miles) of natural grassland has been destroyed in the western United States since the onset of intensive settlement. Of these losses, almost 10 percent-110,000 square kilometers (43,000 square miles), an area half the size of Kansas-were incurred between 1950 and 1990. … the destruction is relentless. In Colorado alone, more than 1,100 square kilometers (420 square miles) of farm and ranch land are lost every year, and the rate is accelerating. … this continuing assault on the prairie ecosystem imposes an escalating stress on species that rely on wild grasslands for their survival. …The cause of prairie restoration has found some unexpected advocates, among them the Iowa Department of Transportation. …What the state does have…is a go-anywhere grid of roads, all of which have vegetated margins. Taken together, these strips add up to about 2,000 square kilometers (roughly half a million acres) of unproductive land that requires mowing, spraying and other regular maintenance. In an attempt to reduce costs in the late 1980s, the transportation authorities began to experiment with the use of native plants, on the assumption that they were adapted to local conditions and could look after themselves. Since then, more than 20,000 hectares (about 50,000 acres) of roadside have been seeded, a little more every year, to either a four-grass mixture-typically big and little bluestem, side- oats grama and Indian grass-or to a colorful assortment of native grasses and wildflowers. The results have exceeded all expectations. In addition to controlling expenses, the flower-rich plantings in particular have become slender oases of life, blooming not only with flowers but also with butterflies. In 2001, for example, researchers found five times as many butterflies and twice as many species in the high-quality restorations as in comparable grassy or weedy ditches…

Fall 2005. Prairie: Home on the Range. By Candace Savage. Forest Magazine. Excerpt: In 1960, 3 million acres of land were designated national grasslands, and put under U.S. Forest Service purview. There are twenty national grasslands, all managed by the Forest Service. …Rangelands-expanses of native grassland that are grazed by livestock-exist only where the prairie has somehow managed to escape the plow, usually because the soil is too dry, too thin, too rocky, or too steep to be suitable for crops. …In some ways, the introduction of domesticated livestock onto the Great Plains was not much of a shock to the ecosystem. Bison and cattle belong to the family Bovidae, and trace their ancestry back to India and China some 2 million years ago. …This is not to say that the introduction of cattle to the Great Plains has been completely benign-it has not. … bison like to throw themselves on the ground and flail around in the dirt, a self-care routine that is thought to coat the skin with dust and offer protection from biting insects. In the process, they wear away shallow bowls, or “wallows” in the earth. By rubbing out the grasses from these hollows, bison create openings for other kinds of plants. The increased diversity of plants available for shelter and food also augments the diversity of insects, birds, and mammals. If the depressions fill with water, they provide seasonal habitat for aquatic insects and water-loving shorebirds. Or at least they used to. Because cattle do not wallow, this dynamic has been lost…. 

18 March 2004. NASA RELEASE: 04-095. NASA EXPLAINS “DUST BOWL” DROUGHT. NASA scientists have an explanation for one of the worst climatic events in the history of the United States, the “Dust Bowl” drought, which devastated the Great Plains and all but dried up an already depressed American economy in the 1930’s. Siegfried Schubert of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues used a computer model developed with modern-era satellite data to look at the climate over the past 100 years. The study found cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean surface temperatures combined with warmer tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures to create conditions in the atmosphere that turned America’s breadbasket into a dust bowl from 1931 to 1939. The team’s data is in this week’s Science magazine.