Science
Carbon storage offers hope for climate, cash for farmers
The rye and rapeseed that Rick Clifton cultivated in central Ohio were coming along nicely — until his tractor rumbled over the flat, fertile landscape, spraying it with herbicides.
These crops weren’t meant to be eaten, but to occupy the ground between Clifton’s soybean harvest last fall and this spring’s planting. Yet thanks to their environmental value, he’ll still make money from them.
Farmers increasingly have been growing offseason cereals and grasses to prevent erosion and improve soil. Now, they’re gaining currency as weapons against climate change.
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Experts believe keeping ground covered year-round rather than bare in winter is among practices that could reduce emissions of planet-warming gases while boosting the agricultural economy, if used far more widely.
“For too long, we’ve failed to use the most important word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis: jobs, jobs, jobs,” President Joe Biden said in his April address to Congress. One example, he added: “Farmers planting cover crops so they can reduce the carbon dioxide in the air and get paid for doing it.”
Clifton, 66, started growing cover crops several years ago to improve corn, soybean and wheat yields. Then he read about Indigo Agriculture, a company that helps businesses and organizations buy credits for carbon bottled up in farm fields. He signed a contract that could pay about $175,000 over five years for storing greenhouse gases across his 3,000 acres (1,214 hectares).
“If you can get something green on the ground year-round, you’re feeding the microbes in the soil and it’s a lot healthier,” he said, touring a barn loaded with cultivating and harvesting equipment. “And if somebody wants to pay you to do that, it looks to me like you’re foolish not to do it.”
Agriculture generates about 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions: methane from livestock, nitrous oxide from fertilizers, carbon dioxide from machinery.
All industries are under pressure to reduce emissions, primarily by switching to renewable energy.
But farming has something most others don’t: the ability to pull carbon dioxide, the most prevalent climate-warming gas, out of the atmosphere and store it. Plants use it in photosynthesis, their process of making food.
Besides cover crops, promising techniques for carbon storage include reducing or eliminating tillage and letting marginal croplands revert to plains or woods, said Adam Chambers, a U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service air quality scientist.
Agriculture won’t be “the sole solution, but I see it as a solid plank in an overall program to address climate change over the next few decades,” said David Montgomery, a University of Washington geologist.
The National Academy of Sciences estimates agricultural soils could take in 250 million metric tons (276 million tons) of atmospheric carbon dioxide annually, which would offset 5% of U.S. emissions.
Some caution against overselling farmland’s potential. Iowa State University ecologist Steven Hall says that at some soil depths, microbes convert carbon absorbed by cover crops into gas that returns to the atmosphere.
“It may make sense to pay farmers to do this,” he said. “But I would go into it a bit more suspicious that we’ll get a maximum performance on all farms.”
The federal government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars helping farmers make environmentally friendly changes. Since 2005, those actions have produced an eight-fold increase in prevention of greenhouse gas emissions, the NRCS says.
The latest U.S. Census of Agriculture in 2017 found more farmers were switching from conventional soil tilling, a big source of carbon pollution, to reduced or no-till practices. It also recorded a 50% increase in cover cropping over five years.
But the 15.4 million acres (6.2 million hectares) planted in cover crops were just 6.7 % of the land suitable for it.
Biden has ordered the Department of Agriculture to craft a plan for making such practices so common that the U.S. farm industry would become the world’s first to achieve net zero emissions.
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Secretary Tom Vilsack has pledged bigger payments for pulling marginal lands out of crop production to make way for carbon-absorbing grasses, trees and wetlands. He announced $330 million for local climate partnerships and $25 million for testing new ideas.
Supporters say unless the actions are mandatory, which farmers resolutely oppose, more financial incentives will be needed.
The agriculture department is consulting industry groups about tapping the $30 billion Commodity Credit Corp., which helps keeps farm incomes and prices stable, to establish a “carbon bank” that could pump in more funds.
Republican lawmakers say financing carbon storage should be left to rapidly developing private markets.
Indigo Agriculture is among recent arrivals brokering sales of credits for farmland carbon to buyers wanting smaller environmental footprints. Thousands of growers with a combined 2.7 million acres (1.09 million hectares) have signed with Indigo to receive payments for greenhouse gas storage, said Chris Harbourt, head of its carbon program.
The Boston-based company’s agronomists help producers adopt the techniques. It uses farm management data, soil sampling and modeling software to calculate credits, based on volumes of gases pulled underground or prevented from being generated.
IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase and Barclays are among buyers of Indigo’s credits. Farmers currently get $15 for each metric ton ($15 per 1.1 ton) of carbon with payments phased in over several years.
The extra cash is nice but hardly a windfall, said Lance Unger, who recently enrolled 7,500 acres (3,035 hectares) near Carlisle, Indiana. More important is that carbon-sequestering steps also mean bigger yields and profitability from lands packed with organic nutrients, the third-generation farmer said.
“I want to make our farm better for the fourth generation,” said Unger, 33, strolling through corn stubble in a field he now tills more lightly than before. He also uses cover cropping and more efficient fertilizing, which reduces nitrous oxide emissions.
Still, some farmers are reluctant to change habits ingrained over generations. Others wonder whether carbon markets will work.
Pending U.S. Senate and House bills would help farmers get started and provide third-party inspections to verify improvements. The chief Senate sponsor, Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, said attitudes have changed since she unsuccessfully proposed a similar program in 2009.
“Farmers have been hit right in the head with one weather disaster after another. They know the climate is changing,” the Democrat said.
The measures have bipartisan sponsorship and support from industry groups such as the American Farm Bureau Federation. The Environmental Defense Fund is among green organizations backing it.
But an opposing coalition of other environmentalists and small-farm groups says credit markets let corporate polluters outsource carbon reduction instead of mending their own ways.
The critics told Congress that farmers who adopt the newer land management practices could abandon them later. “Without adequate measurement tools or guarantees of permanence, quantifying soil carbon to use in a carbon market becomes a guessing game and does not guarantee actual reductions in greenhouse gases,” they said.
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Bruno Basso, a Michigan State University soil and plant scientist, said farmers are unlikely to resume old ways after seeing how the changes benefit their lands. Carbon storage methods and technology to assess their performance are improving, he added.
The NRCS and Colorado State University continue refining an online system that calculates carbon stored and greenhouse gases prevented through conservation efforts. It’s based on factors such as location, soil types, tillage practices, nutrient applications and crop cultivation.
Such complex data analysis lends credibility to eco-friendly agriculture, once widely associated with “offbeat farmers,” said Keith Paustian, a soil and crop scientist at Colorado State.
“It seems to some degree utopian, but what is best for the planet can also be what’s best for farmers and society,” he said.
China lands on Mars in latest advance for its space program
China landed a spacecraft on Mars for the first time on Saturday, a technically challenging feat more difficult than a moon landing, in the latest advance for its ambitious goals in space.
Plans call for a rover to stay in the lander for a few days of diagnostic tests before rolling down a ramp to explore an icy area of Mars known as Utopia Planitia. It will join an American rover that arrived at the red planet in February.
China’s first Mars landing follows its launch last month of the main section of what will be a permanent space station and a mission that brought back rocks from the moon late last year.
“China has left a footprint on Mars for the first time, an important step for our country’s space exploration,” the official Xinhua News Agency said in announcing the landing on one of its social media accounts.
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The U.S. has had nine successful landings on Mars since 1976. The Soviet Union landed on the planet in 1971, but the mission failed after the craft stopped transmitting information soon after touchdown.
A rover and a tiny helicopter from the American landing in February are currently exploring Mars. NASA expects the rover to collect its first sample in July for return to Earth in a decade.
China has landed on the moon before but landing on Mars is a much more difficult undertaking. Spacecraft must use shields for protection from the searing heat of reentry and both retro-rockets and parachutes to slow enough to prevent a crash landing. The parachutes and rockets must be deployed at precise times to land at the designated spot. Only mini-retro rockets are required for a moon landing, and parachutes alone are sufficient for returning to Earth.
Xinhua said the entry capsule entered the Mars atmosphere at an altitude of 125 kilometers (80 miles), initiating what it called “the riskiest phase of the whole mission.”
A 200 square meter (2,150 square foot) parachute was deployed and later jettisoned, and then a retro-rocket was fired to slow the speed of the craft to almost zero, Xinhua said. The craft hovered about 100 meters (330 feet) above the surface to identify obstacles before touching down on four buffer legs.
“Each step had only one chance, and the actions were closely linked. If there had been any flaw, the landing would have failed,” said Geng Yan, an official at the China National Space Administration, according to Xinhua.
Touchdown was at 7:18 a.m. Beijing time (23:18 GMT; 7:18 p.m. EDT), according to the State Administration of Science. Technology and Industry for National Defense. The distance between Earth and Mars caused a delay for mission control in Beijing to confirm its success.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, in a congratulatory letter to the mission team, called the landing “an important step in our country’s interplanetary exploration journey, realizing the leap from Earth-moon to the planetary system and leaving the mark of the Chinese on Mars for the first time. ... The motherland and people will always remember your outstanding feats!”
NASA Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen tweeted his congratulations, saying, “Together with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity’s understanding of the Red Planet.”
China’s Mars landing was the top trending topic on Weibo, a leading social media platform, as people expressed both excitement and pride.
The Tianwen-1 spacecraft has been orbiting Mars since February, when it arrived after a 6 1/2-month journey from Earth. Xinhua described the mission as China’s first planetary exploration.
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The rover, named after the Chinese god of fire Zhurong, is expected to be deployed for 90 days to search for evidence of life. About the size of a small car, it has ground-penetrating radar, a laser, and sensors to gauge the atmosphere and magnetic sphere.
China’s space program has proceeded in a more cautious manner than the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the height of their space race.
The launch of the main module for its space station in April is the first of 11 planned missions to build and provision the station and send up a three-person crew by the end of next year. While successful, the uncontrolled return to Earth of the launch rocket drew international criticism including from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
China has said it wants to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there. No timeline has been released for such projects. A space plane is also reportedly under development.
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