Living on Earth: Harvesting Emissions (Cutting emissions, by changing farming practices.)

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.loe.org/shows/shows.htm?programID=09-P13-00004#feature4

Harvesting Emissions

CURWOOD: Agriculture is responsible for about a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions - more than the transportation sector. About half of those emissions come directly from crop and livestock production, and much of the rest from land clearing and degradation for food production.

Sara Scherr is an economist and head of Ecoagriculture Partners. She wrote an article on agriculture and climate change in this year's State of the World book by the Worldwatch Institute. Ms. Scherr says changing the way we farm could be one of the least painful and most effective ways of cutting emissions.

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CURWOOD: How does tilling the soil increase CO2 emissions and what is no till agriculture anyway?

SCHERR: Well, if you look at all the different places that carbon is stored in the world, it turns out that the third most important sink is actually the world's soils. And the process of conventional agricultural tillage, where you take a plow or other implements and turn the soil around at the beginning of the cropping season – actually every time you do that, you release a large amount of carbon from the soils. So one of the things that's been developed in modern agricultural systems over the last couple of decades is something that's called minimum tillage or even no till systems that really try to not turn the soil around very much. They manage soil quality and they manage the weed problem through other kinds of methods that don't require turning that soil around.

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- http://www.ecoagriculture.org/">Ecoagriculture Partners