Blogs & Ecology

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Nature is teaming with busy environmentalists, and nowhere more resourcefully so than in the diminutive world of invertebrates. As if their tootsies weren’t small enough, many of these little folks make it their life’s work to reduce their carbon footprints, recycling and reusing whatever is in their field. Without further ado, then, here are the three of the best. But who’ll take top spot?

Image from Jeff Kubina

Remember this term: carbon-capture farming. While it may not yet have received much attention, this practice, which would consist of paying delta farmers to plant carbon-sequestering crops, could soon become a big business.

Tally up one more reason why planting switchgrass may be a good idea. According to a study conducted by Kristine Nichols, a microbiologist with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory, soils planted with native grasses have significantly higher levels of glomalin, a sugar-protein compound that helps improve soil quality, than soils planted with non-native grasses.

The natural alternative to carbon capture and storage (CCS)

Modern Farming Methods Are Better Than Our Grandparents'
"No-till" or "low-till" cropping systems - increasingly common in large scale traditional agriculture - are superior because they consume less energy, build soil organic matter over time, sequester carbon, and greatly reduce soil and nutrient loss. (The old style moldboard plow behind the mule was actually terrible for the land: with soils deeply turned and broken up with several passes, leading to rapid soil loss and eventually productivity loss for the farm. Such primitive farming practices were a contr...

Here is an apt demonstration of why strictly controlled organic food production methods pose lower risks to human health. It is a frightful sounding tale of deformed vegetables in domestic gardens where "allotment" owners used commercially produced (non-organic) manure to supplement their soil.

Gardeners have been warned not to eat home-grown vegetables contaminated by a powerful new herbicide that is destroying gardens and allotments across the UK.

The chain of events in the UK was roughly as follows...

Timothy J. LaSalle is CEO of the Rodale Institute, a 60-year-old non-profit organization dedicated to researching sustainable farming and educating farmers and consumers about the food we eat. He will be contributing posts to TreeHugger as a guest blogger on an ongoing basis.

Soil bacteria have thumbed their ‘nose’ at antibiotics this week. A surprising study in the journal Science shows that soil bacteria can thrive on antibiotics alone. The bacteria apparently have no problem using our most trusted weapons against them as food. What is worse, these close relatives to human pathogens might serve as a reservoir of resistance to the bacteria that plague humanity.

UK researchers are amending soils with powdered calcium-silicate (concrete dust) to determine if a carbon fix-boost hypothesis is correct: that crops will be induced to bind extra carbon dioxide, reacting it with calcium taken from the concrete dust (in the soil matrix).

This reaction, whether directed by, or simply mediated by plants and/or soil organisms, would sequester more atmospheric carbon than is possible by production of plant tissue. Good for the climate.

Image courtesy of benketaro via flickr

A five-year, $180 million project to revitalize the soils and agricultural sector of sub-Saharan Africa has been launched in Nairobi, Kenya. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa's (AGRA) Soil Health Program will work with 4.1 million farmers to regenerate 6.3m hectares of farmland, which have been degraded by unsustainable farming practices in the last few decades.

"Currently, farm yield in Africa is one-quarter of the global average, and one-third of Africans face chronic hunger," says Dr. Namanga Ngongi, president of AGRA. "We know that the use of high quality seeds, combined with the rejuvenation of A...