December 26, 2008

Organic farming combats global warming … big time

New Findings, from Rodale New Farm Institute.
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. Watch this great video

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.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

These statistics are all that much more upsetting when you consider the entire European Agriculture sector has quietly excused itself from the Kyoto protocol greenhouse gas limits. They have this level of influence in European politics, and they just quietly did it with hardly any debate what so ever.

There was an uproar when the airline and auto industries tried to do the same thing, but somehow food seems sacred and somehow logical to be exempt from these limits.