7gen Bloc

It's a good question. Generally we hear about what not to eat -- beef that emits methane, palm oil that's grown on land that was a tropical rainforest, corn raised on petroleum-based fertilizers. But here's some good news for your diet: Terrestrial carbon sequestration (that's carbon that is stored in the soil) is the best way to buy time in a warming world. Cutting emissions will help, but not as quickly as sequestration. Making sequestration a priority matters, given the critical policy choices that must be made to make it happen as evidence of current, specific climate-change impacts to agriculture and wildlife mounts.

The Rodale Institute's recent call for land-based biological sequestration dovetails with a recently published Worldwatch Institute report on climate change: State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World. In a chapter entitled "Farming and Land Use to Cool the Planet," authors Sara J. Scherr and Sajal Sthapit examine ways to reverse the trend of environmentally destructive agriculture by using carbon sequestration to mitigate climate change.

They argue that food production must be fundamentally restructured to simultaneously preempt and react to the devastating effects of climate change. They confirm the Rodale Institute's contention that reexamining the role of carbon in agriculture is a vital first step in this restructuring process.

Organic agriculture presents an untapped solution, an underutilized carbon sink at the ready. Research indicates that, if the world's 3.5 billion tillable acres could be transitioned to organic agriculture now (and that's a big if), land could sequester almost 40 percent of our current carbon emissions. No other proposed carbon mitigation solution comes close to that potential impact, particularly using existing and readily available technology.

Scherr and Sthapit recommend multiple strategies for carbon sequestration, including organic farming, reduced tillage, use of biochar to aid in revegetation of degraded soils, retaining forests and grasslands as carbon sinks, agroforestry, and perennial cropping to retain more biomass, rotational grazing, and biogas digestion to convert manure into energy and organic fertilizer. They include several good suggestions in ramping up the quest for better perennials, such as looking at more tree crops for food production and finding suitable perennial biodiesel crops.