Regenerative Agriculture - Part 1

the IPCC tellers we've got fewer than 12 years to completely transform the way our global civilization operates if we're to stand any chance of avoiding their catastrophic social environmental and existential consequences of runaway atmospheric warming we're told we need to reach a net carbon zero position somewhere between 2040 and 2050 which means rapidly eliminating the use of fossil fuels moving predominantly towards renewable energies changing the way we build our homes towns cities and transport infrastructure and transforming the way we feed ourselves so how we doing well according to the International Energy Agency global energy consumption in 2018 increased at nearly twice the average rate of growth since 2010 oil demand rose by 1.3 percent led by the United States natural gas consumption grew by 4.6 percent its largest growth since 2010 again led by the USA but followed closely by China and overall global energy related co2 emissions didn't reduce they actually went up by another 1.7 percent to an historic high of 33 point 1 Giga tons it's just not going to happen is it but what if we've been looking in the wrong direction for the radical short-term solution that we apparently so desperately need what if we've been just a little bit too preoccupied with the second most powerful greenhouse gas in our atmosphere and forgotten to consider the most powerful greenhouse gas well if the answer actually lies in water hello and welcome to just ever think back in 1978 the then US President Jimmy Carter asked the Scripps Institute to advise him on the causes of and solutions to the global warming issue that was by then already becoming very difficult to ignore water vapor is by far the most powerful greenhouse gas in our atmosphere there's about a hundred times more of it up there than there is co2 and it's about seven or eight times more effective at capturing the heat that leaves the surface of our planet but in their response to President Carter the Scripps Institute factored out water vapor and placed all their advisory emphasis on the co2 concentrations in our atmosphere why because they knew that human beings were responsible for the rise in co2 concentrations since pre-industrial times and then it was mainly this rise that was causing the increase in temperatures they also knew that it was still within the ability and control of human beings to bring about the necessary reductions in co2 concentrations as long as the social and political will was there by contrast they stated two main reasons why they felt there was little point in trying to predict or control the effects of water vapor on our warming climate firstly they said that water is such an overwhelmingly dominant force in our global climate systems that it was inconceivable that human beings could possibly have made any significant impact on its mechanisms and influence and secondly they concluded that the movement of water around our planet and the consequent effects of that movement were so hugely variable in both time and physical space that it was practically impossible to create any predictive mathematical modeling that would be of any help anyway so our global leaders made the perfectly rational and pragmatic decision to control what they could control and the focus was placed squarely on carbon dioxide reductions unfortunately despite that apparent focus our collective efforts are reducing our carbon dioxide emissions in the 40 years since that report came out have amounted to nothing short of a Attis trophic failure more recently though there's been a growing realization that we humans do in fact have at least some ability to affect the way that water and water vapor influence our planet's climate this guy is Walter Jenna water is an Australian climate scientist and soil microbiologist and director of healthy soils Australia his research over many years is brought into the firm conclusion that our only hope of short-term climate mitigation is to fundamentally change the way we manage our land which in turn will bring about a radical transformation in the levels of water and carving that our soils are able to retain in April 2018 Walter delivered a lecture at Harvard University on what he calls the soil carbon sponge and I'll leave a link to the video of that lecture in the description box below it's a fascinating presentation based on the principles of something called regenerative agriculture I highly recommend you go and have a look at it but it is two hours and nine minutes long which probably means that not everyone will find the time to watch the whole thing so in this two-part video we're going to offer a potted version of the science that Walter takes us through in his presentation so grab a drink settle in and let's get into it about 420 million years ago our planet consisted of water in the oceans containing the first rudimentary life forms and dry land in the form of rock that had no life on it at all but those rocks did contain essential nutrients like phosphorus calcium zinc and magnesium the rock was made up of particles that were densely packed together and if water hit the surface of those rocks it would simply run off but as it did so it would leach out tiny amounts of nutrients and life in the oceans relied on the leaching of these nutrients for them to use to drive their various basic life processes as always competition for food drove evolution so any life form that could solubilize the nutrients out of the rock instead of waiting for them to arrive in the water found that they had a significant competitive advantage the first life form to manage this was called cytoplasm which together with enzymes formed into long tubes that we know as fungi but fungi didn't get far on their own because they can't generate their own energy only plants can do that using the quite miraculous process that we call photosynthesis plant life in the oceans took the form of blue-green algae so over evolutionary time scales the fungi and the blue-green algae combined in a symbiotic relationship to form what we call lichens and without any competition on the land the lichens were able to spread rampantly as the lichens solubilized the rocks the rock particles got moved apart leaving air gaps and as lichens grew and moved on they left behind organic detritus which filled the gaps between the particles and acted like tiny little bedsprings that detritus could also hold water and so over time through a process called peda genesis the rock was transformed into an absorbent spongy material about two-thirds of which was just thin air this stuff had a far greater surface area available for nutrients and the air gaps meant roots could travel far further down below the earth and that material is of course what we now call soil within about a hundred million years the planet was in a period known as the Carboniferous perming with lush forests teeming with life and once our planet had soil all the elements were in place to produce an evolutionary explosion in plant life from lichens - mosses to ferns through to the seed plants like cycads gymnosperms angiosperms and eventually about 50 million years ago along came the grasses carbon was being drawn out of the atmosphere by the plants and fixed in the soil by the fungi using sugars that they got from the plants in exchange for the carbon and so the symbiosis continued so much carbon was drawn down into the soil that the atmospheric concentrations of co2 went from a starting point of about 8,000 parts per million to only about 100 parts per million towards the end of the period and evolving alongside all of that were the insects and the herbivores fast forward a few hundred million years to our current predicament this is a chart called the Keeling curve it shows atmospheric co2 concentrations based on observational readings taken at Mount a lower in Hawaii since 1958 there's a seasonal pattern you can see the planet gives off co2 in the winter and draws it back down again during the summer predominantly driven by the northern hemisphere simply because that's where most of the ice-free land is located every year plants draw down a hundred and twenty billion tons of carbon into their bio systems trouble is every year the earth 3 emits 130 billion tons of carbon back up into the atmosphere so we've got a deficit of 10 billion tons every year and that's what's causing the graph to go up we also know that the amount of energy reaching the top of our troposphere from the Sun something scientists call incident solar radiation averages 342 watts per square meter that's the energy coming into our planetary system simple logic says that if we want that planetary system to remain at a constant temperature then we need to find a way of radiating the same 342 watts per square meter back out into space the trouble is that the increase in greenhouse gases means we're only actually getting rid of 339 watts per square meter so there's three watts per square meter of warming going on all the time across the entire 510 million million square meters of our planet's surface and that's a lot of warming that extra energy has already caused about one degree Celsius of planetary warming since pre-industrial times and the greenhouse gases that are already up in the atmosphere will continue to absorb energy and heat our planet for a very long time right now there's as much as another degree or so of further warming locked in that we haven't seen yet because of the time lag of the process and the more we continue to pump out excess carbon dioxide into our atmosphere the higher the temperature we lock into our system our current trajectory is towards about 5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100 and there are plenty of videos you can watch or books you can read to find out how bad that would be seriously if you don't know how bad that would be I strongly suggest you find out especially if you've got children so our challenge is not simply to remove the deficit of 10 billion tons of carbon per year but actually to do far more than that in an effort to reverse the extra warming that we're currently locking in that probably means removing more like 20 billion tons of carbon every year it certainly doesn't look like we're going to achieve that in 12 years by cutting out fossil fuels because despite the Herculean efforts of the renewable energy industries we simply are not reducing our global fossil fuel use in fact as we saw earlier we're actually increasing it so what's Walter Jenna's master plan for achieving our short-term goal well according to the United Nations Environment Program or u net the surface area of our planet where plants can carry out the work of fixing carbon into the soil is only about half the size it was some eight to ten thousand years ago and that's not because that land is now covered in cities and human beings that infrastructure actually only accounts for about 1% of the ice-free land surface no it's because in those eight to ten thousand years human agricultural and livestock management techniques have been so misguided and profligate that they've created 5 billion hectares of desert and wasteland out of once fertile soil but walter jenner argues that all that land and all those bio systems can be regenerated simply by copying what nature did when life first got going outside of our oceans in fact he tells us it's as simple as ABC here's how he explains the theory a is for agriculture this is what humans can observe and easily manage above the soil humans dominate this process and manage it to maximize the crop yield but this top bit is only 30 percent of the overall biomass of the system there's another 30 percent of the biomass in the root system and the final 30 to 40 percent is kicked out or actually dated as sugars and amino acids and these are critical to drive the microbial and fungal ecology that makes the springy detritus between the soil particles that we looked at earlier and keep the whole system spongy and absorbent the fungi grow in long filaments called fungal hyphae which create a huge surface area for nutrients to pass between the plants and the microbial life around the roots Jenna tells us that in a healthy soil that can be 25 thousand kilometres of fungal hyphae in a cubic meter of soil and that's twice the diameter of our planet and that microbial ecology includes not just the fungi but bacteria protozoa is acting in my seats nematodes colon Bala earthworms and all the other creepy crawlies all contributing to the constant cycling of nutrients around a healthy soil there's reckoned to be about 10 times the weight of organic life in a healthy soil than the animals living in grazing above it our modern day profit oriented farming practices focused solely on maximizing the crop yield at all costs and so we engage in what Walter Jenner describes as more on techniques the first of these is clearing and burning of the eight billion hectares of primary forests that originally existed on earth human beings have cleared 6.3 billion hectares and only regenerated about 1.8 billion so we're now left with only 3.5 billion hectares and every year we're burning 10% of what's left about 350 million hectares and we also burn about 2 billion hectares of grassland crop stubble and rangelands every year the second more on technique is cultivation cultivation exposes the soil to UV radiation which kills microorganisms and thirdly we over fertilized the lung with nitrates every gram of excess nitrate oxidizes 30 grams of carbon we also irrigate the land which restricts fungal growth and slows productivity we traditionally keep land fallow for periods of time or stencil me to help it recover but in fact this is essentially a starvation regime for the microbes and fungi in the soils no plant growth means no sugars so the soils ecosystem grinds to a halt and last but by no means least we had by asides which basically kill everything in this soil more than 40% of the net global value of Agriculture is invested in these practices and inputs and yet according to walter jenner every single one of these practices results in more and more soil carbon being oxidized back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and as the carbon leaves the soil the fungi have nothing left to trade with the plants which means no more springy detritus between the soil particles no more air gaps for root systems to travel easily through and so the soil collapses back to useless compacted impervious material and we humans are left with dust poles and deserts according to Walter our future literally depends on the BC ratio in other words how much carbon we burn or oxidized back to co2 and how much carbon we fix into the soil to maintain healthy absorbent material for future growth and in part 2 of this video we'll look at how the regenerative agriculture practices that Walter Jenna talks about can manage this balance and we'll discover some of the dividends that could potentially transform our planets temperature and climate see in part 2

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Views: 40,043

Rating: 4.9097457 out of 5

Keywords: regenerative agriculture, Walter Jehne, Carbon Soil Sponge, Climate Crisis, Global Warming, Climate Energency, Act Now

Id: uBngaoG_-6A

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 01 2019

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Part2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMFNqaBXBwo