Organic farms as good as jungle, prairie, and coral reef at storing extra CO 2? I think so.
Where to find an article on how conversion to organic agriculture would restore depleted soil to act as a carbon sink. As it did before being converted to chemical agriculture.
The key question? How much carbon is stored in healthy organic soil? Chemical ag destroyed soil must be near zero.
With the huge land area devoted to agriculture could this reverse global climate disaster all on its own?
If one thinks of photosynthesis as nature's main mechanism to restore the greenhouse gas atmospheric balance to pre-human created combustion related catastrophic change, then that huge land area as a carbon sink might just be the difference that saves us, along with renewable energy replacing fossil, chemical fuel farming, and nuclear.
Prairie soil is 58% stored carbon, according to a Canadian study http://www.agr.gc.ca/pfra/pub/pallande.pdf
In a natural prairie layer after layer of soil can accumulate over time. Just how much carbon can this natural soil store. Or say crop land where organic soil was fed 90% of the biomass of the crop (return the hay, manure, cornstaks, all back in.).
Could it be enough to swing the carbon balance a few percentage points, maybe make a crucial difference? We are talking only slight rises in average temperature over decades. And huge areas of the earth's surface that could store carbon. The healthy soil would also increase agricultural efficiency, decrease land area needed, and improve the quality and lower the chemical toxicity of food.
New water management policy could really help this effort. In order to restore the wetlands and aquifers that farming depends upon, a new sort of dam and levy system on river systems needs to be used.
Many areas drained for agriculture and protected by levees need to become wetlands again. With locks built into levees to let flood waters into these areas and then later let them drain back into the river. Residents can have homes built on concrete barge foundations to cope with flooding as they are doing in the Netherlands.
The wetlands restore the aquifers pumped dry and polluted by chemical agrictlture. Wind pumps can even pump the excess water up into higher and higher wetland areas to bring water to regions that now pump rivers dry, like the Colorado.
Why have flooding damage in northern Caloformia and drought in southern? This would distribute water out and increase the photosynthetic CO 2 absorption.
Natural wetlands are a huge carbon sink. Water is becoming a limiting factor in restoring global climate balance.
