National Association of Conservation Districts

The Conservation Delivery System at Work –
Developing Cutting Edge Research in Soil Carbon Storage

NACD, USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), state conservation agencies and every conservation district in Iowa, Indiana and Nebraska,( all 215 of them), have worked together with Colorado State University, Natural Resources Ecology Laboratory (NREL) over the last four years to produce a body of information on the storage of carbon in agricultural soils. The Carbon Storage Projects, funded in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and state governments, provide an excellent example of the effectiveness of the Conservation Partnership and delivery system. The products of this research provide a clearer understanding of how agriculture can provide a solution to global climate change while simultaneously improving soil and water quality. It also helps to set a cornerstone in the foundation of a future carbon trading market.

The Importance of Carbon Storage to the Atmosphere and the Soil
The ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuel energy (coal, oil, gasoline) has produced far more carbon dioxide than is necessary to replenish the earth’s current carbon cycle. Through human activity since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have increased 31 percent as reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This large increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other potent greenhouse gases are central to the global climate change debate.

Agriculture and forestry are in a unique position since they both can play a positive role in helping to reduce the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. One way is by sequestering or storing carbon in perennial vegetation (such as plant residues and wood) and by increasing soil carbon in the form of soil organic matter. The latter is accomplished by utilizing conservation practices that add more carbon back to the soil and slow down the rate that carbon would normally be converted to carbon dioxide. Traditional conservation practices such as no-till planting, conservation buffers or land retired in the Conservation Reserve Program or the Wetlands Reserve Program provide annual increases in the amount of carbon that do not biodegrade into carbon dioxide through the microbial decomposition of organic matter.

Many nations of the world have or are in the process of signing the Kyoto Protocol, a document that calls for restrictions on the production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The United States, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, will not sign the Protocol but is pursuing an alternative way in the Administration’s “Clear Skies &Global Climate Change Initiatives”. There is also concern and legislative activity to reduce greenhouse gases in Congress and elsewhere around the country. Several state governments have enacted requirements to regulate greenhouse gases or provide incentives to utilize various forms of bioenergy such as ethanol, methane and biomass conversion to electricity or nutrient management. California has recently raised the bar in this arena by passing a bill that will require car manufacturers to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 2008.

Growing interest in the concept of carbon trading could help countries meet their reduction goals by using a market-driven approach. It is based on the successful model provided by the sulphur dioxide market to reduce acid rain, a trading system among smokestack industries created by the Clean Air Act. Carbon trading would be conducted by those whose emissions exceed desired or mandated levels of carbon dioxide and during a transitionary phase can offset that additional amount by paying farmers or foresters to install conservation practices that will provide annual increases in the amount of carbon stored in the soil or vegetation. Buyers would need to secure sufficient credits to equal the carbon content of the excess carbon dioxide they were emitting each year until they could adopt new technology or lower carbon fuel sources to meet new standards.

The conservation community can embrace a market whose products include reducing carbon dioxide by increasing the organic matter content in the soil. Increased amounts of organic material in topsoil improve the fertility, porosity and tilth, builds a healthy population of beneficial microorganisms and earthworms, all of which improve soil and water quality. A carbon trading market would reward farmers for installing and maintaining the same conservation practices that the Conservation Partnership has been promoting for the past 60 years. It would provide a powerful new incentive through the private sector that would treat carbon as any other commodity, a new crop that could grow simultaneously in the same field as corn, soybeans or any other traditional crop or on land retired in permanent cover.

The Purpose of the Carbon Storage Projects
The objectives of the carbon storage projects that have been completed in Iowa, Indiana and Nebraska were to assess the rates of carbon sequestration that result from conservation practices and to provide tools that allow local land managers to estimate and evaluate the potential of alternative management strategies to store carbon in soils. This was achieved by entering data into the Century EcoSystem Soil Organic Matter Computer Model, developed at Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Once entered and calibrated, the computer model can estimate the current amount of carbon stored in the soil down to the county level. It can estimate the impact of conservation practices on soil carbon. It also provides a very important tool for decision-making with the ability to run “what if?” scenarios with different land management decisions and the resulting impact on soil carbon.

Data were gathered in two stages: a state level assessment of climate, soils, land use and management; and a county level assessment that registered current acreage of installed conservation practices that increase carbon storage and determination of when key agricultural events occurred in each county that would impact soil carbon storage. Scientists from NRCS and CSU conducted the state level assessment with information from various NRCS databases and other sources such as the Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC). The county level data had never been gathered previously and required the full cooperation of the conservation partnership in each state, including NRCS, state conservation agency and conservation districts working together.

These databases also provide an important first step in establishing carbon sequestration baselines and can be used to help determine efficient, cost-effective ways to measure annual changes of carbon on croplands. Within the realms of greenhouse gas reduction and mitigation and carbon storage in soils, a tremendous amount of scientific study is still needed. Establishing a baseline, determining efficient, cost-effective ways to measure annual increments of carbon in cropland and forest and adequate ways to verify contract compliance are just some of the components of a carbon trading market that need to be determined and refined. Federal efforts to help establish a carbon trading market will look to USDA for some of the answers. The Energy Policy Act of 2002, currently in conference committee to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill, would assign carbon storage research to the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and improving methods to measure, monitor and verify carbon levels to NRCS.

Establishing a Partnership With DOE
The U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) was an essential funding partner in the Carbon Storage Projects. Before the first Carbon Storage Project was started in Iowa, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and NRCS co-funded an effort from 1996 to 1998 to conduct a feasibility study and organize a team of NRCS and CSU scientists. George Bluhm, NRCS National Meteorologist, (now retired) led the project for NRCS and Keith Paustian was the lead scientist for CSU. The study concluded that the Century computer model was the appropriate tool to estimate baseline levels of soil carbon and was robust enough to estimate the impact of land management decisions on carbon sequestration. NRCS assigned John Brenner, Air Quality Cooperating Scientist, to work with Dr. Paustian in Fort Collins in 1997.

The Iowa Carbon Storage Project needed substantial funding support. NRCS and NACD approached DOE in 1997 and explained the importance of the project and how the conservation delivery system could help to gather the data. DOE could also benefit from the project by having the results reported to DOE to satisfy its responsibility under the Energy Policy Act of 1992 to assess all sectors of the economy with respect to emissions of greenhouse gases and their ability to mitigate the buildup of greenhouse gases. Over the next four years, DOE funded a substantial portion of the Projects conducted in Iowa, Indiana and Nebraska.

The Partnership in Action
The Iowa Conservation Partnership agreed to serve as the pilot effort to conduct the Carbon Storage Project. The NRCS State Office served as the technical advisor to oversee the gathering of county-specific data. A new survey instrument, the Carbon Sequestration Rural Appraisal, was developed to gather the specific acreage of conservation tillage, land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program, conservation buffer practices and dominant management practices such as drainage, irrigation, crop rotations, tillage methods, fertilization and historic land uses. Each of Iowa’s 100 conservation districts agreed to provide the local data. In many cases, the district convened a special meeting, inviting the oldest farmers in the county to try to get benchmark dates as specific as possible for such events as the approximate year that most farmers were using commercial fertilizer and the point at which conservation tillage was in common use.

On the national level, NACD provided administrative and promotional services by coordinating with the State Conservation Partnership and paid each district and the state association upon completion of their respective tasks. The Iowa Association of Conservation Districts conducted an information and education effort to district officials and staff and to local media about the importance of the project. NRCS planned and presented a training session for district conservationists on the technical aspects of collecting the data and coordinated the transfer of data from districts to CSU. NACD also provided national publicity about the Project
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When the scientific team at Fort Collins was ready to begin a study for the State of Indiana in the Spring of 1999, several lessons had been learned from Iowa’s pilot effort that allowed the data gathering process to proceed smoother and faster. NACD and NRCS continued to communicate with DOE in Washington, DC to assure continual funding. The Indiana State NRCS Office, with cooperation from Perdue University and NRCS Air Quality Cooperating Scientists, presented an orientation for district officials and staff and technical information for district conservationists via satellite downlink at several locations around the state simultaneously. Data was collected from Indiana’s 92 conservation districts in just a few months and the Indiana Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts provided coordination and an information outreach program. NRCS added two more scientists to the team at CSU to help enter the data into the Century program.

By the end of 2000, the CSU/NRCS team was ready to begin the first stage of the Nebraska Carbon Storage Project. Interest in global climate change and carbon trading had grown and through LB957 (2000), the Nebraska State Government agreed to administer the second stage of data gathering utilizing the State’s 23 natural resource districts and NRCS with the same established procedures. Funding was secured through the Nebraska Environmental Trust (a State entity) as well as several other organizations. The final report for the Nebraska Project was completed in March 2002.

Results
Some overall conclusions from the Iowa, Indiana and Nebraska Carbon Storage Project Final Reports include the following:

• Agricultural soils in Iowa are estimated to be sequestering 3.1 million metric tons (MMT) of carbon at present (using 1998 as the base year), mainly through the adoption of conservation practices. That is the equivalent of 11.3 MMT of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere. This amount is equivalent to 16.7% of Iowa's 1997 fossil fuel emissions.
• Indiana cropland soils are shown as a small carbon sink prior to 1990 and continue to sequester carbon over time. These soils in 1999 removed 0.77 MMT of carbon (~2.8 MMT of carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere mainly through the adoption of conservation practices. Net carbon emissions from cultivated organic (i.e. peat and muck) soils offset much of the gains in carbon on mineral soils, thus reducing the overall soil carbon sink.
• Nebraska cropland soils have also been sequestering soil carbon over time. These soils in 2000 removed 1.28 MMT of carbon (~4.7 MMT of carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere mainly through the adoption of conservation practices. Nebraska rangeland has the potential to sequester 5 MMT of carbon (18.4 MMT of carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere over a 20-year period through the adoption of grazing management practices on areas identified as being in poor or fair condition.

The 60 million acres of cropland represented by these studies are sequestering over five MMT of carbon annually. To illustrate the impact conservation practices are having, these three states are removing the equivalent amount of carbon that is being released from the burning of 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline annually!

Recently, the CSU/NRCS team cooperated with DOE’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado to utilize the Iowa Century model to run scenarios on a project to determine how much corn stover (crop residue) could be removed from fields without degrading erosion control and carbon content. DOE is conducting research on the utilization of corn stover as feedstock for the production of ethanol. New bioengineered enzymes are capable of converting virtually any cellulosic biomass, although their production readiness is currently being refined. The Century model provides an important tool to help determine the optimal amount of residues that could be used as feedstock without creating erosion or soil productivity problems.

Through the Carbon Storage Projects, the conservation delivery system has demonstrated its effectiveness in gathering and transferring data at the local, state and national levels and working with partners to produce important information that could produce opportunities for agriculture to play an important role in solving a global environmental problem and improving soil quality as well.

For additional information on the Carbon Storage Projects, call John Brenner at 970-491-5799 or email at jbrenner@nrel.colostate.edu .

Article written by Gerald Talbert, independent consultant, who served as NACD’s Project Coordinator on the Iowa and Indiana Carbon Storage Projects.