Wild Ones member Adrian Ayres Fisher is sustainability coordinator for Triton College in River Grove, Illinois. She writes about gardening, healthy soil and carbon sequestration, and how we can help solve global warming. Temperate woodlands and prairies can draw down approximately 1000 pounds of carbon per acre per year, but what about the millions of acres of cropland and grass?
In her article Gardening, healthy Soil and Carbon Sequestration she states that practices matter. Over-application of chemical fertilizers, digging up the soil, and leaving the soil bare result in infertile and non-porous earth and thus low carbon retaining soil. But by enhancing the soil with organic matter, using cover crops, and disturbing the soil as little as possible, we can begin to sequester the carbon in our lawns and croplands. Considering there are 55.3 million acres of irrigated cropland and 40 million acres of turf grass in America, we have a lot of potential to sequester more carbon.
Read the full article. Adrian will be one of the speakers at the 24th annual Ecological Landscape Alliance (ELA) conference.
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