Grass cure to carbon woes

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GRASS is the best cure for our greenhouse-gas woes, says leading Australian soil biologist Dr Christine Jones.

“And the greener, the taller and the more permanent it is, the better it is capturing carbon,” Dr Jones, who helped established the Australian Soil Carbon Scheme, said.

For more than three years, Dr Jones has been crusading for acceptance of grass and other vegetation to help capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Farmers - particularly those with sheep, cattle and crops and who are being painted as net emitters of greenhouse gases - warm to her message.

According the Kyoto Protocols, Australian farmers account for 16 per cent of the nation’s greenhouse gases and cattle account for half of the farm emissions.

Politicians, Dr Jones said, seem more focused on emissions rather than the opportunities for farmers to solve the greenhouse-gas problems.

At the annual Te Mania seminar and workshop at Geelong last week, Dr Jones won over her audience of 70 cattle breeders with the suggestion that farmers had the potential to sequester up to 20 times their on-farm emissions.

But as she conceded, on-farm sequestration of greenhouse gases is not part of the Kyoto Protocols, to which Australia is a signatory.

Dr Jones rejects the notion it would be too difficult and costly for producers to measure and audit the carbon stored in their soil.

“We are already measuring it and US farmers were already trading on the Chicago Board of Trade their ability to capture and store carbon,” she said.

Dr Jones’ soil carbon scheme depends on plants building up the organic content of the soil.

She also advocates replacing conventional fossil-fuel based fertiliser with “biology-friendly” fertilisers in traditional bare fallow systems.

She said when these systems were changed the carbon footprint would be would be reversed, and more carbon would be sequestered than emitted.

As for the density of the pasture, Dr Jones said the taller plants had deeper roots, hence their ability to store carbon at a greater depth.

She said current debate focused too much on using trees to sequester carbon.

“With trees there was a greater risk in storing carbon above ground because over 100 years there was a 100 per cent chance the trees or plantations would being ravaged by fire.” she said.

“Grass is better, at least we will be able to maintain our food production.”