Capturing Carbon

Capturing Carbon. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Carbon. I grew up thinking it was basically what was left over after burning leaves and sticks. But it has become something so much more and in fact has become the basis for volumes of research documents. Patrick Mazza, Research Director for Climate Solutions has just released a new series of documents aimed at Building the Biocarbon Economy. MAZZA: Well I just did this series I call Building the Biocarbon Economy. It's basically about how to build soil and vegetation carbon in agriculture, forestry, use of waste streams, urban development, you know use of the land in a biomass and connecting it with other benefits. So the agriculture is basically rebuilding soil fertility. Even urban development is being looked at and changing the style of some of the new development. Mazza explains bio-economy. MAZZA: What we're calling bio-economy is capturing a lot of the waste streams we have and rechanneling them. The Washington State University Climate Friendly Farming report, that's one interesting idea because that's a recent report, it's just out over the last several months and it begins to look at the different ways we might build up soil carbon and make farming more climate friendly. We will be dedicating the next several Friday reports to this topic and these reports. Mazza says the reports do look at ways to rebuild that biocarbon base. MAZZA: The good news is that we can do that and actually have all kinds of other economic benefits as well so in terms of agriculture, really when we are talking about rebuilding soil carbon what we are talking about is rebuilding soil fertility. In some areas of the dryland we have mined out 30, 40, 50% of the soil carbon since we begun agriculture here over the last century and a half. And so rebuilding soil carbon has some really good aspects for farmers. Mazza discusses various techniques to accomplish that end as well. If you are interested in reading the series you can find them online by visiting harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org