Finding the real potential of no-till farming for sequestering carbon

The data from the 11 soils show that NT farming increases SOC concentration in the upper layers of some soils but does not store SOC more than PT soils for the entire soil profile. Blanco and Lal stated, “if the SOC pool was measured only within the surface soil (<20 cm), the data could have led to completely different conclusions.” Therefore, the authors strongly recommend that “future studies in SOC sequestration must be done by analyzing the soil profile to about 2-m depth rather than the surface layer only.” Blanco and Lal also indicated that “NT technology offers innumerable benefits to soil and water conservation, but its potential benefits for sequestering SOC on the basis of the data on surface layer only must not be generalized to all soils.”

This project is an ongoing research activity at The Ohio State University and among its next goals is to further scrutinize the potential of NT systems for sequestering SOC across a wide range of soils, topographic, and climatic conditions of the eastern U.S. Corn Belt.

The full article is available for no charge for 30 days following the date of this summary. View the abstract at: http://soil.scijournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/72/3/693

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