Soil Carbon Capture and Storage: Is It Real and Can It Scale?
Adaptive grazing (AG) involves managing livestock using multiple paddocks to provide short periods of grazing and long recovery periods – roughly mimicking the herd migrations of animals like bison, elk and deer.
We are seeing AG work to create carbon sinks in many different types of soils, with many different adaptations, around the world. We want to find how and whether AG is actually improving ranch ecosystems by measuring 1) carbon stored, 2) water absorbed and retained, 3) populations of fungi, bacteria, wild life and insects and 4) rancher & animal well-being.
Can AG be scaled to create significant reduction of CO2 in the air? At scale, could it slow down climate change?
We want to explore the plausibility of these solutions as a grand challenge – converging many disciplines: soil science, ranching, farming, policy, anthropology, consumer choice, fast food, health, filmmaking, advertising, grocery business, the oil and gas industries, and more.
The oil and gas industries are investing billions of dollars on mechanical carbon sequestration schemes. We want to discover whether they could also achieve their goals of carbon sequestration (and possibly save money) by simply helping ranchers switch to smarter land use practices.
ASU•SOIL CARBON NATION SCIENCE TEAM
Richard Teague, PhD
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Allen Williams, PhD
CO-PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Jason Rowntree, PhD
CO-PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Steve Apfelbaum
CO-PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Russ Conser
Jennifer Hodbod, PhD
Christine Jones, PhD
David Johnson, PhD
Urs Kreuter, PhD
Michael Lehman, PhD
Jonathan Lundgren, PhD
Rebecca Ryals, PhD
Wendy Taheri, PhD
BOARD OF ADVISORS
Jingle Wu, PhD
Charlie Walthall, PhD
Osvaldo Sala, PhD
Tony Michaels, PhD
Gary Dirks, PhD
Phil Christensen, PhD
Jay Fuhrer
FILMMAKER, FUNDRAISER, ORGANIZER
Peter Byck
