Carbon Farmers of America, LLC

OUR GLOBAL WARMING and climate change problem is caused by excess quantities of greenhouses gasses altering the optical characteristics of the world’s atmosphere. Of all the greenhouse gasses that concern us, carbon dioxide is the most significant. Where does it come from? We must understand the fundamentals of problems or we will never be able to solve them. With understanding we will appreciate how we have been, and are being, blinkered.

Originally all carbon dioxide comes from volcanoes, and that source will be pumping it out into the air long after mankind has gone. This delivery of carbon dioxide has been consistent for a few billion years. Admittedly there has been a few hiccups along the way when some areas of the Earth would experience excessive volcanic activity. Over eons the surface ecology evolved to stash it away at the same rate as it discharged from the world’s volcanoes. Equilibriums became established. Humans, unfortunately are digging up the stash, dumping it back in the air and putting the whole system out of balance.

Getting down to fundamentals. When you light a ﬁre you burn “something”, and what you burn was once some form of plant or animal structure. It was alive, and the chemistry of life is both built on, and is totally dependent on the chemistry of the element carbon. It is the basic material of all living things. The carbon atom has the unique ability to chemically link itself, to itself infinitely, and also to link to a whole range of other elements. These links form never-ending chains and structures, sometimes of astounding complexities. The original energy used to form these complex carbon compounds is always, and has always been, the energy of sunlight absorbed on plant leaves by photosynthesis.

When the remains of living things are buried beneath the ground, and out of contact with air for many millennia, chemical reactions stabilize and the once living things become fossils. The fossil materials that concern us in our problem of Global Warming are coal, oil, natural gas and sometimes peat. When any of these fossil forms re-emerge on the surface to be burnt for their energy or alternatively manufactured into ultimately degradable products, the carbon in them is converted back into atmospheric carbon dioxide. This increases the total carbon content of our planetary biosphere.

By extracting and using fossil carbon materials we are adding carbon to the biosphere that has been in storage and out of circulation for countless millions of years. As a direct consequence carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rise and greenhouse warming is exacerbated.

On the other hand, when we burn wood we are simply shifting carbon that is already in the biosphere, from one form to another; from wood to carbon dioxide. Then when timber regrows, the process is reversed; carbon dioxide is converted back to wood. Greenhouse gas levels are unchanged.

Deep ice core drillings at Vostok on the Antarctic continent show conclusively that in the 400,000 years before the massive mining of this buried fossilized carbon material, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were surprisingly consistent. In that entire period, levels never once exceeded the levels that we had rapidly climbed to by the late 1900s. There is more information on the Vostok research results in the next chapter, along with reports on other research that shows pre 1980 carbon dioxide levels not being exceeded for as far back as twenty-two million years.

Global Warming is the problem we face. As such there are two forms of non-atmospheric carbon placement that concern us. The ﬁrst of course is in the fossil forms. (Limestone is also a fossilized form of carbon, but is not particularly relevant to our current Global Warming problem.)

The second storage form that concerns us in determining a solution to greenhouse warming however, is much more dynamic. It is the mass of carbon residing in our world’s soils and in our world’s living biology. And what then becomes of supreme importance is that we can massively and easily increase that quantity. That will solve half the problem.

Prior to the advent of the industrial revolution our requirement for energy for transport was satisﬁed by the horse, and what it ate. For power, the water wheel to grind our ﬂour, and wood to supply us with heat. Animal skins, plant ﬁbres and wood were our plastics. The rains came to constantly power our water wheels. Fibres were easy to grow. The regrowth of timber catered for our small population’s tiny energy requirements. Life, for most of us, was harsh but simple. Just surviving occupied most of our time.

Then the rapid development of industry, an ever-rising standard of living, an unchecked and even encouraged population growth created an enormous and unprecedented increase in energy requirements.

We uncorked the jar containing the genie of fossil fuel with its vast store of ancient sunlight energy. Unfortunately, it’s taken half a century to ﬁnd out there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Burning these fossil fuels released the long buried carbon. The carbon burned to become carbon dioxide. The very carbon dioxide that once upon a time prevented the very existence of oxygen breathing life. The types and varieties of fossil fuels and how they can be easily replaced by fuels that won’t contribute to Global Warning is discussed in Chapter 11: ENERGY SYSTEMS WE USE NOW AND WHAT WE MUST USE TOMORROW.

Fossil fuels are not the only culprit creating the mess that is Global Warming and climate change. There is another and it’s an almost intimately related culprit. It’s also near equal in guilt.

This second source of carbon dioxide inﬂuxing our atmosphere derives from the discharge of the gas from the wholesale destruction of soil organic matter and its conversion back to carbon dioxide. Our living soil is being killed and destroyed. Amazing as it may seem, some simple arithmetic clearly shows that the volume of this source of carbon dioxide pouring into our atmosphere is of comparable volume to the total coming from the burning of fossil fuels. This is true but it’s an extremely well-concealed truth. Soil fertility degradation is a topic where facts and truth have been systematically twisted, distorted and hidden for very obvious commercial and marketing reasons.

Nevertheless the facts are available, albeit not readily. One of the many, and I believe the most, informative and valuable consideration and discussion on the destruction of the fertility of agricultural soils is in a collection of essays compiled as The Albrecht Papers.

The Albrecht Papers were published by Charles Walters, Jr. of Acres U.S.A. magazine, Kansas City, Missouri. My wife and I stayed with Chuck Walters in Kansas City and he visited us when he was in Australia. For many years Dr. William A. Albrecht was Professor of Soils, and Chairman of the Department of Soils at the University of Missouri, College of Agriculture. See in Chapter6 : page 111: EXTRA: THE ALBRECHT PAPERS.

There are three things that contribute to the destruction of the fertility of agricultural soils. They are agricultural chemicals, mono-cropping and inversion tillage. All three have a massive impact on soil organic matter. All three have the effect of breaking it down and releasing the carbon into the air as carbon dioxide. Therefore all three contribute massively to Global Warming. The three processes are considered in detail in Chapter 6: HOW WESTERN AGRICULTURE IS FEEDING GLOBAL WARMING.

In stark contrast to truth and reality, the claim that receives the greatest publicity as a contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels is the clearing of forest lands. This is portrayed as a monumental disaster. Yet this “claim” approaches complete ﬁction. The forest story is in fact a logical and well-considered marketing ploy. In the ploy the general use of timber as a material of construction is portrayed as a crime against the planet. Children are constantly fed this ﬁction in insidious TV cartoons, where trees are portrayed as innocent and helpless “good guys”, always to be protected, and at any cost. Reality is that in general, tree numbers aren’t even in decline.

For decades the majority of Western countries have been growing vastly more timber and creating more forest than they actually consume. The often-voiced complaint that much of this timber is grown in plantations is a clever but factually illogical criticism. Actually growing timber and using the wood acts as a positive hindrance to atmospheric carbon dioxide build up; it is not in any way a contributor to Global Warming. Preferably wood should be used to replace plastics and other high embodied-energy products; the reverse is madness.

The greatest biological source of carbon dioxide feeding the greenhouse effect, comes from the destruction of the fertility of the world’s soils. Any argument that tree felling and rainforest clearing cause Global Warming fades into insigniﬁcance compared to carbon dioxide produced from soil fertility decline. Timber has to rot or be burnt before the carbon in the wood can revert back to gas in the air. More timber houses get built than get burnt down, so the construction of timber houses is a very effective carbon dioxide sink.

The clearing of dense rainforests for agricultural use becomes especially insigniﬁcant if the exposed land is farmed in a sensible and soil enhancing manner. That is, farmed so that the depth and fertility of the soil increases. Burning off timber and thereby not harvesting or utilizing the valuable wood for houses etc., will however be a contributor to Global Warming until soil fertility is developed. But burning is totally logical if the wood is being used as a fossil fuel replacement. It is unjustiﬁed waste not to utilize this alternative energy source.

The ﬂames and the smoke of a burning rainforest makes for good television. A “save the rainforest” campaign is also a convenient way to shift the blame for Global Warming to the Third World. The truth is that, almost totally, Global Warming and climate destabilization is a derivative of Western agricultural practices and the West’s consumption of fossil fuels. But for oil companies, funding irrational rainforest causes makes good marketing sense.

Amazonia, the total Amazon River catchment area, is not “the lungs of the world” as the environmental marketing lobby claim. It never has been and it never will be. Rainforests; indeed any forests, are totally carbon dioxide neutral. Forests do nothing.

A stable forest, during the day, breathes in carbon dioxide and breathes out oxygen. But at night the process is reversed. The forest breathes in oxygen and breathes out carbon dioxide. That’s short term. Long term is no different as the carbon trapped in the plants ultimately falls as litter on the forest ﬂoor. The litter rots and decomposes and releases the carbon back into the air as carbon dioxide. Think about this – if this was not so, million year old rainforests would have to be buried in their own litter, or else the ﬂoor of a rainforest would have to be a coal seam, or a peat bog. And we all know it’s not like that. In fact the litter on the ground in a rainforest can be scratched through with your ﬁngers. It’s very shallow.

Deep rich soil can trap and store as much carbon dioxide as any rainforest. That same deep rich soil can also grow a healthy food crop and grow one every year and for ever. Forests are stagnant entities. Soil fertility is the key to restoring global climatic stability – not trees – and deﬁnitely not fertilizers, not ever.

The meaning of the word “fertilizer” has been distorted. Fertile should mean healthy fertility. The term has been cleverly and substantially expanded to now encompass the whole range of plant stimulates and soil additives. It encompasses all from the once highly favoured and popular cow manure, through to pure bottled ammonia gas. Today manufactured chemicals are called fertilizers.

The term “chemical fertilizer” is clever and astute marketing. Chemical fertilizers have nothing to do with fertility. They function more like “speed”. They are like a soil amphetamine. One of their functions is to break down and destroy soil organic matter. This stimulated breakdown releases nutrients within the humus that is normally required to sustain soil biological activity. So for a few years crop growth can be increased. Unfortunately for the soil and the farmer, each year more fertilizers – those so beautifully misnamed soil drugs – need to be purchased and applied to produce an ever-diminishing yield. It’s a diminishing yield of food with diminishing nutritional levels. In the process, soil biological activity is terminated. Soil biological activity is no longer there to break down virgin rock particles and so can’t deliver new nutrients and elements to the soil. Using fertilizers made farmers ﬁnally come up with the term “worn-out soils”. And no wonder; these processes and reversing these processes are discussed in detail in Chapter 5: SOIL FORMATION CAN HALT GREENHOUSE WARMING.

Soil organic matter has slight variations in meaning and our use here should be clariﬁed. It is generally nominated by determining soil carbon content. Sometimes the term is expanded to include surface litter. Sometimes it may also include actively growing plant material. In this book “soil organic matter” is limited to the more commonly accepted usage and so refers to plant material that is already in the process of breakdown and decomposition, all the way through to its eventual conversion into humus and humic acid molecules. The weight of fresh surface litter is not included. Also, as is common, soil organic matter here includes the mass of living soil microbiological activity involved in the process of plant breakdown and humus formation. Soot is pure carbon, as is a diamond. It is not a carbon compound and here it is quite rightfully not considered as soil organic matter.

Generally to determine organic matter content, a soil sample is heated until all the carbon and carbon compounds are burnt off. The carbon dioxide is collected and the organic carbon content is calculated. Some soils do contain high levels of soot, generally from ancient excessive anthropogenic burning. This is notably so in Australian soils. In these cases an oxidizing agent process is used on the dry soil sample. This is done to avoid the soot carbon affecting organic carbon content determinations.

In Australia, in the production of sugar from sugar cane, it is common for state agricultural departments to advise growers to use chemical fertilizers at rates exceeding two tons of chemicals per hectare, per year. (Ton and tonne are close enough to equal.) It takes a lot of crude oil to produce those two tons of fertilizers and all the chemical sprays used along with it. Big money is involved and so the destruction of soil organic matter, unfortunately, becomes an ongoing process.

To make matters worse, agricultural quota systems for many crops, all round the world, are deliberately constructed to limit the number of acres or hectares that can be farmed. These systems seem always to be systematically designed so that no limit is placed on the quantity of produce actually produced. The limit is placed on the area that can be farmed. Area is limited but not quantity. This naturally encourages the use of massive quantities of chemical stimulants to produce maximum crop quantities from the restricted areas allowed. This practice and its destructive consequences are expanded on in Chapter 6: HOW WESTERN AGRICULTURE IS FEEDING GLOBAL WARMING.

You will often have seen statements from supposedly green protagonists criticizing farmers and their tractors for the discharge of carbon dioxide from these implements. This is a laughable “red herring” and is obviously used to stop us urban dwellers becoming interested in the discharge of carbon dioxide from chemical induced soil destruction. Even the biggest farm tractor rarely burns more fuel than a family car. In addition they are all diesel powered and therefore more fuel-efﬁcient than the petrol powered family car. The argument becomes even more ludicrous when we consider as an example that the farming community in Australia amounts to no more than three percent of the total national population. So in comparison to cars there are very few tractors in the nation. Australian farming is however, very efﬁcient. Australia not only feeds itself but is a major world supplier of food, wool and many other agricultural products.

Farmers around the world might use a litre or so of fuel to drive their tractor over a couple of acres of land. In so doing they might well be spreading the equivalent of two, three or even four tons of oil, previously converted into agricultural chemicals, on that same land area. The oil to drive the tractor amounts to a few litres. The oil to make the agrochemicals amounts to tons. The enormous contribution made by the use of agricultural chemicals to the build up of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, to my knowledge, has never before been seriously considered, except here in this book. It’s enormous.

When it is realized that world agriculture is such an important factor in increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, it must also be realized that changes in agricultural practices might reverse it. And they can. Fortunately, techniques now exist for the very rapid rejuvenation of our agricultural soils. Practices can now be implemented that rapidly and massively increase the weight of organic matter within soil. In this way soils can rapidly be returned to their former excellence and even beyond, up to extreme levels of fertility. Because of careful lobbying and astute funding by those that make their money by catering to farmers working now unhealthy and infertile soils, agricultural departments and agricultural colleges rarely promote such concepts.

It must never be forgotten; humus and organic matter is the stuff of fertile soil. The composition of humus and organic matter in soils is generally accepted as being 58% carbon by dry weight. Soil organic matter is decomposed plant life. All plant life sources its carbon supply from carbon dioxide in the air around it. Excess carbon dioxide in the air is causing Global Warming but improving soil fertility means less carbon dioxide in the air.

Provided the numbers work out, it is obvious. If we increase the basic fertility levels of our world’s agricultural and grazing lands we can stop Global Warming in its tracks. And the numbers work out exceptionally well.

BUILDING SOIL FERTILITY TO HALT GLOBAL WARMING, THE SIMPLE BASIC ARITHMETIC

All the carbon dioxide that has been discharged into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels and all the carbon dioxide that has derived from the destruction of the fertility of world soils, is not all still in the atmosphere. A huge quantity has been absorbed into the world’s oceans. Our soils therefore don’t have to absorb all the carbon dioxide they discharged into the air as they were denuded. So fortunately they actually have some excess capacity available to cater for the atmospheric build up from fossil fuel use. That is why world soil enhancement can restore atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to normal. The absolutely essential proviso is that fossil fuel use is concurrently, progressively reduced to negligible quantities. Otherwise our newfound climatic stability from enhanced soil fertility will be short-lived and then total destabilization will be utterly irreversible. We can only play the soil fertility card once.

This is the sequence. All life ultimately starts by green leaves or green algae extracting carbon dioxide out of the air and manufacturing carbon compounds; compounds that become the building blocks of life. As plants grow, oxygen is released and recharges the air for more complex life forms to breathe. Normally when plants die they become soil organic matter and ultimately can then become permanent humus. (There is a small but interesting exception. It is a life cycle that exists near hot volcanic vents in some of our deep oceans. The energy source is the local volcanic heat. Search “hydrothermal-vents smokers” on the Web.)

Rich soil contains large quantities of organic matter. Very rich soil can contain as much as 20% organic matter. In good soils in cold climates where decomposition of roots and litter is slowed, organic matter content can often stabilize at levels well above 20%. The majority of the soils of the world however, have organic matter contents ranging between 2% and 10%. Even deserts, apart from the windblown sand variety, usually contain around 0.5% organic matter. Otherwise how else could “deserts bloom” after their rare rainstorms?

It is not only apparent in the ﬁeld but also well- documented in agricultural literature, notably in Albrecht’s writings, that using “modern” agricultural practices, soil organic matter content invariably drops by around 50% of it’s original value over a period of thirty or forty years. Further decreases in organic matter content, after that initial 50% drop, occur at a much slower rate. Decreases in soil fertility from poor farming practices occurs irrespective of either soil type or location. Most of our Western world’s soils are now at or below this 50% level. The levelling occurs because some humic acid molecules are extremely stable and stoically resist agrochemical attack.

How fertility declines and how it can be reestablished is discussed in the chapters on soil and soil fertility. Happily for the planet, creating fertile soil is a much faster process than destroying it. Although this is not generally appreciated, for it is very rarely taught or even discussed in most agricultural schools.

The control of fertility in our agricultural soils has an enormous bearing on Global Warming. So we need to understand the relative quantities of carbon involved in the world’s soils in relation to that in the world’s atmosphere.

Global Warming has to be ﬁxed and the utter reality is that ordinary people are the ones that are going to make that happen – not experts, not academics and certainly not state bureaucracies. Therefore, as much as it is possible, it is essential that we all personally get an appreciation and general understanding of the problem and the ﬁx.

Quoting huge numbers with lots of noughts is confusing and usually becomes meaningless. That’s why it’s fed to us. But that’s not good enough. We have to have a comprehensible perspective. We have to know what statements and claims are plausible and do actually reﬂect reality, and what is simply well-oiled marketing ﬁction.

Let’s start with what we know. The Earth is covered with a thin layer of air a few miles, a few klicks, thick – a klick being a kilometre. That’s our atmosphere. That layer of air weighs about the same as a layer of water thirty-four feet deep (10.3 m deep). (If air is cooled enough it becomes a liquid.) Liquid air is slightly less dense than water, so as liquid air our atmosphere would be 39.2 feet deep(11.9 m). The fact is there is not much air on this planet. Our layer of air contains a small, but until recently a relatively constant percentage of carbon dioxide. In the 1940s the air contained just under two hundred and eighty parts of carbon dioxide gas for every one million parts of air. For the few thousand years before the 1940s it was nearer 270 ppm. By 2000 it had risen above 360 ppm and the rate of increase is accelerating.

The gasses that occur in small quantities in the atmosphere are usually measured in “parts per million” or “ppm”. So for example, 360 ppm of carbon dioxide means there are 360 parts, or bits of that gas in the atmosphere for every million single bits or parts of everything else. As a percentage it would be written as 0.036%. Rarer gasses are often nominated in “ppb” which is parts per billion. Sometimes you may see these terms written as ppmv and ppbv. The term ppmv means “parts per million by volume”. For us there is little difference.

In simple terms, the problem of Global Warming is caused by the increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere causing an excessive greenhouse effect. This is discussed in detail in Chapter 4: THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE OZONE HOLE, THE LIGHT, THE HEAT AND THE GASSES.

At 280 ppm, how much carbon dioxide are we really talking about? What does it all mean? To answer we need a little more visualization. Freeze carbon dioxide and you get “dry ice”. If we took all the CO₂(carbon dioxide) out of the atmosphere and froze it, it would form a vast white blanket of dry ice covering the entire surface of the planet. Just a few years ago the blanket would have been slightly over one sixteenth of an inch thick or just under two millimetres (1.86 mm). The carbon dioxide content of our atmosphere by the year 2000 had reached 360 ppm. The extra 80 ppm can be imagined as a layer of dry ice less than one thirty second of an inch deep (0.021 inches or 0.53 mm).

Global Warming is happening because we have increased the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Imagined as dry ice it went from just under two millimetres thick to just under two and a half millimetres in sixty years – from 0.075” thick to 0.095” thick. Your ﬁngernail is about 0.4 mm thick. So the dry ice got one and a half ﬁngernails thicker. It went from about four and a half to about six ﬁngernails in thickness.

Carbon dioxide is made of one atom of carbon combined with two atoms of oxygen. So let’s just consider the excess carbon atoms causing Global Warming at the 360 ppm levels. Those atoms would form a layer of soot, or carbon dust, a mere seven-thousandths of an inch (0.18 mm) thick, covering the entire surface of the Earth. A sheet of newspaper is about that same thickness. (The density or speciﬁc gravity of soot varies between 1.8 and 2.1 times as heavy as water, here it is averaged at 1.95. By comparison a commonly accepted range for the density of fertile soil is from 1.3 to 1.4.)

That tiny seven-thousandths of an inch (0.18 mm) of carbon is causing the erratic climatic changes the world is now beginning to experience. That tiny quantity of carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide is the villain causing our crazy, destructive, unpredictable Global Warming.

We cannot leave the stuff there in our atmosphere. We have to remove it. If we don’t, then very dangerous and even more expensive Global Warming effects will manifest themselves. Temperatures all over the world will rise even faster than is happening already. Temperatures will then go on rising for centuries to come as lagging ocean water temperatures try to catch up. Climates will become totally destabilized and unpredictable.

But we can stop it!

We have looked at the atmosphere, now let’s look at the soil. The 58% carbon content of soil organic matter means that a typical average density agricultural soil, twelve inches (300 mm) deep, and containing 5% organic matter, can be imagined as a layer of soot a quarter of an inch thick (0.246 inches or 6.25 mm). A soil containing 5% organic matter is not a rich soil. So even in poor soil we still have the equivalent of 246 thousandths of an inch of carbon and our Global Warming problem is caused by just seven- thousandths of an inch of carbon.

Soil having an organic matter content of only 5%, therefore holds over thirty-ﬁve times as much carbon as that causing Global Warming. That’s why soil fertility concepts are so important and why increasing the fertility levels of our soils can ﬁx Global Warming.

They talk about it, but we simply cannot trap the excess CO2 in the oceans. We don’t know how to, even if we wanted to. Also to play with, and somehow manipulate the surface of the world’s oceans, to have them absorb carbon dioxide at some vastly altered rates seems incredibly risky. It’s too big a gamble to even contemplate.

So we really only have the land to trap the excess. And we really only have the land we actively use or farm. But that’s O.K. Humans know about land and know about farming. Some parts of our world have been farmed successfully for more than forty centuries, as is so interestingly described by Professor F.H. King in his 1911 book Farmers Of Forty Centuries.

What do the numbers look like? Can it be done? Yes, as we will see. The land area of planet Earth is 29% of the total surface area of the planet. We use, or actively control as farm lands, range lands, park lands etc. about 30% of that land area. So we control at least 8.5% of the total surface area of the entire planet. Third World countries, depending how they are deﬁned account for less than a quarter of that total.

The extra carbon dioxide causing Global Warming equates to 0.007 inches (0.18 mm) of carbon spread over the whole planet, but we have limited ourselves to just 8.5% of the Earth’s area to ﬁx the problem. But it’s enough. If we magically scraped together the carbon causing Global Warming so that it only covered the land we farm or control, then it would still be only 0.081 inches (2.1 mm) thick. Amazingly that is still less than one third of the quantity of carbon in the ﬁrst foot or three ‘hands’ of an agricultural soil with just 5% organic matter.

A horse's height is measured in "hands". A person’s hand is about four inches wide, and the hand unit is currently deﬁned as four inches, which conveniently is very close to 100 mm, or a tenth of a metre. A block with sides each of one hand is therefore approximately one litre. A hand print, a palm print or a pad is generally very close in area to a four by four inch square, or a 100 mm by 100 mm square. So we could say, nine prints (palms or pads) to the square foot and 100 to the square metre.
(So ofﬁcially redeﬁning a hand as exactly one tenth of a metre would be wonderfully logical and useful.)

As we have seen, such soil easily contains a quarter of an inch of carbon atoms.

To ﬁx Global Warming we need to put that 0.081 inches (2.1 mm) of carbon back into that 8.5% area of the Earth we actively control. That quantity of carbon is the same as in a foot of soil with just 1.6% organic matter content. There is more than that in most desert soils.

All we have to do is ensure that our soils are managed in such a manner that their fertility levels rise that necessary 1.6%. It only has to happen on the lands we farm and manage right now, but when it does, all that excess carbon dioxide in the air causing world climatic change will vanish from the face of the Earth.

Soils that once held 5% organic matter and now hold half that, can easily be restored to 5% and even higher. Prairie soils, such as those in the United States that once had up to 20% organic matter and have been gradually reduced to levels often below 5% can also be restored to their original richness. They can rebound rapidly back to those 20% levels.

Recreating the richness of the soils of the American prairies could almost on its own normalize world carbon dioxide levels.

All agricultural land the world over has the potential to be restored to its former fertility level. Even better, with judicious management most soils can have their organic matter proﬁtably elevated to well beyond those original levels.

With the right agricultural changes in place (See Chapter 8), that 8.5% of the world’s area is easily sufﬁcient to mop up the excess carbon dioxide causing our Global Warming. The problems of Global Warming thus become no more than the problem of turning the equivalent of 0.081 inches (2.1 mm) of atmospheric carbon atoms into stable productive soil organic matter. Practically, economically and technically we can do it easily and world climatic stability would be instantly restored.

Relative to world agriculture and the world’s soils, the build up in atmospheric carbon dioxide is nothing. It is easy to reverse and ﬁx. Yet we are allowing that build up to continue, and we are allowing it to destabilize our world’s climate and weather.

The soils most easily rejuvenated are the mineral rich soils. Mineral rich soils simply respond faster than mineral poor soils, but the response of both is always amazingly rapid. The simple techniques are discussed in Chapter 8: HOW WE CREATE FERTILE SOIL TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING.

Actually very few of the world’s soils are mineral deﬁcient to any prohibitive extent. (Technically we should say element deﬁcient.) The problem is that the minerals or elements are “locked up” in chemically stable rock particles and thus unavailable to plant life. Unfortunately the excessively slow natural way of freeing up elements for biological use is through rain. Raindrops absorb carbon dioxide and so rainwater is slightly acidic. This acidity increases the weathering effects on rocks. Weathering slowly releases minerals to soil and plant life. Fortunately, active organic matter can break down rock particles and make minerals available to soil life many times more effectively. That’s one of its established functions. Without this process land life could never have developed as it has.

The mineral and humus rich soils of the Western Nations have now unfortunately become organically poor. These are the “worn-out” soils we hear so much about.They have also in effect become mineral deﬁcient as minerals have stopped being released. Nevertheless in almost every example, the basic rock material is not itself deﬁcient, so the increased soil biological activity possible when strong agrochemicals are avoided, can rapidly release the essential elements to plants.

The farmers of the Western nations are already equipped, more than anyone else, to handle and physically implement the simple changes necessary to recreate rich fertile soil. Indeed, many farmers are already doing this. They are our “organic farmers” and grow our organic food and ﬁbres. They are the farmers who have totally and systematically abandoned the concept of chemical-fed agriculture. Some have changed entirely for moral or ethical reasons. Most have changed because it makes good sense. Almost without exception, these farmers actually make more money from the better prices they generally receive. Practitioners of organic farming and farming based on soil development concepts have found that yields soon generally exceed their chemically addicted neighbors. This is documented later in Strategy 37.

The agrochemical Establishment image, that high farm yields and increasing world food production requires ever increasing inputs of chemicals and chemical fertilizers, is wrong. Organic farmers know this but organic farmers don’t have a loud voice in the halls of power, so governments give most support to chemically based agriculture.

The restoration of world soil fertility levels, especially in the developed worlds where declines are endemic, can reverse Global Warming. Such changes in agricultural practices should start now. They must become the new “conventional” agriculture.

This change in agricultural practices will give us the breathing space we need to bring on line alternative energy producing systems that don’t endanger our tiny and vulnerable atmosphere.

We have to start immediately to change our agricultural practices for only then we will have enough time to win this Global Warming War.

Don’t believe the propaganda of the oil industries’ lobby groups. We will not need to decrease our standard of living. We will not need to abandon the family car. We will not need to live the austere life of a Tibetan monk and we will not need to ride to work on a push-bike. Our food on the other hand will taste better. It will be more nutritious, we will be healthier and, most certainly we will live longer. An additional bonus in some areas will be a halt in the current continuous loss of arable farmland to salination. Salination stops and actually reverses itself as soil fertility returns.

Rising water tables that contribute to salination will cease to be a problem. Rising water tables result in part, from the use of ever increasing volumes of irrigation water. Soils lacking organic matter can’t retain moisture efﬁciently. In consequence huge quantities of excess water are necessary to maintain soil moisture levels. Soils with low and declining fertility levels require chemical fertilizers and stimulants for crop production. Soil fertility and soil organic matter levels drop and the salination cycle repeats.

The innate worth of high soil fertility, how it prevents and cures soil salinity, and why trees are not the answer is discussed in Chapter 8: HOW WE CREATE FERTILE SOIL TO HALT GLOBAL WARMING and also generally throughout this book.

BIRTH OF THE SOIL FERTILITY CONCEPT

This simple and so beneﬁcial solution to Global Warming seems obvious in retrospect. But it wasn’t. Generally things are always clearer in hindsight. In this however, I was fortunate. I grew up in a household where soil conservation and soil fertility enrichment were in constant discussion, where concepts were developed and where erosion control and on-farm water storage ponds were dinner table conversation. My father, P.A. Yeomans, wrote several books on the concepts he developed and pioneered. I studied engineering at Sydney University and was very involved in the agricultural concepts. I saw the trials, watched the improvements and saw the ultimate development of a practical, viable, economical and proﬁtable sustainable agricultural system. I was particularly involved in the design of equipment to make the system economically viable. The agricultural system that ultimately developed from all these efforts became the “Keyline System”. It is unique in many aspects, but in reality is still only a wise and astute modiﬁcation to, and a development from farming and farming practices that have endured for millennia. See Chapter 7: HISTORY OF TWENTIETH CENTURY SOIL CONSERVATION AND KEYLINE.

Even with my agricultural background the interrelation between agriculture and Global Warming would still not have been at all obvious, for the reality is Global Warming and climatic change are actually meteorological phenomena. However as a hobby I started ﬂying. I became a glider pilot and for many years raced sailplanes. Sailplanes are high-performance gliders. To race sailplanes a pilot has to develop an intimate knowledge and understanding of meteorology. Otherwise you can’t stay in the air.

This probably uncommon combination of an intimate knowledge of soil fertility levels and how they can be enhanced, coupled with a detailed knowledge of the composition of the atmosphere and associated atmospheric phenomena, was fortuitous. With these two disciplines, a practical and viable solution to reversing Global Warming and restoring climatic stability suddenly looked feasible; a deﬁnite possibility. It soon became quite obvious that just simple changes in agricultural practices could solve the problem of climate change. A great deal of study and research totally conﬁrmed the original concepts. I had already known energy systems were available at reasonable cost that could prevent warming recurring. See Chapter 11: ENERGY SYSTEMS WE USE NOW AND WHAT WE MUST USE TOMORROW.

By slightly changing our Western agricultural techniques to a combination of early sustainable agricultural practices and efﬁcient modern mechanized practices we can do it. We can rapidly extract the excess carbon dioxide out of our overburdened atmosphere and from it create or recreate rich, wonderfully fertile and hugely productive agricultural soils.

It is not difﬁcult to do and it is now urgent. If we all decide to ﬁx Global Warming, we can ﬁx it. And with a little common sense, it won’t cost a cent.

CHANGING FROM FOSSIL FUELS TO DIFFERENT ENERGY SOURCES

Concurrently we must switch to other energy sources and we must be aware that, despite the propaganda, no other energy system is as lethal to our total environment, and to us, as burning fossil carbon. The era of our world running on fossil fuels must now end. It is over. Not because we are running out of fossil fuels, as that’s effectively impossible in any foreseeable future, but because Global Warming is too risky, too deadly and already too costly.

people don’t want the prevention of Global Warming to become a reality and they act accordingly. It is not necessary to invent some world conspiracy to explain their actions; the marketing of fossil fuels creates one automatically. Oil company customers burn oil. Burning a ton of any fossil fuel produces between two and three tons of carbon dioxide. It’s a sad but uncompromising reality: fossil fuel companies are utterly dependent on the continuation of Global Warming and allied climate change.

The author in a Libelle 301 sailplane over the Murray River during the 1975-76 Australian National Championships. Glider ﬂying time in a typical race day is four to ﬁve hours and distance ﬂown might be 500 km. Initially the glider is towed to 2,000 feet by a light aircraft and released. Tow plane engine time is typically about eight minutes per launch. The glider then uses rising air currents to periodically gain height to ﬂy the nominated task. Eight minutes engine time for ﬁve hours ﬂying time is probably why oil company support for the sport of gliding is conspicuous by its absence.

It’s doubly sad with oil, as oil, being an incredible mix of hydrocarbon compounds will pharmaceuticals etc. Oil is also the best general-purpose engineering and industrial lubricant. To burn this valuable resource just for its energy content is inexcusable. And of course, to turn it into agrochemicals to drench the rural lands of the world, destroying their fertility and organic matter is equally inexcusable.

Alternative energy systems for power generation and transport that actually prevent Global Warming, are here now, and they are competitive. Most of the alternative transport fuels will be grown by farmers and mostly in the tropics and sub-tropics. See Chapter 11: ENERGY SYSTEMS WE USE NOW AND WHAT WE MUST USE TOMORROW. This also, most fortuitously would help Third World societies self-fund themselves out of their perpetual poverty.

Despite what is always implied to delay their implementation, no new technologies have to be discovered. Nothing new has to be invented. Even if the costs of alternate fuel systems were, say, ﬁve times the cost of fossil fuel systems, which they are not, they would still be cheap. For they are safe, and they are logical, and they are economically sound, and they will save us all from the horrendous costs of cancerous climate change.

Our main problem in changing is political. In agriculture many Western farmers now spend more money on oil-derived chemical fertilizers and the necessary pesticides and fungicides to keep the resultant unhealthy crop from self-destructing, than they spend on all other farm inputs combined. In consequence agricultural chemical companies have vast sums of advertising and public relations dollars to spend to buy agreeable and placatory editorial to support their agrochemical sales.

The problem for the world is that fossil fuel companies and the agrochemical companies will always strenuously resist any changes in the status quo. They will put up tremendous opposition. They will not only continue, but in the future will signiﬁcantly increase their massive public relations campaign to stop any change. We have seen their public relations campaigns. They are very effective and very inﬂuential. It’s an effort not to be inﬂuenced.

Remember the never-ending series of articles, stories and “scientiﬁc reports” to establish that cigarettes, despite all the evidence weren’t really dangerous to our health? This isn’t any different. When cigarette companies started to lose the cigarette battles, they moved to China and to Third World countries, but they didn’t give up. Before cigarette advertising was restricted, the hero and heroine in movies and TV shows rarely smoked. After the restrictions we saw characters in lead roles smoking cigars. Cigars were a good start. Now you may have noticed all the TV shows have the hero smoking? Clever aren’t they? If you check you will ﬁnd cigarettes sales climbing. Oil advertising companies know the tricks. Just like the tobacco companies, they lose a few battles, but they never give up the war. With cigarettes, individuals have a choice. With Global Warming there are no individuals. We are like conscripted passive smokers.

Now we are being conditioned to allow, and accept, atmospheric carbon dioxide content rising to double the already dangerous levels we are currently at, (now over 360 ppm). That is a rise to 700 ppm. A few years ago they pushed for a public acceptance of 500 ppm. They may even suggest higher limits be accepted as atmospheric readings continue to climb.

We should never tolerate such criminally insane proposals. We must cease tolerating the fossil fuel industry’s blatant irresponsibility and self-interest.

INDIVIDUALLY BUT COHESIVELY, WE CAN STOP GLOBAL WARMING

If the necessary and now urgent changes are to happen in agriculture and energy, then they won’t happen because Big Business wants them to happen. Don’t forget, for Big Business, there is absolutely no money in healthy soil. And big money is not yet in alternative energy.

Nor will the necessary changes happen because governments in their wisdom decide to do something. The main aim of any government is its own personal survival. If we sit pat and do nothing, it will be a very long time before governments come to see soil fertility as a vote catching issue.

It is doubtful that changes would happen from union action. Individualistic farmers and collective union muscle rarely see eye to eye. However, to be just, there are some unions that do sometimes show surprising levels of general community responsibility. In such matters these unions must be applauded.

So the changes must start with us, the people. Fixing Global Warming has to be a real grass roots movement. As citizens and consumers we can indeed make it happen. We can have more impact on the fertility of our world’s soils than any union, any government, any government agency, any inane regulation, and more than any big business conglomerate.

For example, if food processors and retailers see a big market shift by consumers to purchase more “organically” grown food, things will rapidly change and soils will improve. It works like this: organically grown food is grown most successfully and most economically on humus rich soils. If we as consumers show a massive preference for organically grown food, demand organically grown cotton and organically grown wool, farmers will have to change to cater. They will change their methods of farming and their soils will start to change and improve in consequence. Organic matter content will rise and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will fall. Demanding organically grown produce will have a deﬁnitive inﬂuence on Global Warming. It’s also healthier. Actually, nutrient for nutrient, it is generally cheaper.

In addition, as we improve our soils we must also change our total reliance on fossil fuels to power our societies. Alternative energy systems must be fostered and encouraged. We are fortunate that at last alternative energy systems are feasible, practical and economical. Fossil fuel costs may often be a little lower than alternative energy costs, but only if you totally exclude the cost of destroying the stability of world weather.

The process by which the fossil fuel and the agricultural chemical industries manipulate public opinion is given a great deal of detail throughout this book. This manipulation must be understood clearly so that suitable counter measures to Global Warming can get established.

Plants and trees and animals grow and die, the carbon dioxide re-circulates back into the soil and the cycle repeats. We can shift the balance so that the soil retains much more during the cycle.

But extracting fossil carbon from deep geological formations is absolutely a one-way street to global disaster. So let’s not be fooled. We have to be well prepared to combat the unending deluge of misinformation on Global Warming that continues to be heaped upon us.

Restoring the fertility of our world’s soils is essential, and changing to new energy systems must happen concurrently. That way we will stop Global Warming. How we can ensure that what is needed actually takes place, is I hope, the message throughout this book.

Preventing Global Warming and the resultant climate change is easy.

But some people don’t want it to ever happen.