plant diversity and low input biomass for biofuel

The North Dakota Farmers Union has successfully started a national Carbon Credit Program. It allows ag producers and landowners to earn income by storing carbon in their soil through no-till crop production and longterm grass seeding practices. There are also forestry (tree planting) and methane offset (manure digester) contracts. Forestry and methane contracts are available nationwide and have no enrollment date. Soil offset contracts are limited to established enrollment areas. (article includes map). Soil carbon characterization studies are needed to expand the enrollment areas.

Over the course of an eight-year open-top-chamber CO2-enrichment (to twice ambient concentrations) study of a pristine (annually burned) tallgrass prairie north of Manhattan, Kansas, USA, which was composed of a mixture of C3 and C4 species, Williams et al. measured changes in the active, slow and passive pools of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N), with the goal of determining how they were impacted by the doubled atmospheric CO2 concentration of their reasonably long-term experiment.

Web site discusses science in support of using grassland to sequester atmospheric carbon.

The Carbon Coalition started out among growers in the Central West Catchment Management Authority's Farm Systems training program in New South Wales and is expanding to cover Australia and other parts of the globe. The Coalition is a not-for-profit organisation that runs like a business, with the express aim of securing a central role for soil carbon in the credit trading schemes emerging around Greenhouse Gas Emissions abatement. Co-convenors are the Kiely family, woolgrowers from Goolma, NSW.