Carbon sequestration, carbon emission, carbon building. Soil carbon, organic carbon, and accessible carbon. They all keep popping up here and there in the farming space, but what exactly do they all mean? With carbon being thrown around everywhere, it’s understandable to get confused somewhere along the line.

This is why today’s guest, Dr. Bruno Basso of Michigan State University, will shed some light and hopefully clear up the mist surrounding carbon, its different forms, and how significant it is when it comes to agriculture and environmental sustainability.

Dr. Bruno Basso is a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Michigan State University. An internationally recognized agricultural scientist, Dr. Basso co-founded CiBO Technologies, where they aim to incentivize farmers for applying environmentally sustainable practices.

More on CIBO Technologies:  https://www.cibotechnologies.com/

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In this episode of In Search of Soil

• How Dr. Bruno Basso views carbon sequestration in soil (01:55)
  • How plants sequester carbon in two ways (02:45)
  • The presence of carbon in the soil can serve as a health check of sorts (03:52)
• In a natural system, does the carbon balance itself out? (04:55)
  • The carbon imbalance in a managed system (07:34)
  • You break the aggregates when you touch the soil (08:24)
  • The positive aspect behind carbon retention (11:14)
• Does soil saturation affect the evolution of plant life? (12:45)
  • The soil carbon is at equilibrium if you don’t till it (15:08)
• What happens when you add more organic carbon to an already carbon-saturated soil? (16:03)
  • The difference with carbon as an element (17:12)
  • The problem is losing carbon by “opening the jar” (18:22)
• Does soil carbon saturation automatically mean that the plants will be healthy? (19:43)
• The changes of microbial behavior in carbon-saturated soil (22:17)
• Plants and crops that naturally sequester carbon (24:24)
• Do all fertilizers contribute to greenhouse gases equally? (31:40)
  • The emission factor (32:41)
  • Plants do not utilize organic nitrogen (33:33)
• If you plant corn in a no-till system with good soil, will you still need to add nitrogen? (35:43)
• Is nitrogen the same as carbon in the sense that there’s a saturation point in the soil and storage comes down to the biomass? (39:48)
• Even in the healthiest systems, you’ll need to add nitrogen (45:58)
• Legume cover crops and adding nitrogen into the soil (47:02)
• The reason behind keeping a live root: you want something to catch what leaks out of the leaky system (50:10)
• The benefits of planting a cover crop from the fall to the freeze to the thaw (51:30)
• Do you sacrifice yield by interplanting multiple crop species? (57:22)
  • Keep the soil covered to prevent soil evaporation (58:52)
• When and where tillage becomes a problem (01:00:52)
  • Inversion tillage should be avoided (01:02:45)
  • The damage is done only where you do tillage (01:05:08)
• Explaining and valuing the different forms of carbon (01:04:14)
• How to build your soil into a favorable intermediate pool (01:11:32)
• Is carbon decomposition above and below ground? (01:15:07)
• Building soil up and building soil down (01:18:00)
  • Note that temperature plays a big role (01:20:10)
  • The percent of clay in soil plays a protection factor (01:20:52)
• Dr. Bruno Basso’s take on biochar and how it affects carbon equilibrium (01:21:15)
• How practices play into the future of carbon credit (01:23:35)
  • Carbon farming is the new way of farming (01:29:22)
• Looking ahead: the possibility of selling carbon credits in 10 years’ time (01:29:58)
• The approach to take if you want to sequester as much carbon as possible (01:33:13)
• The plant with more root biomass sequesters more carbon (01:35:32)
  • We win when we start making fertilizer by electricity and not by fossil fuels (01:37:46)
• Climate change, changes in temperature, yield, and sequestering carbon (01:38:17)
  • Using global warming to your advantage (01:42:17)
• Nitrogen management: how much nitrogen you’re applying and how much nitrogen comes out as plant protein (01:43:38)
• Growing for quality versus growing for weight and volume (01:48:52)
  • Incentivize the farmers to adopt good farming systems (01:50:54)
  • The ideal situation is having profitability, environmental sustainability, and environmental justice come together (01:52:22)
• A viable future in poly-culture systems: the younger generation and urban farming (01:53:13)
• What vegetable farmers can do to start building their soil (01:57:07)
  • Don’t farm naked, keep the soil covered (01:58:03)
• A brighter future where carbon is managed, and farmers are compensated (02:00:25)