Agriculture, at its core, is the art of turning carbon into food.

The carbon cycle in agriculture is complex, with variables from soil type and weather to farming methods and more. Growing crops will release some carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Ruminants release methane through their enteric fermentation. And nitrogen fertilizer, which helps us grow crops, does release nitrous oxide in the process. All told, U.S. agriculture, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, is responsible for about 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, although there are other economic sectors that have much greater greenhouse gas footprints, agriculture often gets the most attention from the public and government regulators.

However, there’s been a bright spot of good news. A recently released study shows that if farmers and ranchers aggressively adopt current environmental practices and emerging technologies, they could achieve greenhouse gas negative status. This precision conservation could not only bring economic and environmental stability to farms and ranches, but it also could show the public what farmers and ranchers have known to be true: They’re part of the solution, not the problem.

Chuck Rice, a Kansas State University distinguished professor of agronomy, is one of the three lead authors in the study, “The Potential for U.S. Agriculture to Be Greenhouse Gas Negative.” The study was initiated by U.S. Farmers & Ranchers in Action and published by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology.

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Rice has spent 36 years at K-State designing agricultural systems to be more climate resilient and efficient in using nutrients, energy and water. His career has focused on looking at farming systems that help farmers make the most of their resources and bring profit and sustainability to their farms.

The study Rice and his colleagues worked on took a real-world systems approach to the challenge of greenhouse gas emissions and agriculture, and identified near-term opportunities for adoption — not 50 years down the road, Rice said, but today. And what the team found is that if just 50% of U.S. farmers adopted current practices to improve nitrogen management, soil carbon sequestration, animal feed efficiency and on-farm energy use, it has the potential to reduce 80% of the current greenhouse gas emissions attributed to agriculture. That drops us from about 10% of the U.S. total to about 1% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Further, if farmers got aggressive — that is, if 75% of farmers adopted current practices but also emerging technologies such as cellulosic biomass production, solar and wind energy production, advanced cropping systems and more — U.S. agriculture could cut its greenhouse gas emissions to minus 6% of the total U.S. emissions figure. That’s a 16% total drop in emissions.

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How do we get there?

“We’re looking at multiple aspects of agriculture across the whole supply chain,” Rice said in a USFRA virtual event in September. The five major areas to offer opportunities to reduce the carbon footprint of agriculture included soil carbon management, nitrogen fertilizer management, animal production and management, crop production and narrowing the yield gap, and efficient energy use in agriculture.

Farmers across the U.S. already implement some form of a practice under these five broad categories, Rice explained. So, for example, farmers may be using minimal tillage or no-till, which sequesters carbon in the soil but also is a tool to improve their crop yields and soil health.

As Rice explained further, it’s a synergistic effect from the minimal disturbance of the soil, combined with other practices such as increasing crop diversity, planting cover crops or livestock grazing, that intensifies the overall greenhouse gas negativity of agriculture.

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“One sector [of agriculture] alone cannot achieve negativity; it’s really a systems approach,” Rice said. So, the team encourages farmers to look at their farms and ranches in a multi-use systems approach.

To return to the no-till example, it’s not just about implementing no-till on crop acres to be efficient. Farmers also might consider turning areas of that no-till field that are low producing into a perennial crop that would sequester carbon into the soil profile or provide pollinator habitat, Rice said.

That’s a tool of today, but what about emerging technology and tools of tomorrow?  

Adopting emerging technology can further decrease agriculture’s greenhouse gas footprint. For example, consider the growing market for cellulosic biomass for biofuels production. It’s a revenue stream for farms, but it also can help reduce greenhouse gases.

Some farms also use their own on-farm solar or wind energy production to save their business energy costs, but that also allows them to be energy-independent off the grid. Some farmers use technology to apply variable rates of nitrogen on just the parts of the field that need it, which not only saves fuel but also reduces the nitrous oxide that contributes to greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture.

No easy solutions

Rice said just one of these practices by themselves isn’t the magic wand that makes it all better.

Ultimately, the whole goal of this 100-page report is not just that farmers have the potential to improve their productivity and production efficiency using these tools and techniques. It’s that they can start putting together their on-farm precision conservation strategies that don’t hinder their day-to-day operations, and also show value to those who might pay for carbon sequestration or other climate mitigation strategies on farms.

Carbon will always be part of agriculture. As the report’s authors note, “Transitioning toward a greenhouse gas-negative agricultural production system does not mean the elimination of carbon, but rather the most efficient utilization of carbon in production of food, feed, fuel and fiber required to sustain society.”  

Read the report at cast-science.org/publication/potential-for-u-s-agriculture-to-be-greenhouse-gas-negative.