Pine Beetle News.

[Cobleskill]

There was talk of a "fart-methane" tax on cows in the US. It got dropped.

 

[stehansen]

Steve, I think this is something you would be interested in because you are closely connected to the ag industry. It may not be our production of CO2 that disrupts our planet but industry methods that disrupt the natural balancing that would normally occur that would control this.

There is a variety of mycorrhizae genera Glomus. An organic "glue" composed of 30 to 40% carbon representing "up to 40% of the carbon in the soil. Since the earth's soils contain about 1.74 trillion tons of carbon, a 40% contribution of soil carbon by mycorrhizal fungi equals 696 billion tons--more than all of the planet's total carbon terrestrial vegetation (672 billion tons)." "When CO2 reached 670 arts per million (ppm)-- the level it is predicted to be by the mid to late 21st century--mycorrhizal fungal filaments grew three times as long and produced five times as much glomalin as in a control environment with today's ambient CO2 level of 370 ppm." Quoted from "Soil Life and Carbon--How Tree Care Can Help Combat Global Warming" by Mike Amaranthus, Ph.D.

Almost everything we do within the forestry/ag industry disrupts glomulin activity, such as tillage, use of pesticide and herbicides. Think of the millions upon millions of acres world wide that have been disrupted and you have an idea how we can influence the cleansing ability of our planet.

Dave

I hear ya. The sustainability issues with modern agriculture are huge. Especially here in the west where irrigation water is imported into an area. The california Aquaduct transports several million acre feet of water from the sacramento river to the west side of the san joaquin valley and then goes on over the hill into Los Angeles. The water is pretty good with a total dissolved salts of about 180 PPM and I can't remember how much salt this was but I think they said it was like five train cars of salt a day going in and only about 5 percent of this coming out through the San Joaquin river. This is bound to mess things up eventually but probably not for quite a while. Most of this is collecting in the ground water for now.