Soils that store carbon: a regional platform for sustainable livestock systems

Four research institutions in Latin America agreed on a shared agenda to estimate how much organic carbon the region's farm soils can store, and which management practices make that possible.

Context of the story

Soil organic carbon largely determines a field's productive capacity and is at the same time the biosphere's largest carbon reservoir. The 4 per mille initiative, launched at COP21, proposes raising that stock by 0.4 % a year in the top 40 centimetres of the profile, a target that, even if only partly met, would offset a meaningful share of agricultural emissions. The obstacle is information: no country in Latin America and the Caribbean had reported a national soil organic carbon inventory, and early attempts relied on the default values in the IPCC's TIER1 tables, calculated for the world as a whole. Without local data on how soil responds to a change in management, there is no way to know which practices are worth promoting or how much carbon to expect from them.

A multi-agency platform to put local data where default values stand today

The Implemented Initiative

The seed fund set out to create a multi-agency platform for the sustainable intensification of farming systems built on innovative carbon sequestration strategies. Over twelve months the participating institutions compiled the regional and international state of the art on carbon sequestration in agricultural systems, mapped existing capacities and earlier projects in each country, and held a regional coordination workshop that produced an agreed project proposal. That proposal sets out four technical questions: what level of soil organic carbon is attainable for a given soil and climate, how far current production systems sit from that level, which land use and management options close the gap, and whether those options pay for the producer.

The innovation is organisational before it is technological: a shared agenda among national research institutes

The technological solution

The Sustainable Agricultural Intensification 2030/2050 platform is a working agreement among national agricultural research institutes of the Southern Cone and a regional teaching centre, aimed at the farming sector and in particular at grazing systems on sown and natural pastures. It is not a field product but a coordination instrument: it sets a common question, a common method for answering it, and a division of labour across countries. Its technical content combines existing long-term experiments, which allow crop sequences and pasture management sustained over decades to be compared, with surveys on commercial farms where land use has remained stable. On that basis it estimates sequestration rates associated with specific management changes: introducing service crops, integrating cropping with livestock, improving water and nutrient availability, and restoring degraded sown and natural pastures.

Loading map...

Type of project

Information System

Innovation

Strategy 1. Resilient farms

Strategy 2. Sustainables territories

Applied

Technological-Organizational-Institutional

Crops, Cattle raising

Family agriculture

Gas emission

Agricultural systems

Results

The seed fund closed with the platform established and present on the FONTAGRO website, a work plan agreed among the participating institutions, the regional workshop proceedings setting out the state of the art presented by each country, and an agreed project proposal document. The underlying result is that a single regional agenda now exists where scattered national initiatives stood before. The agreed proposal was subsequently formulated as a larger regional project on soil organic carbon sequestration, involving five countries and external co-financing, which confirms the seed fund's role as a preparatory stage.