The Veggie Thread...for news items regarding ALL aspects of food production.

[KichigaiNeko]

http://grist.org/news/abandoned-russian-...very-year/

Abandoned Russian farmland soaks up 50 million tons of carbon every year


When the USSR collapsed, the communal farming systems that helped feed the union’s citizens collapsed with it. Farmers abandoned 1 million acres of farmland and headed into the cities in search of work.

New research by European scientists has revealed the staggering climate benefits of that sweeping change in land use. According to the study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, wild vegetation growing on former USSR farming lands has sucked up approximately 50 million tons of carbon every year since 1990.

New Scientist reports that’s equivalent to 10 percent of Russia’s yearly fossil fuel carbon emissions:

“Everything like this makes a difference,” says Jonathan Sanderman, a soil chemist at CSIRO Land and Water in Australia. “Ten per cent is quite a bit considering most nations are only committed to 5 per cent reduction targets. So by doing absolutely nothing — by having depressed their economy — they’ve achieved quite a bit.”


He says the abandoned farmland is probably the largest human-made carbon sink, but notes it came at the cost of enormous social and economic hardship.

Modelling the effect into the future, [study co-author Irina] Kurganova estimates that, since the land has remained uncultivated, another 261 million tonnes will be sequestered over the next 30 years. At this point, the landscape will reach equilibrium, with the same amount of carbon escaping into the atmosphere as is being taken up.

The finding is a stark reminder of how Earth does a bang-up job of soaking up carbon if we leave more of it undeveloped and un-farmed.

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I think I have posted the news article elsewhere but here is the ranting of my favourite rational Irreverent duck

The Greens are really starting to give me the shits. Their latest press release waffles on about the definition of "free-range" and their support of a model that limits density to 1500 birds per hectare, in place of the current 20,000 maximum. Two things....

1) where will people get money for eggs in your utopian world where population is permitted to grow unchecked, once your pie-in-the-sky opposition to economies of scale drives the price up to $40 per dozen, and where will we get the additional land required to implement the low-density model....nick it from dairy farmers maybe....clear some national parks perhaps?

2) If free range and organic are so goddamn important, how can you justify the hypocrisy inherent in your opposition to hunting? It is the ultimate in organic, free-range harvest, and the vast majority of hunters will use a far greater percentage of the prey than anyone who hunts in a supermarket. Hell, I once shot a deer less than a minute after it'd had a shag. Free and deliriously happy one moment, dead the next...only the deer didn't get to appreciate the dead bit....cause it was dead! Hope I go that way!

Piss on about animal welfare as much as you like. Until you back it up with population control policy, and figure out how to quadruple people's incomes without raising the cost of living so that economies of scale need no longer be a consideration, you're just a bunch of emoting, self-indulgent time-wasters....as the Australian public is beginning to appreciate.

I just can't add much more.