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By Maria Ortega, WSU News Service, mortega@wsu.edu, 509-335-7209 , WSU News Service

Contact: Chad Kruger, CSANR, cekruger@wsu.edu, 509-293-5847

Agriculture Practices to Reduce the Impact of Global Climate Change

PULLMAN, Wash.- While agriculture contributes to the buildup of greenhouse gases, it also has the potential to help the planet by implementing practices that reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted, and even trap some of those being produced.

The Climate Friendly Farming (CFF) project is a statewide research effort to study the impact of agricultural systems on global climate change and it is one of the world's most comprehensive programs for assessing agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.

Coordinated through the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources (CSANR) at Washington State University, CFF was founded four years ago with a $3.75 million grant from the Paul Allen Foundation for a five-year period. The initial project will end in 2009 but more than $7 million has been secured from other sources during the last few years and the CFF will continue with new work, based on its current findings.

Chad Kruger, interim director and BIOAg educator for CSANR, said the project's key objective is to create a database of agricultural practices and techniques that can decrease the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) released into the atmosphere.

"Our ultimate goals are to understand how much reduction we can achieve with new techniques, how much it will cost and what practice changes are needed to make it happen," he said.

The CFF project has supported more than 30 research projects across Washington involving at least 40 people. According to Kruger, the program relies on interdisciplinary collaboration between WSU departments such as biological systems engineering, crops and soils, the School of Economic Sciences as well as county extension educators, USDA Agricultural Research Service personnel and the CSANR.

The project focuses on three of the most important farming systems in the Pacific Northwest: dairy production, irrigated crop farming and dryland grain farming. Using a range of methods from technology research and development, environmental modeling, socio-economic analysis and educational outreach, the team hopes to make local as well as global impact.

Kruger, who is a member of Gov. Gregoire's State Climate Advisory Team, has been able to use results from the project directly in the Climate Advisory Team process.

"Climate-friendly farming can help us ease off our dependence on fossil fuels by reducing agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, storing atmospheric carbon in the soils, and developing renewable substitutes for fossil hydrocarbon products," said Kruger.

Some agricultural practices, such as dryland planting and harvesting, have the potential to act as carbon sinks, tying up CO2 from the air and storing it in the soil. Under optimum conditions, soils in the Pacific Northwest can sequester up to 1,700 pounds of carbon per acre over a three-year period.

Precision nitrogen management on dryland farms also is showing promise for conserving nutrients and improving carbon sequestration capacity of the soil. Precision management allows for cost-effective, site-specific applications of fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and water.

For dairies, developments in anaerobic digestion technology are providing new ways to capture methane and convert it into energy while recycling manure into value-added byproducts.

Researchers are also developing alternative biofuels from plants such as canola and switchgrass.

Kruger said agricultural biomass potentially can offset significant amounts of CO2 as the plants "recycle" carbon already present in the atmosphere.

These agricultural technologies are often inexpensive ways to make early reduction in our society's carbon footprint, but Kruger stressed, "The long-term solution to global climate change will still require that reduce the combustion of fossil hydrocarbons."

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