Monday, July 11, 2011

CARBON TAX V ORGANIC FARMING

All this conversation about the carbon tax can be very confusing, is it right to charge more and penalise for use, or would it be best to teach new ways, foster new methods. Charging people, industry more for use just increases our cost of living, when there are soooo many more methods for positive change, one of them being organic farming. This is known as carbon sequestion.

Through the process of organic farming, carbon is sequested from the environment, this is a process through which carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere is absorbed by trees, plants and crops through photosynthesis, and stored as carbon in biomass (tree trunks, branches, foliage and roots) and soils. This relates to the organic matter in organic soil being mainly carbon. In conventional farming the organic matter is typically depleted.
The Rodale Institute has translated this to if '10,000 medium sized farms were converted to organic production, they would store so much carbon in the soil that it would be equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road, or reducing car miles driven by 14.62 billion miles.'

Makes good sense...just another reason to GO ORGANIC.

Just another bit of information:

Other methods of carbon reduction would be to stop the logging of old growth forests, tropical deforestation accounts for around 20% of the WORLD's carbon emissions.