Carbon Sequestration

Shepherd's Grain R&D > Carbon Sequestration

Carbon Farming

Being tillage-free is all about capturing Carbon and keeping it in its place. Carbon is more than a box on the Periodic Table. It is gold to Shepherd’s Grain growers, and is the critical component to building healthy soils. Sequestering Carbon in soils is consistent with the solution to climate change concerns and increases soil organic matter that helps produce more economically sustainable crops.

As of January 31, 2018, Shepherd’s Grain growers will have sequestered 116,853,160 Kg of CO2 equiv in the soil.*

*Assuming grower average is 20 years in no-till, an average farm of 2,500 acres, average of 35 farms producing for Shepherd’s Grain, with 50% of those growers in fallow-transition and the other half in annual cropping.

Perhaps no-till and crop rotations are not ends but rather the best means or tools we have available to manage the carbon cycle in our cropping systems… If C cycling is to be controlled, low-disturbance no-till now becomes the only option in terms of tillage choice. The focus then turns to optimizing the no-till system and managing it in a truly sustainable way.

– Dwayne Beck, PhD “Managing Carbon: Do You C What I C,” Dakota Lakes Research Farm, SDSU

For every 50 lb. bag of Shepherd’s Grain flour, 1.2 Kg of carbon is sequestered in the soil by a Shepherd’s Grain farmer.*

*Sources:
1. Isaac Madsen, Ph.D. Washington State University, Dept. of Crop & Soil Science, 2018
2. Brown and Huggins, Soil carbon sequestration in the dryland cropping region of the Pacific Northwest.
2012 Journal of Soil and Water Conservation
3. Claus G. Sørensen, Niels Halberg, Frank W. Oudshoorn, Bjørn M. Petersen, Randi Dalgaard, Energy inputs and
GHG emissions of tillage systems, Biosystems Engineering, Volume 120, 2014, Pages 2-14, ISSN 1537-5110