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Farming the climate

By Jeffrey Parr and Leigh Sullivan - posted Tuesday, 20 February 2007


Plantstones currently store 300 million tones of CO2 p.a. worldwide, and there is the clear potential to increase that carbon storage rate many times by careful plant selection and crop management.

For example, improvements in plant breeding and agronomy have increased the original grain yield of cultivated wheat in Europe by over 30 times and it is expected that the current plantstone carbon yields of crops might be multiplied by the adoption of similar practices.

Plantstone technology offers Australia, potentially, an important new export industry worth many millions of dollars not only in the seeds and genetics of such crops, but also in the knowledge of how to grow them in order to maximise their carbon retention under different growing conditions.

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Furthermore it would enable those marketing Australian commodities such as wheat, rice, sugar and meat on global markets to claim them as the produce of a truly climate-friendly agriculture - a huge marketing advantage in a world of consumers becoming acutely conscious of the impacts of climate change.

We urge Australian governments - federal and state - to do everything possible to accelerate both the R&D and the uptake by industry of this promising new technology, and to make Australians the world’s first carbon farmers.

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First published in Australian R&D Review on February 7, 2007.  It is republished in collaboration with ScienceAlert, the only news website dedicated to Australasian science.



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About the Authors

Dr Jeff Parr is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Environmental Science and Management at Southern Cross University. Jeff’s unique area of research is plant silica relationships and soil carbon sequestration.

Leigh Sullivan is Professor at the School of Environmental Science and Management at Southern Cross University.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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