One link between Maryland agriculture and climate change is carbon sequestration in agricultural soils. This recent article from the Washington Post puts names and faces on a problem that is pretty old: so old that I once contributed to a paper on the topic. (Just joking- obviously the science had been around WAY before I worked on that project!) Actually this one sentence in the WaPo article, fairly far down the page, sums up our finding: "But studies that sampled deeper soil layers revealed that carbon was lost there, wiping out most of the apparent gains." We weren't sure if that finding was real: it could have come from the functional form we used to model carbon accumulation, or could have just been swamped by the relatively small differences as we compared deeper samples. But that's what it looked like to us, and it's similar to the findings of more recent studies cited in the news article. One researcher concludes, "An overfocus on soil carbon is a diversion from the climate strategies that can have a bigger impact."
While I'm probably most jazzed to see my work continuing to be debated (and relevant!) it's also neat to see that policies are catching up with the science, paying farmers for their contributions in the fight against climate change. Are those subsidies worth it? That is the question....
