Gil Daigneau, founder of Go Natural Education, describes the relationship between carbon in the atmosphere and in the soil.
Watch the video and read the transcript that follows.
I’m Gilbert Michael Daniel and I’m a farmer. Today, we’re going to talk about carbon.
Carbon in the atmosphere traps heat from sunlight, contributing to global warming and climate change. The scientists in the know, that tell the truth, say that climate change is a natural process. It happens about every 40,000 years. Core samples have been done in ice in the Antarctic to document this.
Please fact-check me on anything I say today. We’re going to talk specifically about carbon: carbon in the atmosphere, carbon in the environment, and how carbon affects us. We’re going to talk about carbon sequestration and its activity in the ground.
The Environmental Protection Agency says that 12% of the carbon in the atmosphere is for methane and 80% of the carbon in the atmosphere is from carbon dioxide. The carbon of carbon dioxide has a really strong double bond to oxygen. Carbon dioxide has a very strong bond. Believe it or not, it takes 300 to a thousand years to break down in the environment. Conversely, methane typically breaks down in the environment in about 12 years.
Well, there’s a really fantastic chemical reaction that helps break down carbon. All plant material, and we’re going to use grass as an example, absorbs the heat from sunlight – the energy from sunlight – and through the chemical reaction of photosynthesis absorbs carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It breaks it apart, releasing oxygen. It’s the oxygen we breathe to support our life and all animal life on Earth.
The carbon dioxide, when it’s absorbed, is broken into oxygen and carbon. That carbon goes into the ground. It’s sequestered into the ground and it contributes to a multitude of soil microbes, soil bacteria, and soil fungi all in the root zone. So the carbon sequestered in the soil – stored in the soil – contributes to an incredible soil-enhancing biological function of soil inhabitants. This activity in the plant root zone encourages healthy plant growth.
Finally, technology has advanced enough that a lot of research has been done on just how important that soil root zone is. So photosynthesis is likely the most important chemical reaction in nature. It breaks apart CO2 and releases oxygen into the environment.
Now these soil microbes do produce some methane that’s released in the environment. And its soil activity does produce some methane. When it enters the atmosphere, it breaks into hydrogen gas (H4) and carbon. This carbon can again bond with oxygen to become part of carbon dioxide and go back through the described cycle.