This past week at the Rose Café, Dawit Solomon spoke about his work on soil. Soil is important for carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, farming, climate regulation, and water purification, among other things. Since 1950, the CO2 in the atmosphere has increased significantly and 25% of emissions are from soil being disturbed because of development. The soil on the earth contains four times as much carbon as the atmosphere, and as soil is eroded because of bad farming techniques, rain due to climate change, or construction, it not only impacts the health of our planet, but also causes malnutrition.
In Ethiopia, soil is highly eroded and food insecurity and malnutrition rates are high. Dr. Solomon’s research group has been working on finding a solution to this issue and have recently produced their first batch of cow bone fertilizer. Indigenous communities knew the importance of nourishing the soil and did this through spreading ash and char residues from cooking or harvesting on the ground. This allowed the carbon to seep into the soil, enriching it for farming and preventing that carbon from going into the atmosphere. This is the idea behind the cow bone fertilizer. Cow bones are abundant, and Cornell is turning them into fertilizer by charring them, grinding them up into a dust, and then gluing the dust into pellet form with a small amount of molasses. The pellets are cheap to produce and if they are effective, they will help reduce malnutrition and increase carbon sequestration, reducing global warming.
Before attending the Rose Café, I knew about the relationship between soil quality and food insecurity, but I was surprised to hear how much of a role soil can play in addressing global warming. Dr. Solomon spoke about how the amount of carbon on earth does not change, it is the way it is stored that changes. Nowadays, more of the carbon that was once sequestered in the soil is now in the atmosphere and by reversing this trend by employing novel techniques such as using bone fertilizer, we may be able to slow climate change.
The title of your post is great and really caught my attention. You explained this concept very well and really helped me to understand better what he had said.