Excerpt
Mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the reduction of negative impacts to the environment are pertinent to long-term agricultural sustainability (Lal et al. 1999). In 2007, the agricultural sector was responsible for 6% of the total GHG emissions in the United States (413 Tg carbon dioxide equivalents [CO2e] [455 million tn CO2e]) (USEPA 2009). The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority reports that GHG emissions for the State of New York totaled 270 Tg CO2e (298 million tn CO2e) in 2005, which represented 3.8% of total GHG emissions in the United States (NYSERDA 2009). There is a paucity of recent estimates for GHG emissions from the agricultural region of New York State. However, it can be expected that the percent contribution of agriculture to total GHG emissions from the State of New York is on the same order of magnitude or slightly lower than that for the nation (≤6%).
Certain management practices can reduce GHG emissions from agricultural lands by sequestering carbon (C) in the soil. Methods of agricultural C sequestration include, but are not limited to, conservation tillage and rotational grazing. Conservation tillage refers to a tillage system in which at least 30% of crop residue…
Footnotes
Cynthia Rosenzweig and Daniel Hillel are senior research scientists, Peter Neofotis is a research assistant, and Angela Yin Yee Kong is a NASA postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Climate Systems Research at the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York. At the time of this study, Sarah Bartges and Alison Powell were students in the Department of Environmental Science at Barnard University, New York, New York, and Jake Garcia was a graduate student in the Department of Geography, Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, New York. Judith LaBelle is the President of and Joan Snyder is a Fellow at the Glynwood Center, Cold Spring, New York.
- © 2010 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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