In a discovery as broad and far-reaching as the Big Muddy itself, a new, Yale-led study says farmers along the Mississippi River Basin are storing more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the soil than they are emitting when they add limestone to their fields, an agricultural practice known as "liming."
It's a finding that carries major implications for agricultural soil management in the American heartland and around the world - and points to more than a century of data showing the effectiveness of removing CO2 from the atmosphere by adding crushed carbonate rock to agricultural soil.
"One of the exciting things about this result is that it aligns climate action with something that is already good for farmers," said Tim Jesper Suhrhoff, a geochemist at Yale and first author of the new study, published in the journal Nature. Suhrhoff is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture.
For generations, farmers in the Mississippi River Basin - an area that covers 41% of the contiguous United States and encompasses roughly 65% of U.S. croplands - have utilized agricultural liming, a soil replenishment practice that involves spreading crushed limestone over agricultural fields to increase pH, reduce soil acidity, and increase crop yields.
