High prices for corn and soybeans, coupled with the ethanol mandate and generous crop insurance, are spurring farmers in the Great Plains to plow up native grasslands in favor of commodity crops, as Gabriel Popkin explains in FERN’s latest story, published with National Geographic. The loss of these ancient carbon sinks “poses a conundrum for the Biden administration,” which wants to cut agriculture’s carbon emissions to net zero and conserve 30 percent of the nation’s land in a bid to protect biodiversity.
“Every time a grassland is plowed or sprayed with herbicide and planted in crops, hundreds of deep-rooted perennial plants that can suck carbon into the soil and keep it there are wiped out,” writes Popkin. “A 2019 study led by Tyler Lark, an agricultural researcher at the University of Wisconsin, estimated that tillage for cropland expansion put as much carbon dioxide into the air annually as 31 million cars. A 2018 study, led by The Nature Conservancy, found that in the U.S., conserving grasslands could prevent almost three times as much carbon emission as conserving forests.
“The loss of the Amazon rainforest may get the headlines, but grasslands are even more imperiled, experts say. Roughly half of all temperate grasslands worldwide have been lost, compared to less than 20 percent of the Amazon. In 2019 alone, 2.6 million acres of North American grasslands were plowed under, according to a World Wildlife Fund report.
Grasslands, says Lark, “really are the most endangered ecosystem in the world.”