How Cattle Ranching Can Positively Affect Carbon Absorption

By Courtney White
Published on May 12, 2016
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Tom wasn’t monitoring for soil carbon, but everything he was doing had a positive carbon effect, as evidenced by the increased health and productivity of their ranch.
Tom wasn’t monitoring for soil carbon, but everything he was doing had a positive carbon effect, as evidenced by the increased health and productivity of their ranch.
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In "Grass, Soil, Hope: A Journey through Carbon Country," the author shows how all these practical strategies can be bundled together into an economic and ecological whole, with the aim of reducing atmospheric CO2 while producing substantial co-benefits for all living things. Soil is a huge natural sink for carbon dioxide. If we can draw increasing amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and store it safely in the soil, we can significantly address all the multiple challenges that now appear so intractable.
In "Grass, Soil, Hope: A Journey through Carbon Country," the author shows how all these practical strategies can be bundled together into an economic and ecological whole, with the aim of reducing atmospheric CO2 while producing substantial co-benefits for all living things. Soil is a huge natural sink for carbon dioxide. If we can draw increasing amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and store it safely in the soil, we can significantly address all the multiple challenges that now appear so intractable.

New Mexico farmer, Tom Sidwell, may hold the secret recipe for plentiful grass to graze and a well stocked pasture. By using cattle to manage carbon he is able to maximize profits while catering to his land.

On a sky-blue October day, I drove into the dry country of eastern New Mexico to visit an award-winning ranch and contemplate the carbon cycle. Although I had visited many well-managed ranches over the years, I had never looked at one through a carbon lens before, especially in the context of carbon sequestration and climate change. I was certain that the ranchers hadn’t, either. The crisis-that-shall-not-be-named is a politically charged topic in the rural West, even among the best ranch managers, which makes the challenge of talking about carbon without talking about you-know-what a delicate juggling act.

On the other hand, for cattle ranchers like Tom and Mimi Sidwell, it’s not necessary to bring up the topic at all. That’s because healing the carbon cycle is what they do for a living. Whether it improves you-know-what isn’t on their minds.

In 2004, the Sidwells bought the 7,000-acre JX Ranch south of Tucumcari, New Mexico, and set about doing what they know best: earning a profit by restoring the land to health and stewarding it sustainably.

As with many ranches in the arid Southwest, the JX had been hard used over the decades. Poor land and water management had caused the grass cover to diminish in quantity and quality, exposing soil to the erosive effects of wind, rain, and sunlight, which also diminished the organic content of the soil significantly, especially its carbon. Eroded gullies had formed across the ranch, small at first, but growing larger with each thundershower, cutting down through the soft soil, biting into the land deeper, eating away at its vitality. Water tables fell correspondingly, starving plants and animals alike of precious nutrients, forage, and energy.

Profits fell too for the ranch’s previous owners. Many had followed a typical business plan: stretch the land’s ecological capacity to the breaking point, add more cattle when the economic times turned tough, and pray for rain when dry times arrived, as they always did. The result was the same — a downward spiral as the ranch crossed ecological and economic thresholds. In the case of the JX, the water, nutrient, mineral, and energy cycles unraveled across the ranch, causing the land to disassemble and eventually fall apart.

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