Farmers sell corn, soy, rye … carbon?

By Gayathri Vaidyanathan — Apr. 28, 2009

Dan Gillespie’s field after receiving heavy rainfall. The soil held together without erosion due to 13 years of no-till farming. (Photo courtesy of Dan Gillespie)

Situated amid the green, rolling landscape near Meadow Grove, Neb., Dan Gillespie’s 700-acre farm, with its 1930s farmhouse, looks idyllic. Gillespie, a fourth-generation farmer, tends to his corn, soy, rye and, since 2006, carbon.

Yes, carbon.

“To harvest the carbon in the Great Plains, you do nothing different than Mother Nature did for eons to cover and protect the soil … and store carbon in the ground,” says Gillespie.

Carbon is a new cash crop for traditional farmers, who are realizing that they can make money and be environmentally conscious at the same time. Gillespie doesn’t literally grow the carbon on his land. He just ensures that by not disturbing the soil during planting, carbon is not released into the atmosphere from decaying plant residue left over from the previous crop cycle.

It may not yet amount to much money, but if President Barack Obama implements a cap-and-trade system to control emissions, as he recently suggested on Earth Day, the future financial payoff could be larger.

Here’s how cap-and-trade works.

A farmer plants his fields without disturbing the soil and releasing carbon into atmosphere. Then he sells the carbon offset to his local farmers’ union. One carbon offset corresponds to 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide not released into the atmosphere.

Miles away in an automobile manufacturing plant, metal plates come together to form an automobile, in the process emitting carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas after water vapor. The trade is between the farmer and the polluting plant, with the hope that the net greenhouse gas emission will be zero.

The farmer conserves, and the plant pollutes.

Various intermediaries help in the process. An aggregator (usually a local farmers’ union) collects the credits and gives them to the North Dakota Farmers Union. The union sells the offsets to the Chicago Climate Exchange, the United States’ only market for buying and selling greenhouse gases.

On the buyer’s side of the exchange, companies enroll voluntarily to buy credits in case they go over a certain emissions limit called a cap.

Companies that have chosen to compensate their emissions by buying offsets from the Chicago Climate Exchange include Rolls-Royce and Ford Motor Co.

With Obama and the Democrats increasingly in favor of cap-and-trade, emissions trading may soon become mandatory.

“By closing the carbon loophole through this kind of market-based cap, we can address in a systematic way all the facets of the energy crisis: lowering our dependence on foreign oil, reducing our use of fossil fuels and promoting new industries right here in America,” Obama said in a speech on Earth Day at a wind turbine plant in Iowa.

Emissions trading is voluntary on the seller’s side of the carbon trade as well, with about 10 percent of farmers from across the country signed up, according to Dale Enerson, director of the North Dakota Farmers Union Carbon Credit Program.

No-till is the most popular way to earn carbon credits from the soil. Gillespie, who also works for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, was one of the first farmers in his county to adopt this environmentally aware farming method 22 years ago.

“My father was a farmer. My grandfather built the 1,000-bushel wooden grain storage with his hands,” said Gillespie of his farming heritage.

Gillespie does not plow his fields before planting. By leaving the decaying matter undisturbed below the ground, he ensures that carbon from decomposition is not released into the atmosphere. The technique also prevents soil erosion and allows farmers to trade in carbon for less work.

“I did it out of environmental awareness, but I was also still single at 34 and didn’t have time for tilling,” he says. Now Gillespie is now happily married and has five daughters.

An hour south of Gillespie’s farm is Newman Grove, Neb., a town of 800. Nearby, James Geyer farms 2,200 acres under the no-till method.

Geyer, a Republican, supports Obama’s cap-and-trade bill, as do environmental groups that have started advertising campaigns to gather support.

“It is an opportunity to earn a little extra money in a practice that I already had,” says Geyer. He switched to no-till because of labor costs and soil conservation.

Carbon does not pay much. Last year, Geyer received $3 to $4 per acre of land per year. This year, he expects the payoff to be much less because of the economy. This is in contrast to European markets that trade billions of dollars in certified emissions credits, a program that does not include agriculture.

There are 300 million acres of cropland in the United States and about 10 million to 15 million acres are enrolled for carbon credits. Last year, 2.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide were traded by the North Dakota Farmers Exchange on the Chicago Climate Exchange, which converts to roughly 300,000 cars taken off the road, according to the North Dakota Farmers Union.

“Harvesting carbon … does not reduce or dismiss the fact that we still need to find new and develop existing alternative energies and reduce use of fossil fuels,” says Gillespie.

E-mail: gv2176@columbia.edu

What’s in my closet? A biology lab

Gayathri Vaidyanathan — Apr 14, 2009

Kay Aull in front of her closet biology lab

A geneticist, a graduate biology student, a writer and an undergraduate physics student recently gathered around a wooden kitchen countertop in New York City, as shown in a video captured by the group.

Daniel Grushkin, the writer, ran a slimy pink liquid through a coffee filter, and the smell of strawberries filled the air. He inhaled and said, “Hmmmm.”

“In this juice is–what?” Grushkin asked the others.

Sung Won Lim, 22, the physics undergrad, replied, “In the juice is DNA along with strawberry essence.”

By the end of the night, the motley crew of biology aficionados had used common kitchen items—shot glasses, alcohol, salt, coffee filters, dish soap, meat tenderizer, wooden skewers—to isolate DNA from strawberries.

They all belong to DIYbio, a biology movement that places experimentation in the hands of amateurs. The idea is to infiltrate basic science, a field that has become increasingly clublike over the years because of specialization of knowledge. Some see it as a return to the era of scientists making important discoveries in their home labs.

“There is a resurgence in ‘make’ culture, and the newest, hottest cool thing in DIY culture is biology,” says Mac Cowell, 25, a biologist who helped launch the movement. “DIYbio is making the technology of biotech better. It is making the tools cheaper and easier.”

Cowell, who attended Davidson College, launched DIYbio in Cambridge, Mass., with help from Jason Bobe, 35, the community director for the Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School. Chapters have formed in Boston, Chicago, Seattle, London, New York and San Francisco, with a new one starting up in Toronto.

“We are on our way to becoming a biotech society, where people’s understanding of biotechnology will become ubiquitous,” Cowell says.

The members get together to experiment in an informal setting with research goals, such as the pilot BioWeatherMap project that the Boston-based group is considering. The map is designed to document the ebb and flow of microorganisms that thrive in different regions of the United States, an endeavor that will be highly useful, especially during flu season.

For the project, volunteers armed with $2 cotton swabs will collect samples of organisms from sidewalks in their cities, a basic experiment in microbiology.

They will then send the samples to Bobe, who will get the DNA sequence of all organisms on the swab from a professional laboratory. Analyzing the sequence—an exercise in bioinformatics—will reveal all species of bacteria that were living on the sidewalk.

Visualizing the results on a map and incorporating environmental trends will get into the fields of ecology, public health and biodiversity.

“It inspires a whole new generation of young people to get engaged with biology,” says Bobe. “With a $2 swab, a 15-year-old can get exposed to five really exciting disciplines.”

Other at-home projects are more complicated but possible. Kay Aull of Cambridge, Mass., is in the process of sequencing her own genome in a laboratory set up in her bedroom closet.

She wants to find out if she has a genetic disorder that runs in her family, but more than that, she wants to show that scientific procedures are not hands-off to laypeople who have an interest in biology.

For the United States, which is struggling with science education in its ailing public school system, DIYbio’s can-do approach may be a boon.

Lim, a sophomore at New York University, had not performed a single science experiment in the New York City public school system—no dissections and certainly no DNA extraction from strawberries. So he was excited to learn the basics of life at DIYbio New York through the strawberry experiment.

“That was the first time I’ve seen and touched DNA,” says Lim. “It was exciting. It got my hopes up. I thought, If I can do this, maybe someday I might be able to do something that’s actually close to genetic engineering or synthetic biology.”

To ultimately be able to generate synthetic organisms from basic parts is the holy grail of most of the DIYbio groups, as it is of researchers in academia and industry.

Ellen Jorgensen, a geneticist at a pharmaceutical company in New York, describes the quest: “To break the simplest of nature—bacteria—down to component parts that you can reassemble into useful machines.”

Synthetic biology aims to make the assembly of cells simple by standardizing the parts that make up the cell. It may eventually become as simple as assembling a living organism from a catalog of ready-made parts.

This brings up issues of safety and regulation and prompts questions about the possibility of bioterrorism. How safe can it be for an amateur to grow and engineer bacteria in a basement lab?

“A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction, that it sounds too dangerous and too futuristic and let us just ban it,” says Bobe. “But I think being able to build frameworks for making this safe and effective for people is our best option.”

The frameworks include regulation and oversight by experienced biologists like Jorgensen for the New York group. She and others say the worries are often overblown. Bacteria used in scientific research are crippled to ensure that they do not thrive outside the laboratory setting.

It is also not possible for an amateur to have bacteria cultures or even advanced chemicals shipped to a home address by supply companies. In the cases where authorities have found private laboratories, they have immediately dismantled them. In 2005, Steve Kurtz, an art professor in upstate New York was arrested by the FBI for keeping bacterial cultures in a home lab in a false bioterrorism scare (he was later acquitted).

“But what’s really clear is we can’t try to prohibit DIYbio,” says Cowell. “The only thing that happens when you try to prohibit people from doing the basic stuff is, they’ll do it without telling you.”

The advantages of DIYbio outweigh the risks, according to Jorgensen because it allows entry into a field that has unfortunately become difficult to access. For the layperson, understanding a published scientific article with its own specialized lingo may be a herculean task. The way out of this predicament may be by educating the public.

“There is an ivory-tower effect with science,” says Cowell. “The most beautiful thing about DIYbio is that it breaks down that wall. The fact that we are not scientists and we are evangelizing it makes it a lot more approachable to people.”

President Barack Obama has announced billions of dollars in his stimulus package to help with various facets of science education and research at the school and university level.

“Now we have a president that is willing to appoint Nobel laureates to Cabinet positions, we are looking to the future,” says Jorgensen. “Science is part of the future.”

E-mail: gv2176@columbia.edu