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Conservation

Spare our restored soil

Nature volume 498, pages 180–181 (2013)Cite this article

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The conversion of poor-quality arable lands to grassland has prevented soil erosion and sequestered carbon. A study finds that greenhouse gases will be emitted if these lands return to cultivation, especially if they are ploughed.

In 1985, the US Department of Agriculture established the Conservation Reserve Program to revitalize degraded and marginalized agricultural land by converting it to grassland. Although enthusiasm for the programme has been far from universal, many agree that it did generally rebuild soils and cause carbon to be sequestered within them1. But with a large number of the programme's contracts with farmers about to expire, revitalized land might soon be ploughed up, with unknown environmental consequences. Writing in Global Change Biology, Ruan and Robertson2 fill us in on one of those consequences: the effect on greenhouse-gas emissions. They conclude that it would be best to maintain these restored grasslands as they are, but that, if they must be cultivated, 'no-tillage' farming produces many fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than does farming involving conventional ploughing.

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Figure 1: Land-use change influences greenhouse-gas fluxes from soils to the atmosphere.

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  1. Johan Six is in the Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH-Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.,

    Johan Six

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  1. Johan Six
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Correspondence to Johan Six.

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Six, J. Spare our restored soil. Nature 498, 180–181 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/498180a

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