If Grown Right, Wheat Might Help Fight Climate Change

Julia Rosen is a freelance science writer based in Portland, Oregon. She writes about earth science, energy, climate, and food, although she can get interested in just about anything. Her words have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, EARTH Magazine, and Eos, among other places. Her voice has appeared on podcasts for Scientific American and the Dirtbag Diaries. Find out more at www.julia-rosen.com. Conventional farming usually gets a bad climate rap. That’s because, in one way or another, food production accounts for up to a third of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Some seep directly from agricultural soils, but others stem from transportation, farm machinery, and the substantial carbon footprints of synthetic fertilizers and other inputs. These indirect emissions add to the environmental impacts of staple crops like corn and wheat, oft-vilified grains that feed much of the world’s population. But a new paper, published today in the journal Nature Communications, offers a slice of good news. The study found that a combination of a few basic farming practices boosted wheat production and put heaps of carbon back into the soil–more than enough to compensate for the GHGs emitted in the process of growing it. “The conventional thinking is that wheat production emits carbon,” said Yantai Gan, a senior scientist at Canada’s Semiarid Prairie Agricultural Research Center and the lead author of the study.