Eric Nyquist
Rock dust and oats can shift the narrative
Agriculture accounts for a whopping 10 percent of US carbon emissions. What’s more, many farming processes deplete soil of nutrients, increasing the need for fertilizers. Geochemist Noah Planavsky and his colleagues wondered if a traditional but relatively little-used process, spreading fields with powdered basalt rock, might help increase yields while sequestering carbon. The idea came out of an undergraduate class he helped teach, in which he noticed a profound appetite in the students to investigate “how agriculture can be something that is part of climate solutions,” he recalls, “instead of being viewed as a source of pollution and degradation of communities, and part of the climate problem.”
The team’s YPS grant was used to set up a trial on a farm in the Midwest, where phosphorus-rich basalt dust, a byproduct of making road surface materials, was applied to fields. So far, they’ve observed increased harvests of oat and other crops as a result of the treatment and are working on ways to calculate the change in carbon released.
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