“I guess all those ag crops don’t “trap carbon.”
Not on a total carbon balance. Traditional crops due to the tilling of soils, pesticides and fossil based fertilizers plus the diesel to plant and harvest are not anywhere near carbon negative they are positive by a good degree several tonnes per acre positive.
You can go to no till or shallow till and put biochar into the soils at that point it’s called regenerative agriculture and it is carbon negative as long as the subsoil is not flipped into the atmosphere by tilling it up. You also get way better yields once the subsurface microbe communities get up and running in all that black earth soil. Less water is needed as well since the biochar holds water in the billions of pores per kg of it.
So to answer your question from a geochemistry expert no traditional agriculture is not trapping carbon. What one feels about net carbon levels is irrelevant given that the process of modern agriculture itself is by definition unsustainable at some point resource depletion will end it’s practice. Be that aquifer depletion from using fossil water at 100 times the rate of recharge. Be it the 8 billion people who all want and need middle class levels of resource access and when they get it burn down the last liquid hydrocarbons in a couple decades. Or no one talks about top soil depletion that deep till agriculture is depleting at 100 times it rate of development. It takes 1000s of years for a meter of topsoil to form and it’s being lost at a shocking rate world wide.
Good exposition of all the problems. Is there a solution besides cutting global population in half? Bugs and Soylent Green?
The history of tech development is that, when new solutions are found, population quickly grows to consume those new solutions. I’m reminded of the time in the 60s that the I-270 interstate “circumferential” was built around St. Louis. The planners thought that growth wouldn’t catch up for 30 or 40 years. I caught and surpassed projections in a few years.
BTW, I buy most of my flour used in bread baking from local regenerative ag farms in the Northwest. Skagit Valley north of Seattle grows outstanding wheat. Other locations in Washington State and Idaho do, as well, as do other places throughout the USA.