Soil organic carbon stocks potentially at risk of decline with organic farming expansion

Ulysse Gaudaré; Matthias Kuhnert; Pete Smith; Manuel Martin; Pietro Barbieri; Sylvain Pellerin; Thomas Nesme

doi:10.1038/s41558-023-01721-5

Soil organic carbon stocks potentially at risk of decline with organic farming expansion

Ulysse Gaudaré^* (Corresponding Author), Matthias Kuhnert, Pete Smith, Manuel Martin, Pietro Barbieri, Sylvain Pellerin, Thomas Nesme^* (Corresponding Author)

^*Corresponding author for this work

Aberdeen Centre For Environmental Sustainability

INRAE

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

6 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Organic farming is often considered a strategy that increases croplands’ soil organic carbon (SOC) stock. However, organic farms currently occupy only a small fraction of cropland, and it is unclear how the full-scale expansion of organic farming will impact soil carbon inputs and SOC stocks. Here we use a spatially explicit biogeochemical model to show that the complete conversion of global cropland to organic farming without the use of cover crops and plant residue (normative scenario) will result in a 40% reduction of global soil carbon input and 9% decline in SOC stock. An optimal organic scenario that supports widespread cover cropping and enhanced residue recycling will reduce global soil carbon input by 31%, and SOC can be preserved after 20 yr following conversion to organic farming. These results suggest that expanding organic farming might reduce the potential for soil carbon sequestration unless appropriate farming practices are implemented.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	719-725
Number of pages	7
Journal	Nature Climate Change
Volume	13
Early online date	29 Jun 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01721-5
Publication status	Published - Jul 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank R. Girault and Y. Behara for help regarding carbon losses in manure management process; D. Angers, E. Ceschia and C. Poeplau for inputs on how to consider cover crops. This work was funded by ADEME, Bordeaux Sciences Agro (Univ. Bordeaux), INRAE’s committee on organic farming (MP Métabio) and Aberdeen University. M.K. and P.S. acknowledge support from the CIRCASA project, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement no 774378.

Data Availability Statement

All data on crop areas, soil carbon inputs and soil organic carbon stocks for any of the scenarios and organic shares considered in this paper are available on a public repository57.

Code availability
The model code for GOANIM is available in its most recent version at https://github.com/Pie90/GOANIM_public/, together with a full model documentation. All analyses were done using R x64 3.5.3. For RothC we used the ‘cin_month’ and ‘runExplicitSol’ functions from the RothC package to respectively estimate SCI0 and SOC stock evolution across time.

Keywords

agriculture
biogeochemistry
Environmental impact

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Access to Document

10.1038/s41558-023-01721-5Licence: Unspecified

Gaudare_etal_NCC_Soil_Organic_Carbon_AAM
For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. The final published version is available at: Gaudaré, U., Kuhnert, M., Smith, P. et al. Soil organic carbon stocks potentially at risk of decline with organic farming expansion. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 719–725 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01721-5
Accepted author manuscript, 1.01 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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Soil organic carbon stocks potentially at risk of decline with organic farming expansion

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Data Availability Statement

Keywords

UN SDGs

Access to Document

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Cite this