[Terrapreta] Amazon cattle ranging

[Nikolaus Foidl]

Dear All!

I know, everybody loves trees and it is a gut feeling for everybody that
cutting trees is bad. Deforestation sounds like a catastrophic event.

But lets have a closer look at the biomass balance in a pasture situation
versus a forest situation.

A grown established forest has neutral balance of fixation and loss, if the
forest gets to old the danger of loosing all the stored biomass with a big
scale fire is imminent and very often.

Pasture on the other hand is continuous growing, continuous harvest. Part of
it is turned in C fixed in the soil, (humic acids and Biomass) part is eaten
and transferred during several month into CO2 again. But the overall balance
of C in soil is positive( some 4 to 8 tons C per ha and year added to the
soil).
Agriculture is negative. We loose some 4 to 5 tons C per ha and year).

So if we combine in a wider rotation program not only crop rotation like
Soy-Maize-Sunflower-Wheat , instead include every 7 years a 2 year pasture
in this rotation plan then we can rise organic matter from 1 % to 3,5 to 4 %
( which takes 4 to 7 years to degrade again to 1 %). In this case the
comparison from the soil quality point of view would be more equilibrated.

In a rainforest the quality of the soil is very poor due to the high
precipitation, high acidity and low nutrient content of the soil( continuous
washing out). In the same area getting pasture would lower the washing out
and would fix more nutrients in the soil. Organic matter as well would rise.
Renovation is continuous and not every 100 to 3000 years waiting that a
mayor burning will happen.

We in our farm in Bolivia have extended the rotation plan and are trying to
rise every 5 to 7 years our organic matter content up to 4 % again. We left
every 200 to 240 meter a 60 to 100 meter wide forest stripe with all stripes
inter connected and evenly distributed some bigger areas with  between 300
to 900 ha. As well in every field we have water retention lagoons to foment
the diversity of live forms. So in a total area of 24.000 ha we still have
9500 ha left as reserve for animals and insects to get a workable
equilibrium. 15 % of the agriculture area is changed every year into grass
land and same amount comes back in to agricultural use every year. For us it
works, although we continue to refine our concept.

If you have a closer look at Methane Balance , O2 Balance etc. you will find
that between pasture and Forest the difference is not as big as the press
always assume.

We have to see that this planet is the only one and until we do not have an
alternative to agricultural food production we cannot save all the trees in
this world.

Best regards Nikolaus