Putting The Cookie Back

I’m guessing I wasn’t the only kid who got caught with my hand in the cookie jar from time to time as a kid. Sometimes the best I could hope for was getting in a bite or two before mom walked around the corner so that there was at least some gratification to offset the punishment ;-).

As many of you know, I’m a bit of an unusual member of the Grassfed Exchange community. Although I grew up and was educated in farm states (Nebraska and Iowa), I was a city kid. I surely loved time on my cousins’ farms at holidays, frankly I was clueless about how the whole thing really worked.

So like many of my generation, I left the old neighborhood to go into the energy business, because perhaps like the Navy, that’s where all the action was in the late 1970’s. I guess it was even more like the Navy than I expected as within a few days after arriving, I was on a helicopter heading out over the ocean to an offshore rig to do my new job – running an array of very technical instruments that could tell us just how much oil and gas was in a given well that we had drilled below the ocean floor.

Frankly, I was somewhat clueless about the details of this industry, too, until I got some experience. One thing that I came to learn that is relevant here is that all that oil and gas actually came from something called ‘source rocks.’ Source rocks are sedimentary materials that are rich in organic matter. That organic matter is sometimes from dead algae or plankton on the sea floor, but sometimes from dead bacteria, fungi and plant material from soils formed on land (click here if you’re interested in learning more). As would become relevant later, I developed some specialty skills in being able to quantify how much solid organic matter was present using the same tools we used to quantify the oil and gas, so I got a pretty good feel about concentration and distribution of source rocks in an around the planet.

The way that a source rocks works is that over time, as more dirt and mud pile on top of the former soil and sea floor sediments, the increasing pressure, temperature and time quite literally ‘cook’ the oil and gas out of the source rock. Being lighter than water, the oil and gas then floats up until it runs into a hard enough layer to block further escape – what we call a ‘trap.’ That’s where ‘oil men’ like me find it and poke holes to suck it out so you can put it in your truck.

So then one strange day only last year, I hear this seemingly crazy guy claim that we can put carbon back into soils by changing how we graze cattle. I immediately recognized that if this is true, skills from my early years in oil and gas source rocks could allow me to go find actual measurements that could prove the claims true or false.

Although data was and is still sketchy, I was able to find enough data pretty quickly that told me it was at least possible in some places (e.g. here and here). These studies showed data where the soil had gone from 1-2% of its own dry weight as carbon to sometimes 3-5%. The functional impact of such changes were indeed significant – in theory, 10’s or even 100’s of billions of tons of carbon could be put back in soils if we could achieve similar changes on grasslands all around the world.

But since these were the exact same units (dry weight %) we used in characterizing source rocks – I recognized immediately the plausibility. See the picture at the right for an example of a ‘world class’ source rock. Here we see a few hundred feet of alternating ~1-5 foot thick layers of the earth where the rock goes from <1% organic carbon up to 3-5% carbon in the good stuff – sometimes even higher.

Then it really hit me – what we were looking at is calling on the same basic dynamics to put the carbon back into the soil as put it there in the first place! Cows aren’t dinosaurs, but the basic interplay of solar energy, plant photosynthesis, and animal life are essentially the same today as they were 100’s of millions of years ago – one of those ‘same song, new verse’ things!

So back to that cookie thing. With the cookie, once I took that first bite, putting it back wasn’t an option. But with oil and soil, it is. Nature buried the source rock and cooked the oil out. We came along and sucked it out, burned it, and emitted CO2 into the air. When visionary farmers and ranchers like you change how you manage your land in a way that builds up carbon in your soil, you are quite literally closing the loop on the fossil fuel age. Given that it was petroleum that allowed so many of the practices that raised farm productivity in the first place, but damaged the soil in the long run, this seems like a fitting irony. It’s like putting the cookie back, except we all got to enjoy it for about 150 years while it was out of the jar ;-).

Russ Conser

Fulshear, TX