Tue, 18 Jan 2005

Rising CO2 Could Lower Forage Quality

And if it had the effect described in this piece, farmers would simply raise the fertilizer level to fix more nitrogen. Which means, of course, greater costs, and more industrial processes to create the additional fertilizer. Which, of course, adds to the ambient carbon dioxide levels via emmissions ... and requires the farmers to add more fertilizer.

Nature tends to work in a circle, and equations want to balance out. In my programming days, we referred to this kind of thing as the "jello factor" - push the code here, and it wiggles over there. And if you don't understand the equation (the code), you're not going to have any idea of where "over there" is.

Continued elevated carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere may reduce forage quality among the world's grasslands and lead to reduced weight gain among animals, according to Agricultural Research Service scientists and cooperators. Their five-year study was published in the journal Ecological Applications. Plant physiologist Jack A. Morgan led the study with ARS colleagues and cooperators at Colorado State University. Morgan heads the ARS Rangeland Resources Research Unit in Fort Collins, Colo.

(link) [Science Blog - Research News in Science, Health, Medicine, Space, Physics and More]

/Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time