Location: Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory
Project Number: 8042-12120-002-004-N
Project Type: Non-Funded Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Nov 28, 2023
End Date: Jun 15, 2026
Objective:
The objective is to determine the impact of soil minerals on soil carbon accumulation and storage between differing management systems. Building soil organic carbon is a critical component of soil health and a key method to mitigate climate change. This collaboration will focus on quantifying the mineral species in each of the farming system program plots and any changes that occur over the course of the 26 year experiment using archived soils combined with in-field experiments using synthesized minerals to measure the stability of organo-mineral complexes. This information will establish a foundation to build our understanding of soil carbon accumulation in organo-mineral complexes and how cultivation practices can shape this long-term soil organic matter pool with implications for carbon capture, system resiliency, and soil and plant health.
Approach:
The approach to this collaboration will focus on identifying soil minerals through X-ray diffraction. This X-ray technique enables the identification of minerals phases and semi-quantitative compositional analysis. The differences between mineralogy in the different cropping systems will form the foundation for the analysis of mineral impact on the organo-mineral associated carbon based on fundamental differences in specific mineral phases' ability to sorb and occlude organic carbon. The Cooperator has an XRD instrument that will be used to run the samples and then all mineral identification will be conducted. The archived soils from the 26 years of the farming systems project will be analyzed to determine changes in mineralogy over time between and within cropping systems.
