Standard Soil: Difference between revisions
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* Controlled burning vs. Fire suppression | * Controlled burning vs. Fire suppression | ||
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Aside from a blog post written by CEO Russ Conser in 2018, the Standard Soil website does not address the subject of Methane at all. | Aside from a blog post written by CEO Russ Conser in 2018, the Standard Soil website does not address the subject of Methane at all. | ||
Revision as of 03:36, 1 March 2023
Markets Grass-Fed Beef for soil carbon removal despite high GHG emissions (Methane + Nitrous Oxide) of their grazing method compared to carbon negative methods of building soil organic carbon.
Leadership
Shell Oil
CEO: Russ Conser, who left Shell Oil in 2013 after 30 years[1] to spend the last decade in regenerative ranching while coordinating with Shell Oil initiatives in this domain
Advisor: Peter Byck - director of Soil Carbon Cowboys, funded by Shell Oil in 2015 to promote the Savory Method of livestock grazing.
Savory Institute
Advisor: Jason Rowntree - director of Savory Hub at Michigan State University, where he is the lead investigator of a $19 million research grant awarded by the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research in partnership with the Savory Institute, Nature Conservancy, and USDA.[2]
Resource Library
Soil Carbon Cowboys
An 11 minute excerpt of the 2015 Documentary Soil Carbon Cowboys (funded by Shell Oil) is the first featured video in Standard Soil's Research Library [3]
Grazing Method
AMP Grazing
Standard Soil is currently Google Search's top hit for multi-paddock adaptive grazing, the technical basis of the the Savory Method [4]. Following Allan Savory, it incorrectly describes this as "mimicking the roaming bison" despite numerous essential differences between AMP Grazing and the traditional ecological knowledge of truly regenerative bison grazing, including but not limited to:
- Open Range vs. Mobile Fencing
- Bison as Partners vs. Livestock as Tool
- Herd longevity vs. Commodity slaughter
- Native species vs. European substitutes
- Controlled burning vs. Fire suppression
Methane Pseudoscience
Aside from a blog post written by CEO Russ Conser in 2018, the Standard Soil website does not address the subject of Methane at all.
In "Reinventing Real Beef," Conser argues that "growing better quality and more diverse forage in pasture" can reduce methane emissions because it leads to "more energy going into the animal and less escaping as methane back out into the air."
While he does not provide a citation for this claim, he later cites a study published in 2018 by Advisory Board Member Jason Rowntree, citing it as "recent research" which "suggests that the production of beef cattle can even be done in a way where the carbon captured in soil significantly exceeds the emission of methane." However, the study itself does not make this claim, but argues instead that improved forage quality can reduce enteric CH4 emissions by 15%[5]
Two years-later, even the industry-funded (General Mills) study also led by Jason Rowntree concluded that beef produced via Adaptive Multi-Paddock Grazing emitted more greenhouse gases than it sequestered. Rowntree reached this conclusion even though he used the long-term (100 year) rather than short-term (20 year) timeframe for Methane emissions, underestimating the need to reduce Methane emissions by at least 250%.[6]
This shorter timeframe is necessary to account for the non-linear dynamics of climate collapse, keep global heating under 1.5C, and stop feedback loops from triggering runaway global heating. The latest research shows that immediate and massive emission reductions are required to ensure we avoid this scenario, especially of methane due to its greater impact over shorter timescales[7]
- ↑ https://www.aeinstitute.org/team-blog/russ-conser
- ↑ http://standardsoil.com/about-us/the-team/
- ↑ http://standardsoil.com/resource/
- ↑ http://standardsoil.com/our-approach/amp-grazing/
- ↑ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X17310338
- ↑ https://plantbaseddata.medium.com/the-failed-attempt-to-greenwash-beef-7dfca9d74333
- ↑ https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(23)00004-0