carbon

Thinking through some of what I saw on my walk yesterday leads directly to the difference between annual and perennial plants. If the legumes I saw in their greenery on March 12^th are photosynthesizing, and they must be, and if the grasses surrounding them were green perhaps a month longer last fall, say until November 15^th after the first hard frost which pushed the legumes into dormancy on about October 15^th, then there are things we can say. One is that annual plants live between whenever they can be planted in spring, generally about May 15^th here until the first hard frost, when they really do die. The goal of an annual plant is not to live on itself but to produce seeds which will start growth in the future.

It is also important to point out that the perennial planting I saw was in both cases diverse. More than one species was present. In the case of the pasture it may have been fifteen or twenty. Even the hay field was seeded with two legumes and three grasses.

Perennial swards photosynthesize for three months longer than do the annuals. This is important. It is not just the perennial, but the diversity of perennials that outperforms the annuals. And they do, harvesting sunlight for eight months per year instead of five, a sixty percent improvement.

What is happening here might be called the carbon pathway. It is how the cycle of life works. Sugars and carbohydrates are manufactured from CO2 and the sun and sent via the plant into the roots and thence partially to the soil life, which in turn helps the plant to access minerals in the soil and grow. Researchers often call this product “liquid carbon” and its movement is critical to plant growth. When plants “sequester” carbon they are helping clean our excess carbon out of the atmosphere and installing it in the soil, where a certain amount of it originated due to agriculture’s traditional over reliance upon the plow.