Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Potential of Agricultural Land Management in the United States: A Synthesis of the Literature (Third Edition)

Author(s): Alison J. Eagle, Lydia P. Olander, Lucy R. Henry, Karen Haugen-Kozyra, Neville Millar, and G. Philip Robertson

Published: January 2012

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This document, now in its third edition, is a companion report to the T-AGG report Assessing Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Opportunities and Implementation Strategies for Agricultural Land Management in the United States. The third edition updates the side-by-side comparison of the biophysical greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation potential of 42 agricultural land management activities with newly available and previously un-included data from field experiments, modeling, and expert review. Activities with sufficient research estimates of mitigation potential are now all derived from original individual data points of side-by-side experiments (previous editions included expert and modeling estimates and applied different weighting factors).

The review includes:

• Advances in plant breeding and biotechnology
• Conservation tillage (no-till)
• Fallow management
• Changes to crop rotations
• Short-rotation woody crops
• Agroforestry
• Herbaceous buffers
• Application of organic soil amendments
• Biochar
• Changes in irrigation practices
• Reduce chemical inputs
• Nitrous oxide emission reductions with nitrogen management (fertilizer, inhibitors, irrigation)
• Drainage of agricultural wetlands
• Reducing methane emissions from rice
• Grazing and pasture land management
• Land conversion
• Specialty crops