SBIR Phase I: Accelerated carbon sequestration

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop novel soil organic matter (SOM) amendment techniques focused on improving nutrient supply to crops, sustaining agriculture, and providing long-term, deep soil carbon sequestration to help combat climate change. New methods of developing persistent organic matter amendments in soil are urgently needed in the US and globally. The result of this work will be to introduce new soil fertility and carbon storage services that permanently sequester carbon in agricultural soils at an unprecedented rate. The approach is synergistic with other economic co-benefits, such as increasing crop yields, reducing fertilizer loads, reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations as related to farming, and expanding biorefineries and forest management capabilities. These high-quality agricultural soil amendment services may eventually have a positive impact on the global environment. This project seeks to develop a novel, soil organic matter amendment technique. The research and development will enable acquisition of critical benchmarking and verification data. Critical prototyping, initial verification, and benchmarking in a representative agricultural soil will be conducted so that the technique can then later be extended to other farms. This proposal seeks to: 1) demonstrate viable integration into operations on commercial farms, 2) demonstrate that the method is scalable to fields and acre-scale applications, and 3) perform initial stability tests to verify the carbon is chemically stabilized using in situ CO2 gas analyzers, 4) track carbon content changes, 5) perform laboratory experiments compared against controls to verify it is not vulnerable to oxygen exposure from root intrusion, and 4) validate soil fertility improvements including changes in soil properties like soil water-holding capacity, cation exchange capacity, and base saturation. The project will use field- and lab-incubated biweekly CO2 loss rates to estimate the mean residence time (MRT) of carbon and compare treatment plots against controls. The results will be validated with random field locations and control plots of land. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.