Ashley Becker Steele’s journey with soil carbon all started at Schoepp Family Farm. She was on an orientation field trip for her master’s program at UW-Madison. Ron Schoepp showed Becker Steele and her colleagues how he rotationally grazes livestock.
“It seemed to be a way of farming more in harmony with nature and challenged my preconceived notions of agriculture,” Becker Steele said.
Becker Steele had ideas about agriculture; she grew up on a farm in Maquoketa, a small town in eastern Iowa. Schoepp’s operation offered Becker Steele a new perspective.
Schoepp invited any interested graduate students to do research on his farm; so six months later when Becker Steele became interested in how agriculture could be a solution to environmental problems, she gave Schoepp a call.
Now Becker Steele is one of our in-house grassland ecologists, a doctoral candidate in Environment & Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Jackson Lab. Becker Steele is exploring the relationship between soil organic carbon and agricultural management practices.
In this video produced in collaboration with Soil Science Society of America Journal, Becker Steele shares results of her research comparing soil carbon in well-managed pastures and row cropping systems. Check out her findings.
Why does soil carbon matter?
More soil carbon in an agricultural system…
- increases water infiltration during heavy rainfall
- holds onto more water during droughts
- retains nutrients, keeping them out of ground and surface waters
- maintains productivity and resilience in extreme conditions
- can help offset greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere
As such, increasing soil carbon serves as both a climate change adaptation and mitigation strategy.
Where does soil carbon go?
“Corn and soybeans dominate the landscape in the Midwest, but they reduce the amount of carbon in the soil,” said Becker Steele. “Whereas perennial pastures offer our best potential to build carbon.”
Read Becker Steele’s paper published in Soil Science Society of America Journal for more.
In addition to her research on soil carbon, Becker Steele conducts interviews with farmers across Iowa and Wisconsin exploring how we can reimagine our agricultural landscapes. What are the barriers and opportunities to getting more sustainable agriculture on the landscape?
Rather than trying to individually target farmers to adopt new practices, her work considers how we can change our food system’s norms in partnership with farmers to promote agriculture that meets the outcomes we want and need, like healthy soil and clean water.
Becker Steele believes that we can both be critical of our agricultural system and support farmers. She reflects back on her own family’s farm in Maquoketa as she considers these questions and contributes her findings to the scientific community.
“I’m most motivated when I feel like my work is helping to make agriculture better for people and the planet. That can mean providing evidence to support the benefits of certain agricultural practices or making a farmer feel like their story matters and is worth sharing,” she said.
For more information, contact Becker Steele at aebecker4@wisc.edu.