Professor Louis Schipper: Can we build and maintain soil carbon in pastures?


Small increases or decreases in soil carbon stocks can result in large changes in carbon dioxide of the atmosphere. Maintaining or enhancing soil carbon is also critical for soil health. During the recent Paris meetings on climate change the French Ministry of Agriculture proposed the 4‰ Initiative aimed at increasing soil carbon by 4 parts per thousand to offset emissions from fossil fuels. Changes in land use or management are understood to alter soil carbon stocks but the consequent direction and magnitude of change in carbon are not always obvious. I will summarise what is known about changes in soil carbon stocks for New Zealand pastures and what the opportunity for additional storage might be. Included are long-term changes under drystock and dairy systems and management practices (irrigation, fertiliser inputs and cultivation).  Most of the data were summarised in: Schipper, L.A.; Mudge, P.L.; Kirschbaum, M.U.F.; Hedley, C.B.; Golubiewski, N.E.; Smaill, S.J.; Kelliher, F.M. (2017) A review of soil carbon change in grazed New Zealand pastures. New Zealand Journal of Agricultural Research DOI: 10.1080/00288233.2017.1284134
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 2017NZAgGHGMitigationConference_Schipper.pdf (1.77MB)
About Louis
Louis Schipper is a Professor at the University of Waikato who investigates soil biogeochemical processes at landscape scales and how they might be manipulated to achieve improved environmental performance while maintaining production. For the last decade, Louis has led teams determining changes in carbon stocks of pasture soils at paddock to national scales. This research demonstrated that while carbon in the majority of pastures on flat land was at steady state, some of our important soils had lost substantial carbon while hill-country soils have gained large amounts. These data have been central to developing a national picture of New Zealand’s carbon budget. They have also used micro-meteorological approaches to evaluate high-resolution fluxes of carbon at farm scales to identify practices that increase carbon stocks, generating in-depth understanding of climatic effects (e.g., drought, rainfall) and management impacts (pasture renewal, cultivation, new pasture species). Louis is an elected fellow of the New Zealand and American soil science societies with multiple awards from the NZ Society. He has published >130 papers (Scopus H-index of 36), supervised ~40 PhD/MSc students, and developed substantial soil and environmental resources for schools.