Humberto Blanco Canqui has dedicated his life to the study of soils and their properties. During his childhood in the highlands of Bolivia near La Paz, Blanco spent much of his time on the family farm. Working shoulder to shoulder with his father, planting and harvesting crops developed his interest in soil science from early on. Now, three decades later, Blanco is no longer harvesting crops; instead, he is taking giant steps in the field of soil science, working to understand how proper soil management can help with a current and relevant world-wide problem, the issue of global warming.
Blanco, now a Research Scientist at the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center and the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State, left Bolivia encouraged by what he describes as a “constant inner drive to better himself.” He arrived in the Unites States in 1993 to obtain his M.S. in Soil Science at the University of Missouri with the support of the Fulbright Program. He went back to his native Bolivia and worked there as a university professor for five years before returning to his alma mater in 2000 to obtain his doctorate in Soil Management.
Since coming to Ohio State in early 2004, initially as a post doctoral researcher, he has been involved in projects that examine soil management and its use as an alternative to sequester atmospheric CO2. Blanco indicates that a lot of soil organic carbon has been lost to the atmosphere since the inception of agriculture because of anthropogenic activities including deforestation and intensive plowing. “By bringing back the carbon lost, we can reduce the net gain of CO2 in the atmosphere while also improving soil fertility and sustaining agronomic productivity,” Blanco said. “Studies on carbon sequestration by soils are important because they are able to buy us time while new technologies are being developed to reduce the net gain of carbon in the atmosphere,” he emphasized.
One of Blanco’s current projects studies the effects of removing crop residues, such as corn stover, for producing ethanol on soil processes and agronomic productivity. “The media emphasizes the positive aspects of this type of biofuel feedstocks, but leaves the negative aspects untold,” he explained. Experiments carried out by Blanco and his colleagues from the Center at three Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center-USDA stations (Coshocton, Hoytville, and South Charleston) have shown that removing crop residues left on the ground after harvest to produce biofuel reduces soil organic pools and soil fertility, increases soil compaction, and reduces water infiltration and storage, and that the magnitude of impacts depend on the type of soil and topography. For Blanco, the dilemma is clear; “harvesting corn stover for producing ethanol may be beneficial to palliate the dependence on fossil fuels and reduce CO2 emissions, but stover harvesting may deplete soil organic carbon, degrade soil structure, and reduce crop yields.” The goal of this project is to find the site-specific permissible removal rates of crop residues that will not affect the carbon sequestration potential of soils while still providing enough raw materials for biofuel.
His recent work within a regional project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (MRCSP) program, goes one step further to show that intensive tillage –the activity of plowing the soil preparing it for a crop– also causes the loss of carbon. “While intensive tillage is known to increase soil erosion, reduce soil carbon pools, and increase production costs, its use is still widespread in the US,” continues Blanco, “no-tillage, on the other hand, offers innumerable benefits to soil and water conservation that cannot be overemphasized.” In his most recent article, soon to be published in the May-June 2008 issue of Soil Science Society of America Journal, Blanco reports on his investigation of the potential of no-tillage soil management methods for sequestering carbon on a regional basis in the eastern United States. He hopes that his project, when complete, will provide a strong database on soil carbon storage in no-tillage farming systems across a wide range of soils, topographic, and climatic conditions. “Many believe that no-tillage is the solution to sequester carbon, but depending on the soil, no-tillage may not always promote higher carbon storage than plowed soils, and we need to know where and when this is,” Blanco said.
Blanco has published numerous refereed articles from his work on the above issues and is giving the last touches to his first book “Principles of Soil Conservation” co-authored with Prof. R. Lal. He encourages students to pursue the field of soil science, which is the basis for understanding global climatic change, environmental, and agronomic concerns. “The combination of continuous real world experience and the opportunity to explore areas never studied before are for me the two most appealing reasons to start a career in soil science and soil management,” says Blanco, “it is very rewarding if you are passionate about it.”
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