Deepening Root Inputs: Potential Soil Carbon Accrual From Breeding for Deeper Rooted Maize

ABSTRACT Breeding annual crops for enhanced root depth and biomass is considered a promising intervention to accrue soil organic carbon (SOC) in croplands, with benefits for climate change mitigation and soil health. In annual crops, genetic technology (seed) is replaced every year as part of a farmer's fixed costs, making breeding solutions to climate change more scalable and affordable than management approaches. However, mechanistic understanding and quantitative estimates of SOC accrual potentials from crops with enhanced root phenotypes are lacking. Maize is the highest acreage and yielding crop in the US, characterized by relatively low root biomass confined to the topsoil, making it a suitable candidate for improvement that could be rapidly scaled. We ran a 2‐year field experiment to quantify the formation and composition (i.e., particulate (POM), coarse and fine mineral–associated organic matter (chaOM and MAOM, respectively) of new SOC to a depth of 90 cm from the decomposition of isotopically labeled maize roots and exudates. Additionally, we used the process‐based MEMS 2 model to simulate the SOC accrual potential of maize root ideotypes enhanced to either shift root production to deeper depths or increase root biomass allocation, assuming no change in overall productivity. In our field experiment, maize root decomposition preferentially formed POM, with doubled efficiency below 50 cm, while root exudates preferentially formed MAOM. Modeling showed that shifting root inputs to deeper layer or increasing allocation to roots resulted in a deterministic increase in SOC, ranging from 0.05 to 0.15 Mg C ha −1 per year, which are at the low end of the range of published SOC per hectare annual accrual estimates from adoption of a variety of crop management practices. Our analysis indicates that for maize, breeding for increasing root inputs as a strategy for SOC accrual has limited impact on a per‐hectare basis, although given that globally maize is produced on hundreds of millions of hectares each year, there is potential for this technology and its effect to scale. For maize–soy system that dominates US acres, changes in the overall cropping system are needed for sizable greenhouse gas reductions and SOC accrual. This study demonstrated a modeling and experimental framework to quantify and forecast SOC changes created by changing crop root inputs.