Climate Change and Farming: Let’s Be Part of the Solution!

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Author: Anna Bowen | Published on: January 9, 2017

What with rising rainfall in the west, and hotter, drier summers in the east, British farmers place plenty of challenges from global warming, writes Anna Bowen. But there are also positive opportunities for agricultural innovators to adapt their farming systems to changing conditions, make their operations more resilient and sustainable, and make themselves part of the solution.

“I think it’s time to change my farming system”, said my client. “A switch from dairy to rice paddies.”

Looking at his sodden fields, it wasn’t hard to imagine.

When you work with farmers, conversations about the weather are inevitable. Their livelihoods are intrinsically linked to the climate, and very often they and their animals are at the mercy of the elements.

As a consultant I work with long-term financial projections and business plans. In light of rising global temperatures it would be foolish to overlook the impact that climate change may have on my dairy farming clients in the dampness of West Wales.

The last decade has seen record-setting wet years for Britain, and the risk of flooding and the problems associated with sodden ground look likely to be an increasing challenge for farmers. The Environment Agency state that precipitation in the West of the country is expected to increase by up to 33%, a significant rise for an area that already experiences some of the highest rainfall in the UK.

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Chile – Cambio climático: “El sacrificio de unos para el beneficio de otros”

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Autor: Catalina Manque | Piblicado: 13 de diciembre 2016

Puchuncaví, esta localidad consta con termoeléctricas que provienen de AES Gener, Corporación Estadounidense y el complejo (Codelco) de fundición y refinería, que dañan la salud y el territorio producto de la contaminación de metales tóxicos.

En el año 2010, se hizo público un informe que provenía de la Seremi de Salud de Valparaíso, sobre los altos niveles de contaminación del suelo, en el territorio La Greda, metales tales como cobre, arsénico cromo, Níquel entre otros, mantienen totalmente intoxicados a los pobladores, entre ellos mujeres, ancianos niños y niñas, a esto se suman los problemas de salud de trabajadores de la planta Empresa Nacional de Minería (ENAMI), los llamados “hombres verdes”, cuerpos intoxicados por el desvelo del trabajo y sustento de sus familias.

Tras varios acontecimientos de intoxicación, medios de información expusieron casos sucesivos sobre otra zona de sacrificio de Chile, Puchuncavi.

“Seminario permanente, sociedad, territorio y medio ambiente”, es el nombre de este coloquio que lleva su tercer año consecutivo para sus estudiantes y la comunidad.

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Climate Policies Alone Will Not Save Earth’s Most Diverse Tropical Forests

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Published: January 17, 2017

A focus on policies to conserve tropical forests for their carbon storage value may imperil some of the world’s most biologically rich tropical forests, says new research.

Many countries have climate-protection policies designed to conserve tropical forests to keep their locked up in trees. But the new study suggests these policies could miss some of the most diverse forests because there is no clear connection between the number of in a forest and how much carbon that forest stores.

Lead author Dr Martin Sullivan, from the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, said: “International programmes often encourage the conservation of forests with high , because their focus is to try to slow climate change. Until now, we didn’t know whether these programmes would also automatically protect the most biodiverse forests. It turns out they probably won’t.”

A team of scientists from 22 countries measured both tree diversity and the amount of carbon stored in 360 locations across the lowland rainforests of the Amazon, Africa and Asia. In each plot the carbon stored was calculated using the diameter and identity of every tree within a given hectare (2.5 acres). In total 200,000 trees were measured in the study.

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Dust Bowl Would Devastate Today’s Crops, Study Finds

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Author: Robert Mitchum | Published on: December 20, 2016

A drought on the scale of the legendary Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s would have similarly destructive effects on U.S. agriculture today, despite technological and agricultural advances, a new study finds. Additionally, warming temperatures could lead to crop losses at the scale of the Dust Bowl, even in normal precipitation years by the mid-21st century, UChicago scientists conclude.

The study, published Dec. 12 in Nature Plants, simulated the effect of from the Dust Bowl era on today’s maize, soy and wheat crops. Authors Michael Glotter and Joshua Elliott of the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy at the Computation Institute, examined whether modern agricultural innovations would protect against history repeating itself under similar conditions.

“We expected to find the system much more resilient because 30 percent of production is now irrigated in the United States, and because we’ve abandoned corn production in more severely drought-stricken places such as Oklahoma and west Texas,” said Elliott, a fellow and research scientist at the center and the Computation Institute. “But we found the opposite: The system was just as sensitive to drought and heat as it was in the 1930s.”

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Take the 2017 National Young Farmer Survey

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Author: Chelsey Simpson | Published: January 9, 2017

Through our first national survey in 2011, young farmers and ranchers came together to tell the nation—citizens, advocates, and policy makers—who they were and what they needed in order to succeed. The results from that survey inspired new programs and influenced policies in every state. Now we have the opportunity to speak up again.

Help us tell Congress that #FarmersCount by taking the 2017 National Young Farmer Survey:

Your participation will help us understand and elevate the issues that matter most to young farmers. It is crucial that the survey results represent all young farmers and aspiring farmers, no matter where they live or what they grow.

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Entra en Lista de Animales en Peligro Abeja de Territorio Continental de EE.UU.

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Autor: EFE | Piblicado: 10 de enero 2017

El Servicio de Pesca y Vida Silvestre de Estados Unidos incluyó por primera vez un abejorro (Bombus affinis) en la lista de animales en peligro en el país, con vistas a impulsar medidas para protegerlo de la “extinción”.

El Bombus affinis es además el primer insecto de la familia de abejas que viven en territorio continental estadounidense en entrar en esa lista, en la que desde 2016 hay siete especies de abejas de Hawai.

La población del Bombus affinis, endémico de Norteamérica, se ha reducido en un 87 % desde finales de los años 90 como resultado de una conjunción de factores.

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Food and More: Expanding the Movement for the Trump Era

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Authors: Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Olivier De Schutter and Ricardo Salvador

Published: January 16, 2017 

If the recent election had an upside, it’s this: It demonstrated that the good food movement is real. Four jurisdictions—Boulder, Oakland, San Francisco, and Albany (California)—approved taxes on soda, which will benefit both public health and public finances. (Two days later, lawmakers in Cook County, Illinois, also approved a soda tax, becoming the largest jurisdiction to do so.) In Oklahoma, an initiative to shield animal factory farms from regulation was defeated. Massachusetts voters passed a measure outlawing the sale of products from animals raised inhumanely. And four states voted to raise their minimum wage above the anemic $7.25/hour federal standard.

Meanwhile, the national reality has turned Orwellian: In a matter of days we will have an attorney general who is hostile to civil rights, an EPA chief who doesn’t believe in climate change or environmental protection, a Health and Human Services Secretary hostile to public support for health care, an anti-worker Labor Secretary, and an anti-democracy Congress which will rubber stamp an increasingly anti-individual rights Supreme Court. Not to mention a president who evinces little respect for democratic institutions and is already regarded the world over as, shall we say, sui generis.

As of today, the president-elect has yet to nominate an agriculture secretary, but the food movement is rightly aghast at the agriculture transition team, which promised to “defend American agriculture against its critics, particularly those who have never grown or produced anything beyond a backyard tomato plant.” This nonsense is premised on the assumption that “American agriculture” is limited to the large industrial variety and that advocating that public investment serve the public interest is a bad thing. Yet the majority of farmers are clearly not being served by the current system, and the only sector of the food industry that’s actually growing today is the one that produces good food.

How can the food movement best navigate this treacherous new environment? Two years ago, we outlined the need for a national food policy, a critical yardstick in determining whether legislation helps or harms farmers, eaters, the land, animals, and more. This remains an important long-term goal, but right now the most pressing work is to join forces with other progressive groups in a more immediate cause: protecting the disadvantaged and defending democracy. So it is the recent minimum wage victories, spurred by the Fight for $15—an alliance of workers, labor unionists (specifically, the Service Employees International Union), immigrants’ and women’s rights advocates, and the Food Chain Workers Alliance—that should point the way forward.

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Young Farmers: Strengthening the Agricultural Resilience of the Cook Islands to Climate Change

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Author: UN Development Programme | Published: January 13, 2017 

In Mangaia, the second largest of the Cook Islands, five young leaders are being trained in organic farming practices so that they can supply their local markets, as well as export their crops to the capital island of Rarotonga, alleviating the country’s heavy reliance on foreign imports. Three of the five participants are women, who were not traditionally farmers on Mangaia.

FARMING REVOLUTION

The SRIC-CC Programme is implemented by Climate Change Cook Islands, a division within the Office of the Prime Minister and supported by UNDP. With financial support from the Adaptation Fund (AF), the SRIC-CC Programme and communities in the Pa Enua are addressing environmental risks through community-based approaches and community-driven adaptation.

The Strengthening the Resilience of the Cook Islands to Climate Change Programme (SRIC-CC), is working with more than 150 individuals on community-based resilience initiatives to enhance water and food security across the 11 Pa Enua (outer islands) of the Cook Islands.

FARM TO TABLE, SEED TO MARKET

As part of the SRIC-CC programme managed by William Tuivaga, a Young Farmers’ programme has been established. Under the watchful eyes of SRIC-CC agriculture Young Growers Project Manager Makiroa Beniamina, all five of the young farmers have covered the following in their training: best practices in germinating seeds, nursery management, pest management, fertiliser management, composting, farm management, quality control, marketing and packaging, managing loss and farm administration.

The Young Farmers’ programme is working with Prime Foods Supermarket to sell the produce to their clients on the wholesale market, as well as to restaurants, hotels and retail shops throughout the Cook Islands. This project will provide a more consistent supply of vegetables and other crops, thereby promoting healthy eating and food security on Mangaia, along with an increased supply of locally grown produce in the capital, Rarotonga.

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The Potential Is There

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Author: Claire Woodcock  | Published: January 12, 2017 

In 2008, during the first days of Ollin Farms, owner Mark Guttridge says the Longmont soil produced only “nubby” carrots. A picture of his wife holding their then year-old daughter, Amber, illustrates the problem; the carrots were wide and short, mutant-like in their girth — maybe right for a county fair prize for “heaviest carrot,” but not the kind of produce folks buy at the farmers’ market.

By 2012, the carrots from Ollin Farms had slimmed down and stretched, now reaching from Amber’s shoulder down to her waist.

These were quality carrots.

“It was this foot-and-a-half-long carrot,” Guttridge says. “That never would have been possible four years previously when the soil was the way it was.”

Today, Ollin Farms grows 10 different varieties of carrots each agricultural cycle and Guttridge credits the success to carbon sequestration, the process of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to build healthy topsoil.

Over centuries of traditional agricultural practices, farmers have plowed their fields, releasing carbon stored in the soil in the process. When that carbon collides with the oxygen in the air, it creates carbon dioxide that is then released into the atmosphere and contributes to global warming. Scientists estimate as much as 80 percent of soil carbon in heavily cultivated areas has been lost, according to Kristin’s Ohlson’s 2014 book The Soil Will Save Us. Furthermore, practices such as traditional farming, overgrazing, deforestation and erosion, what Ohlson calls “land misuse” in her book, account for approximately 30 percent of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.

But a growing number of farmers around the world, including several Boulder County farmers, are implementing carbon sequestration practices to recapture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in soil, where the carbon aids crop growth while helping to mitigate climate change at the same time.

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Regeneration of Soils and Ecosystems: The Opportunity to Prevent Climate Change: Basis for a Necessary Climate and Agricultural Policy

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Author: Íñigo Álvarez de Toledo, MSc

SUMMARY

We are probably at the most crucial crossroad of Humanity’s history. We are changing the Earth’s climate as a result of accelerated human-made Greenhouse Gases Emissions (GHG) and biodiversity loss, provoking other effects that increase the complexity of the problem and will multiply the speed with which we approach climate chaos1, and social too:

We explain and justify scientifically the need to give absolute priority to the regeneration of soils and ecosystems. The sustainability concept has driven positive changes but has failed on two levels: it has been easy to manipulate because of its inherent laxness, and because of the fact that since the Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro, 1992) indicators show much worsening and certainly no improvement. Global emissions increase and soil erosion is every year hitting new negative records.

Ecological and agrosystem regeneration necessarily implies a change for the better, a positive attitude and the joy of generating benefits for all living beings, human or not. For all, because it is the way to not only reduce emissions to the atmosphere but to allow natural, agricultural and livestock soils to act as Carbon sinks, reducing the threat of an all too sudden increasing Climate Change.Regeneration improves products’ quality, thereby increasing their market value. It improves the properties not just sustaining but carrying them into a future of permanent virtuous processes, in the long and short run. In this way it tackles the increasing intergenerational justice problems. By means of increasing the resilience of the agrosystems, it also substantially contributes to Climate Change adaptation.

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