This Is Why When You Talk About Climate Change, You Can’t Ignore Agriculture

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Author: Chelsea Harvey | Published: August 23, 2017 

Agriculture has historically released almost as much carbon into the atmosphere as deforestation, a new study suggests — and that’s saying something.

In a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that land use changes associated with planting crops and grazing livestock have caused a loss of 133 billion tons of carbon from soil worldwide over the last 12,000 years, amounting to about 13 years of global emissions at their current levels. And at least half of those losses have probably occurred in the last few centuries.

“Historically, I think we’ve underestimated the amount of emissions from soils due to land use change,” said lead study author Jonathan Sanderman, an associate scientist with the Woods Hole Research Center, a climate change research organization based in Massachusetts.

The researchers suggest that the findings could be used to help target the places around the world that have lost the most soil carbon, and where restoration efforts — which aim to help store carbon back in the ground through sustainable land management — might make the greatest difference. It’s a strategy many scientists have suggested could be used to help fight climate change.

“We have known that extensive agricultural practices are responsible for depleting soil carbon stocks, but the full extent of these carbon losses has been elusive,” said soil expert Thomas Crowther, who will be starting a position as a professor of global ecosystem ecology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in October, in an email to The Washington Post. “In this study, the authors do a really good job of quantifying how humans have altered the Earth’s surface soil carbon stocks through extensive agriculture, with direct implications for atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the climate.”

Previously, studies on global soil carbon losses have varied wildly in their conclusions, suggesting historical losses of anywhere from 25 billion to 500 billion tons of carbon, Sanderman noted. In general, based on the average findings from multiple studies, scientists have often assumed a total loss of around 78 billion tons, he added.

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Teaching Agroecology in the Himalayan Foothills

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Published: July, 2017

Neha Raj seeks sleep on the night train from Delhi to Dehradun. It’s not the soundest slumber, but she’s grown accustomed to the sway of the rails. Neha teaches at Navdanya’s organic farm in the foothills of the Himalayas. Her teaching props are the hundreds of varieties of rice, wheat, millets, lentils, vegetables, oilseeds, and spices grown at the farm. Since the green revolution—when private seed companies entered Indian agriculture—India’s agrobiodiversity has shrunk dramatically. Neha teaches farmers how to preserve it.

Navandya encourages a mix of ancestral and modern farming techniques through the practice of agroecology. At the heart of their work is the observation that the green revolution has destroyed traditional knowledge that previously guided Indian farming communities. Now, most are poorer; their land and innards poisoned. Unable to pay off credit for expensive chemical pesticides and fertilizers, more than 300,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide, often drinking the very toxins they apply to their crops. Neha’s teaching is based on simple science and economics—farmers don’t need to bury themselves in debt to tend their crops. Healthy soils and climate-adapted, local seeds can generate adequate yields and well-fed children. Navdanya’s method isn’t anti-modern, but it is based on ancestral wisdom.

Neha took me to visit a farmer who had participated in Navdanya’s training program. I asked his advice for U.S. farmers, also deep in debt to agrochemical companies, planting row upon row of purchased, genetically modified corn seeds. “Cow dung,” he counseled. “Lots of cow dung.”

As we spoke, his wife poured pails of water on their cow—revered provider of milk and soil nutrients—and scrubbed vigorously. We walked past a composting pile of dung and straw that had yet to be plowed into his fields. Rather than buy seeds, he saves them from the previous year’s harvest. He’d planted a little bit of everything, spreading risk and diet among an astonishing variety of grains, tubers, and vegetables. There was always something to put on a plate.

Neha’s colleague, Drona Chetri, felt with his fingertips for a hidden key on top of a beam. The padlock to Navdanya’s central seed bank—smaller seed repositories are spread across the country—sprang open. Each week, Bija Devi and Sheila Devi, the Navdanya Seed Keepers, brandish smoking branches in the dirt-floored storehouse to dissuade insects and reduce moisture. To minimize contamination, he had me take off my shoes. In socks, I examined the labels of hundreds of glass jars, clay pots, and seed-laden stalks drying above on a twine line. Handwritten entries in a notebook described the conditions in which the seeds thrive and fail. In a live experiment, seeds are planted and returned each year—the circulation keeps them adapting to evolving ecosystems, essential in today’s quickly changing climatic conditions. It was a far cry from one-size-fits-all seeds cooked up in a Monsanto lab.

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Natural Intelligence Farming: Ian and Dianne Haggerty

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Author: Christopher Johns | Published: August 3, 2017 

Key Point

  • Natural Intelligence farming uses natural processes combined with modern agricultural technology to produce food and fibre of optimum nutrition and quality while enhancing positive ecosystem development.
  • Natural Intelligence farming has the potential to sustainably regenerate the agricultural landscape, restore biodiversity and to sequester greenhouse gasses in the soil as beneficial soil carbon.
  • There is a direct link between soil health and human health and there is a growing body of research into this relationship between soil and plant/animal, human and environmental health.
  •  Natural intelligence farming can be applied to broad-acre agricultural production with only small changes to capital equipment and a reduction in operating costs and increased productivity.
  • Once the appropriate logistic infrastructure is available, the produce from Natural Intelligence farming can be market differentiated and priced accordingly for its nutrient diversity and absence of chemicals and other toxins.

Introduction

Natural Intelligence Farming is the term Ian and Dianne Haggerty use to describe the harnessing of the dynamic, natural relationships that exists between all the organisms in the ecosystem and the environment itself, particularly the soil. These relationships are highly complex and versatile. They involve mutually beneficial interactions between the soil, plant seeds and roots, microorganisms, and the ruminants that feed on the plants and cycle dung and microbes back to the soil. Understanding these relationships requires a holistic engagement with the agricultural ecosystem and the body of scientific knowledge supporting this understanding is still incomplete. The key to natural intelligence farming is not to hinder or obstruct the interactions that support and inform these relationships.  The Haggerty’s aim is to facilitate natural intelligence with modern farming methods to create regenerative agricultural ecosystems that produce optimal food and fibre products.

Ian and Dianne farm approximately 13,000 hectares of land in Western Australia’s central wheatbelt, around 190 kilometres north east of Perth. After years of conventional farming, the Haggerty’s realised that their system was vulnerable to dry seasons. Input costs were steadily increasing without corresponding increases in productivity. Soil tests showed adequate nutrient levels, but tissue tests revealed nutrients were not getting to plants in appropriate balance, despite a comprehensive mineral fertiliser program. To top it off, rainfall in recent years had been less than half the annual average often falling in 3 to 5 mm events followed by windy weather, meaning much was lost to evaporation. Maximising crop production in dry years had become a real struggle and hard pans in their soils were severely restricting root growth. So, the Haggerty’s started to research biologically-based farming systems with the aim of increasing their soil’s microbial population, nutrient availability and moisture holding capacity.  What followed was a massive learning curve combining and adapting some of the world’s best ecological knowledge with much ground truthing and extension in harsh Western Australian semi-arid agricultural zone conditions.

Ian and Dianne have a life mission to facilitate positive global change by rebuilding soils in semi-arid regions, producing premium food and fibre and supporting the nutritional needs of humanity to optimise health. In this Feature Interview, FDI takes the opportunity to interview Ian and Dianne and investigate what it is that they are doing differently from other farmers and the benefits of their methods for productivity, ecological regeneration and plant, animal and human health.

Interview

FDI: As an introduction to this Interview could you give us a short history to your association with agriculture and the land?

I&DH:  While coming from long family backgrounds of farmers, neither of us was fortunate enough to inherit a farm so we purchased our own 660ha property in 1994 next door to Di’s parents. It was in the years immediately prior to purchasing our farm, while owning and operating a roadhouse in the Kimberley that we were exposed to some interesting ideas on land management through our contact and friendship with Robyn Tredwell of Birdwood Downs Station (Robyn was the 1995 ABC Rural woman of the year). Her views on using livestock as tools to “Feed, Seed and Weed” the land, penetrated deeply into our psyche even though we were not involved with a rural enterprise at the time.

Purchasing a farm took all our capital reserves so for the first few years we share-farmed our land with Di’s father and worked in return for use of his machinery to grow our crops.

While successfully farming conventionally in the 1990s, and slowly beginning to piece together a working range of plant machinery, it didn’t take long for us to realise that moisture in the soil was key to profitability and that hanging onto that moisture was critical to make a viable crop out of a poor spring. This fact, along with a questioning mind and noticing that there were discrepancies between soil test and tissue test results, sparked a drive for real answers. Reducing risk and increasing profitability year in year out were key goals for the business to progress.

In 2001, we embarked on learning how to improve soil health and productivity in the cropping program. Dr Elaine Ingham’s message of the miracle work of soil microbiological communities in providing optimum balanced nutrition to plants and prevention of disease and insect attack through soil health resonated with us.  At the same time, we consulted with Jane Slattery of South Australia to develop an understanding of ruminant nutrition, intuition and interconnectedness with landscape health.  Working on both the soil and animal health aspects concurrently enabled some wonderful synergies to express and assist with fast tracking the ecological progress of the farm.

 Dr Arden Andersen’s message of the direct link between soil health and human health outcomes rang alarm bells for me [Dianne] as an Occupational Therapist, practising Early Intervention Paediatric and Aged Care occupational therapy as the preventative model for health care which was firmly entrenched. A keen awareness of responsibility as food producers ensued. This was the beginning of an intense learning curve where we pursued the knowledge of many other international and national scientists, leaders in the field of soil health and its relationship to animal, human and environmental and global health.

In 2009 and 2010 we were privileged to be introduced to Dr Christine Jones, Dr Maarten Stapper and Walter Jehne who had considerable knowledge on working soil health principles in Australian agricultural environments. Dr Jones’ “liquid carbon pathway” answered many questions of what was happening within the soil to improve its friability and moisture holding capacity. This was confirmed with deep soil carbon testing in 2012 that confirmed observations with sound figures.  On similar soil types to neighbouring properties, soil carbon was improved by 10t/ha on our cropping land, an increase of 41.46% in the top 30cm of soil.

 It was this knowledge, along with an interest in using livestock to better “feed, seed and weed,” that first motivated us to embark on what has become a life-long passion to farm, together with natural processes, while maintaining a profitable farm business and improving natural capital.

FDI: What are the benefits of your agricultural practices?

I&DH: Our agricultural methods can make a significant contribution to improving global trends in environmental management and human health. There is an existing and growing body of scientific research supporting a wide range of benefits associated with our farming methods. We believe that natural intelligence farming can make a positive contribution in the following areas:

  • Carbon sequestration while producing optimal food and fibre production.
  • Increased biodiversity, particularly microbiological biodiversity in soil.
  • Nil chemical residues tested in grains grown.
  • Nutritional balance in foods grown
  • Decreased or elimination use of synthetic fertilisers.
  • Increased microbiome, the number and diversity of microorganisms in an ecosystem such as the digestive system.
  • Production of fully pasture fed meat that is high in omega-3, conjugated linoleic acid, vitamin E and has greater mineral diversity.
  • Greater reliability in grain crop yields.
  • Crop disease resistance resulting in decreased or eliminated use of fungicides and pesticides.
  • Lower energy requirement for agricultural production.
  • Improved equity.
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Five Indigenous Farming Practices Enhancing Food Security

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Author: Eva Perroni | Published: August 9, 2107

On the 2017 International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, the United Nations is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The Declaration, formally adopted in 2007, is an international human rights instrument that sets a standard for the protection of indigenous rights. UNDRIP addresses the most significant issues affecting indigenous peoples regarding their civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights. It recognizes a range of fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples including their right to self-determination, spirituality, language, lands, territories, resources, and free, prior, and informed consent.

Over the centuries, indigenous peoples have provided a series of ecological and cultural services to humankind. The preservation of traditional forms of farming knowledge and practices help maintain biodiversity, enhance food security, and protect the world’s natural resources. There are approximately 370 million indigenous peoples in the world occupying or using up to 22 percent of the global land area, which is home to 80 percent of the world’s biological diversity. The Declaration affirms that indigenous peoples have the right to own and develop their land and resources and to follow their own traditional ways of growing food.

To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of UNDRIP, Food Tank is highlighting five indigenous farming practices that have helped shape sustainable farming systems and practices all over the world.

1. Agroforestry

Agroforestry involves the deliberate maintenance and planting of trees to develop a microclimate that protects crops against extremes. Blending agricultural with forestry techniques, this farming system helps to control temperature, sunlight exposure, and susceptibility to wind, hail, and rain. This system provides a diversified range of products such as food, fodder, firewood, timber, and medicine while improving soil quality, reducing erosion, and storing carbon.

NGOs Green Hope Fund and Forestever initiated the Sustainable Indigenous Orchards Project in 2010 to fight deforestation and help improve the living and health conditions of Amazonian indigenous communities. Working with indigenous leaders across seven communities, the project works to diversify agricultural production, secure food security, and maintain and protect local biodiversity through agroforestry methods.

The Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) is dedicated to research and graduate education in sustainable agriculture and natural resource conservation throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. CATIE”s agroforestry research projects work to translate scientific findings into practices that small producers can apply on their farms to improve the production of ecosystem services and diversify crop production.

The Ghana Permaculture Institute has established several community tree nurseries to produce large numbers of trees that support reforestation and agroforestry farming projects. Working to support community-based sustainability, the institute provides education to small farmers on agroforestry techniques and planting combinations of fast-growing beneficial tree species.

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Mastering Soil Health Elevates Farm Productivity, Sustainability

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Author: Dennis Pollock | Published: June 19, 2017

Soil health best achieved by minimal soil disturbance, maximizing plant diversity, living roots yearlong, covered soil at all times with plants-residue

It seems in recent years it has become all the rage to make sure that the dirt under our feet – and plants or trees – is healthy in order to sustain farming.

Soil health was the chief topic at a University of California soil health field day held at Five Points, attended by about 200 people including boots-on-the-ground farmers and researchers.

Jeff Mitchell, University of California (UC) Cooperative Extension cropping systems specialist at Fresno County, has been toiling in the trenches – literally – for some 20 years, seeking to illustrate the value of cover crops, and no or low-till agriculture.

At the workshop held at the UC West Side Field Station, Mitchell had trenches to showcase, pits that showed differences between conventional and no-till farming. Speakers on hand discussed some of those differences.

Improved soil health

Mitchell, the growers, and others emphasized that managing for better soil health was best achieved by minimizing soil disturbance, maximizing the diversity of plants in rotation or used as cover crops, keeping living roots in the soil as much as possible, and keeping the soil covered with plants and plant residue at all times.

“I have something growing in the ground 365 days a year,” said Scott Park with Park Farming in Meridian in the Sacramento Valley. “Having roots in the ground is 10,000 times better than adding biomass.”

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Soil Carbon Scheme a World-First for South Australian and Victorian Farmers

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Author: Jess Davis | Published: August 10, 2017

Farmers in Victoria and South Australia are taking part in a world-first carbon capture scheme to generate a new source of income.

The farmers won a bid under the latest round of the Federal Government’s Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) announced in April.

One of the farmers, Mr Farmer Steven Hobbs, said the scheme was a bit tokenistic, but that ”a little bit of tokenism was better than none”.

“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of double standards in the way our Government is approaching our emissions and it’s very tokenistic in many respects,” he said.

But Mr Hobbs said it was a good first step that the Federal Government had recognised soils were capable of storing carbon.

Farming Soil Carbon

The ERF is an auction available to farmers and land managers for projects to capture carbon, similar to the capture of methane in landfill or piggeries.

For soil carbon, farmers are paid roughly $10 for each carbon credit based on how much carbon they can sequester in their soil over a 10-year period.

Farming is like mining soil, said project leader Deane Belfield, Director of Regenerative Australian Farmers.

Mr Belfield said a lot of carbon had been released through farming over time and the plan was to try to reverse the process.

“The incentive for the farmer is to implement regenerative farming practices, to draw down the carbon into the soil, and that’s what they get paid for,” he said.

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Land Losses and Lessons on the Great Plains

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Author: Peter Carrels | Published: July 7, 2017

Gabe Brown’s 5,200-acre farm and ranch in central North Dakota practically straddles the 100th meridian, the line that historically divided Eastern lands that were farmed from the drier Western lands that were grazed by livestock.

That geographic boundary, of course, has always been somewhat blurry. But in recent years, row-crop agriculture on an industrial scale has pushed the dry line westward. Modern sod-busting has gobbled up vast expanses of native grasslands, markedly enlarging the nation’s corn and soybean acres.

Critics watched this happen but weren’t able to quantify the ecological alteration. Now, an analysis issued by the World Wildlife Fund, Plowprint Report, confirms just how extensively the American Great Plains has been transformed. The Great Plains region, the short and mixed-grass portion of the North American prairie, includes lands from the Canadian border east of the Rocky Mountains, between Great Falls, Montana, and Fargo, North Dakota, and stretching south to Texas — some 800 million acres in total.

Destruction of the Eastern portion of the continent’s prairie region — the tallgrass part — was caused by conversion to corn and soybean fields and is nearly complete. Less than 1 percent of the original tallgrass prairie ecosystem survives. The Plowprint study reveals that since 2009, more than 53 million acres of prairie on the Great Plains has been plowed and converted to corn, soybeans and wheat. That figure — an area that equals the size of Kansas — represents about 13 percent of the estimated 419 million acres of Great Plains grasslands that had survived in its native condition.

Fortunately, stewardship models show how farming can be less damaging and more sustainable. For example, Gabe Brown changed the way he managed his land after suffering four years —1995 to 1998 — of hail and drought. Nearly broke and lacking access to capital to buy seeds and chemicals, Brown re-examined his approach to farming. Finding that his soils had dramatically deteriorated through conventional farming practices, he started avoiding tillage and now relies on cover crops, perennial grasses and a diversity of income streams. When many of his neighbors plowed pastures to plant corn, Brown did the opposite, reducing row crops from 2,000 acres to 800 acres and re-vegetating 1,200 acres back into prairie. His operation also emphasized grazing and grasses instead of growing annual grains.

“It’s not easy to admit that I farmed the wrong way for many years,” Brown said. “But we’ve completely weaned ourselves from government programs, stopped using synthetic fertilizers, minimized herbicide use, and in the process enriched and even built our soils.”

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Perspectives: Agroecological Approaches to Enhance Resilience Among Small Farmers

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Author: Clara Inés Nicholls and Miguel Altieri | Published: June 26, 2017

Many studies reveal that small farmers who follow agroecological practices cope with, and even prepare for, climate change. Through managing on-farm biodiversity and soil cover and by enhancing soil organic matter, agroecological farmers minimise crop failure under extreme climatic events.

Global agricultural production is already being affected by changes in rainfall and temperature thus compromising food security. Official statistics predict that small scale farmers in developing countries will be especially vulnerable to climate change because of their geographic exposure, low incomes, reliance on agriculture and limited capacity to seek alternative livelihoods.

Although it is true that extreme climatic events can severely impact small farmers, available data is just a gross approximation at understanding the heterogeneity of small scale agriculture, ignoring the myriad of strategies that thousands of small farmers have used, and still use, to deal with climatic variability.

Observations of agricultural performance after extreme climatic events reveal that resilience to climate disasters is closely linked to the level of on-farm biodiversity. Diversified farms with soils rich in organic matter reduce vulnerability and make farms more resilient in the long-term. Based on this evidence, various experts have suggested that reviving traditional management systems, combined with the use of agroecological principles, represents a robust path to enhancing the resilience of modern agricultural production.

Diverse farming systems

A study conducted in Central American hillsides after Hurricane Mitch showed that farmers using diversification practices (such as cover crops, intercropping and agroforestry) suffered less damage than their conventional monoculture neighbours. A survey of more than 1800 neighbouring ‘sustainable’ and ‘conventional’ farms in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, found that the ‘sustainable’ plots had between 20 to 40% more topsoil, greater soil moisture and less erosion, and also experienced lower economic losses than their conventional neighbours. Similarly in Chiapas, coffee systems exhibiting high levels of diversity of vegetation suffered less damage from farmers to produce various annual crops simultaneously and minimise risk. Data from 94 experiments on intercropping of sorghum and pigeon pea showed that for a particular ‘disaster’ level quoted, sole pigeon pea crop would fail one year in five, sole sorghum crop would fail one year in eight, but intercropping would fail only one year in 36. Thus intercropping exhibits greater yield stability and less productivity decline during drought than monocultures.

At the El Hatico farm, in Cauca, Colombia, a five story intensive silvo-pastoral system composed of a layer of grasses, Leucaena shrubs, medium-sized trees and a canopy of large trees has, over the past 18 years, increased its stocking rates to 4.3 dairy cows per hectare and its milk production by 130%, as well as completely eliminating the use of chemical fertilizers. 2009 was the driest year in El Hatico’s 40-year record, and the farmers saw a reduction of 25% in pasture biomass, yet the production of fodder remained constant throughout the year, neutralising the negative effects of drought on the whole system. Although the farm had to adjust its stocking rates, the farm’s milk production for 2009 was the highest on record, with a surprising 10% increase compared to the previous four years. Meanwhile, farmers in other parts of the country reported severe animal weight loss and high mortality rates due to starvation and thirst.

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Are Industrial Agriculture and Genetic Modification the Answer to Feeding Humanity?

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Author: Dr. David Suzuki, Ian Hanington | Published: August 6, 2017

Industrial agriculture has made it possible to produce large amounts of food fairly efficiently, but it also comes with numerous problems.

The following excerpt is from Just Cool It! A Post-Paris Agreement Game Plan, by David Suzuki and Ian Hanington (Greystone Books, 2017)

Over the past half century, the world has moved increasingly to industrial agriculture—attempting to maximize efficiency through running massive, often inhumane livestock operations; turning huge swaths of land over to monocrops requiring liberal use of fertilizers, pesticides, and genetic modification; and relying on machinery that consumes fossil fuel and underpaid migrant workers. Industrial agriculture has made it possible to produce large amounts of food fairly efficiently, but it also comes with numerous problems: increased greenhouse gas emissions; loss of forests and wetlands that prevent climate change by storing carbon; pollution from runoff and pesticides; antibiotic and pesticide resistance; reduced biodiversity; and soil degradation, erosion, and loss. Depletion of fertile soils is especially troubling, with losses estimated to be occurring up to one hundred times faster than they can regenerate with current industrial agriculture practices. Biodiversity loss refers to both a reduction in the number of crop varieties—more than 75 percent of plant genetic diversity has vanished over the past 100 years, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization—and to reduced biodiversity among species that require diverse habitats for survival.

The “solution” many experts offer for feeding a growing human population is to double down on industrial agriculture and genetic modification. Some argue leaning more heavily on genetically modified crops, and perhaps even animals, is the only way to go. A new process called clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or CRISPR, allows researchers to turn a specific gene on or off. It’s being touted as a way to produce “plants that can withstand what an increasingly overheated nature has in store” and create “a more nutritious yield, from less plant,” according to a 2015 Newsweek article.

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Africa’s No-Till Revolution

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Author: Mike Wilson | Published: February 3, 2015

Sustainable, integrated cropping systems are boosting yields and building food security for smallholder African farmers

In a quiet rural corner of Ghana, near the humble village of Amanchia near Kumasi, Dr. Kofi Boa goes about revolutionizing food production in Africa, one farmer at a time.

“It is my dream that the whole of Africa will know how to sustain the productivity of a piece of land,” says Boa, speaking to a group of seed growers who have flown in from several countries to learn his techniques at the No-Till Centre he opened here two years ago. The Centre is supported by a partnership between John Deere, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and DuPont Pioneer.

In Ghana, where agriculture makes up 60% of GDP and accounts for over a third of all employment, Dr. Boa is something of a hero. One by one he is showing farmers how traditional ‘slash-and-burn‘ methods lead to extreme erosion and poor yields that have kept them impoverished for decades.

Instead, Boa shows farmers how a sustainable system focusing on no-till, cover crop mulch and intercropping can lift them out of self-sustenance and inject new income streams to the poorest of families.

Slash-and-burn farming today is used by upwards of 500 million farmers worldwide. With slash-and-burn farming, says Boa, many smallholder farmers could not get enough production from their farms to afford even the basics, like sending their kids to high school, which costs real money in Ghana. But with no other options and limited education, many farmers just continued the same old techniques.

Until now.

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