How Climate Change’s Effect on Agriculture Can Lead to War

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Author: Ryan Bort | Published: February 17, 2017 

On February 12, the temperature in Magnum, Oklahoma, reached 100 degrees. It was a state record for the month of February, besting a mark that was set in 1918. The average February high in Magnum is 56.

Many see the unseasonably warm temperature as yet another undeniable sign of climate change, but won’t likely be heeded by Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who famously brandished a snowball on the Senate floor in 2015 in an effort to prove that climate change was not real. Inhofe’s views have been echoed by the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, who famously tweeted in 2012 that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to “make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruit, is a known climate change denier who has written that the debate surrounding the “extent of global warming” is “far from settled.”

Most of the rest of the world isn’t so cavalier in dismissing what many see as the 21st century’s greatest threat to humanity. At this week’s World Government Summit in Dubai, the subject of climate change had a prominent place in discussions led by the world’s preeminent scientists, professors, business leaders and heads of state. In particular focus was the effect climate change could have on the world’s food supply, which most agree will be catastrophic if both the public and private sectors don’t do enough to combat rising temperatures.

“The implications are enormous,” said Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation. “It affects every aspect of the global food supply around the planet.”

Much of the concern is over temperatures exceeding the scope of what modern agriculture was developed to withstand. “It’s going to be radically different from what we’ve seen before,” Homer-Dixon explained. “The variation in temperature has been within .75 degrees over a period of almost 1,500 years, and this century we’re moving far outside of this envelope in which human beings laid down their industrial infrastructure, their agricultural systems, their irrigation systems, their road networks and their ports.”

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China Moves to Implement More Sustainable Ag Practices, Which Is Good for Everybody

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Author: Andrew Amelinckx | Published: February 9, 2017 

On Sunday, the Central Government released its Number One Central Document, the first policy statement of the year, and as in the previous 13 years, it focused on agriculture and rural development. While previous Number One Documents have included mentions of sustainability measures, this year’s had a particularly strong focus on developing “green” policies.

“Green production and sustainable farming practices, under the overall framework of supply-side reform, was one of the highlights of this year’s document. ‘Green’ actually becomes one of the most frequently used words in the document,” Vincent Martin, the representative for China from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations tells Modern Farmer. “The gist of supply-side reform in China’s agricultural sector is to increase the output of high-quality products based on green and innovative production.”

China is now the fourth largest consumer of organically-produced food in the world, so expanding domestic organic production makes sense. The Central Government plans to push organic products in part by promoting favorable taxes for start-ups in rural areas, and by creating innovation centers to help support the production of high quality farm produce, according to Reuters.

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Can Small-scale Mountain Agriculture Survive Global Warming?

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Author: Bob Berwyn | Published: February 15, 2017 

The story of global warming is most often told as an unfolding disaster, but humanity’s response offers a unique chance at planetary redemption. We are morally obligated to act on existing scientific evidence, to act as though our lives depend on it — because they do.

Visionary Austrian mountain man Sigfried Ellmauer has been busy building a better world for the past 15 years or so. Wiry and intense, he welcomes us to Berghof Thurnergut, his mountain farm and lodge near Spital am Pyhrn, in the limestone Alps near the geographical center of Austria. Just as the Alps sustained stone age migrants like the famed Ötzi iceman, Ellmauer says, the region could become a future oasis from global warming.

But that has to work economically, and that means honestly valuing the goods and services produced on the seasonal alpine pastures — called Alms — Ellmauer says, outlining a pragmatic vision for renewal that’s based on common-sense wisdom and grassroots involvement. In the past 12 years, he’s led more than 10 projects to revitalize abandoned high-elevation Alms. First he identifies potential caretakers, like the Pöchacker couple at the Herrenalm, and organizes volunteer work parties to refurbish buildings and prep pastures by removing brush and setting up fence lines.

“It’s important to keep these Alms alive because they can provide local food,” he says. “But it’s not going to be easy. There are many forces pushing against the survival of small farms.”

As he shows us how he uses local materials and time-proven traditional construction techniques to build a tree house for a planned outdoor camp, he says, “People will ultimately not value the protection of nature unless they spend some time living in a way that makes them realize they are connected to nature, and part of nature.”

But he also understands the political and economic realities of agricultural policy in Austria. For more than a decade, Ellmauer was the official Alm administrator in the agriculture department of Upper Austria, responsible for ensuring the sustainability of hundreds of Alms scattered across the mountains between Linz and Salzburg, as required under Austrian law.

But that doesn’t mean that the government always puts its mouth where its money is.

“The politicians are always willing to come and make a speech when the cows come home to the valley, bells ringing and covered in flowers. But when it comes to voting for agriculture policies, the same ones often support industrial-scale food production and benefits for producers that export,” he says. “That’s not going to help sustain local food production.”

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Grassland Management Holds Key to Carbon Capture, Gas Reductions

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Author: Karen Briere | Published: February 16, 2017

Planting perennial forages and improving soil organic matter are good management practices for cattle producers but they also offer the added benefit of sequestering carbon, says a federal researcher.

Alan Iwaasa, grazing management scientist at the Agriculture Canada Research and Development Centre in Swift Current, Sask., said producers are looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint in light of increasing em-phasis on climate change, carbon tax and greenhouse gas emission reduction.

“We have a wonderful opportunity here with our soils,” he told the Saskatchewan Beef Industry Conference.

Soils that are in poorer condition can still build organic matter. There are about 14 million acres in the brown soil zone across Western Canada; about 10 million acres are in Saskatchewan.

The province also has 5.5 million acres in the semi-arid brown soil zone, or very dry land.

“Even traditional crop lands that are in environmentally marginal areas do have potential that we could convert those to perennial forages,” Iwaasa said.

Natural grasslands have been depleted since modern agriculture began. Only about 28 million of the original 151 million acres remain, he said.

The potential to sequester carbon in grasslands could be a huge advantage for Saskatchewan producers looking to offset emissions.

“Uncultivated grasslands of Western Canada contain two to three billion tonnes of carbon to the depth of one metre,” he said.

The associated ecosystem benefits of increased water holding capacity, improved soil structure and quality, nutrient cycling and reduced soil erosion are all advantages to cattle producers.

“In many cases you’re doing that already because you want to in-crease your production, you want to have healthier pastures, you want to improve your biodiversity,” he said.

Ways to improve or enhance carbon sequestration include different grazing management practices.

These can help the physical break down and compaction of vegetation, increase decomposition and soil incorporation and therefore restore degraded soils, he said.

“The challenge though is that in a lot of cases grazing systems’ intensity and frequencies may impact carbon storage but the effects are often difficult to measure and often are inconsistent due to the environment.”

Drought, flood and weather all affect carbon storage.

“These treatments need to be utilized consistently and over a long time to actually see the benefits, not just three or four years but sometimes for decades,” he said.

A paper published in 2014 examined the impact of agriculture and loss of bison on grasslands from 1927 to 2007 and the potential to sequester carbon even on land disturbed years ago.

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The Magic of Carbon Farming

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Author: C B Ramkurmar | Published: February 4, 2017 

Farmers have always been life givers, as they work to feed the millions in this planet. The service they provide of growing food for all of us is invaluable. This importance of farming is even greater for economies that are dependent on agriculture as the primary contributor to the economy. Now, this humble age old practice of farming has now taken on a role, that is making climate activists and scientists smile.

Until now, we know farmers who farm fruits, farm vegetables, farm millets, etc. but attention is now going towards farmers who farm carbon! And this is what is drawing the attention of the climate change community.
“There’s a really significant potential for carbon farming worldwide to play a role in reversing the climate crisis,” said Stedman, an agricultural consultant at AppleSeed Permaculture. Stedman explained that plants pull carbon out of the air and bury it in the ground. While this seems like an obvious truth that all of us learnt in school, the problem is when all the carbon is then released to the atmosphere because of the modern farming practices.

All agricultural production has photosynthesis at the centre of it. Plants use sunshine to combine carbon dioxide from the air with water and micro nutrients from the soil to produce plant material that we see growing in farms.

These plants have a root system that is below the ground that we do not see. As the plant grows, it stores some of the carbon it produces below the ground. As farmers till the soil and as live stock grazes, the carbon that is stored in the soil is released into the atmosphere. As much as one third of the Co2 in the atmosphere that is driving climate change has come from land management practices.

On the other hand, carbon can be stored in soils for decades and centuries too, and this process is called soil carbon sequestration. Carbon farming is a process when the rate at which Co2 is removed from the atmosphere and converted to plant matter is accelerated.

This results in reduction of Co2 from the atmosphere. Carbon farming is successful, when the amount of carbon that is removed from the atmosphere by the plants is greater than the amount of carbon that escapes into the atmosphere as a result of farming processes like tilling. So the trick is to now engage in smart farming practices that keeps this formula in mind.

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The Business Case for Holistic Management

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Author: Alexander Lykins | Published: February 17, 2017 

Allan Savory — Zimbabwean ecologist, farmer, soldier, exile, environmentalist, international consultant and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute — has a world-saving message: The answer is in the soil. In the 1960s, Savory originated the concept of holistic management, which has been popularized by several articles and a TED Talk that has been viewed nearly 4 million times.

Holistic Management is a framework, most commonly applied to grassland management, that when properly practiced has the potential to regenerate damaged land. It focuses on mimicking the evolutionary grazing patterns of cattle to regenerate soils and restore grasslands. This technique has proved effective in hundreds of areas across the globe, one of the most popular being via Operation HOPE, winner of the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge.

In December, Bard MBA student Alexander Lykins sat down with Savory to discuss holistic management, how it can be applied to business and how young entrepreneurs can become involved.

Alexander Lykins: For some of our listeners, holistic management may be a new concept. Could you please give a brief overview?

Allan Savory: It’s an easy way, really, for anyone to manage their business or any management situation more successfully. Management, in any situation, always involves a web of social, environmental and economic complexity. Even managing feeding your family or living in a city involves complexity.

All management actions also need a reason and a context. If you think about that, you’ll realize that the reason is that you want to meet a need or a desire. In the case of policies, the context always has to do with the problem. There’s no other reason why governments develop a policy — it doesn’t matter if the policy is on drugs, terrorism or anything else. Whatever it is, the context is the problem.

When we do that, we take this great web of complexity that we cannot avoid and reduce it to a simple context for our actions. That’s reductionist management. All of us do it — we always have, in all cultures. Unfortunately, reductionist management commonly leads to achieving our actions but also later experiencing unintended consequences. And that’s where we are today.

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Farming a Warmer Planet

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Author: Zack Colman | Published: February 12, 2017 

Fatima Ait Moussa paces in front of 13 women sitting on the floor of a rectangular room in this village in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. She’s shy, avoiding most eye contact, but Ms. Moussa is an accomplished woman. She commands the room with a familial tone and motherly smile.

“Who is your husband?” she shouts out.

“Argan!” they respond in unison. Moussa, dressed in a flowing black djellaba, repeats her question. One person responds, “Argan is my wallet!”

In reality, argan isn’t literally a husband or a wallet. It’s a tree that happens to play a vital role in sustaining the livelihoods of these entrepreneurial farmers. For the 149 women spread across 20 villages in Moussa’s cooperative, the trees and the oils they provide – used in expensive cosmetics, soaps, and food products – are the primary source of income.

Moussa’s actual husband died in the mid-1990s, saddling her with massive debt. Around that time, she witnessed a similarly cash-strapped woman try, unsuccessfully, to convince a grocer to accept argan oil as payment. The encounter sparked the idea for the business venture she now runs.

It’s a success, judging by the women’s enthusiasm and the framed certificates and photographs with leading politicians that decorate her office. Yet the cooperative is also beset by serious challenges, from drought and climate change to deforestation and global competition, that squeeze the women’s $5 daily incomes.

What’s happening here is emblematic of forces that reach far beyond Moussa’s venture in these arid, windswept mountains of southwestern Morocco. Worldwide, 3.4 billion people live in rural areas, often in poverty and with lifestyles that expose them disproportionately to the effects of changes in Earth’s warming climate. From Afghanistan to Bolivia, as well as in large swaths of Africa, many of them cultivate land that’s dry or growing drier.

The challenge for farm communities is to adapt and respond before climate change starts to erode agricultural productivity. For governments and development groups, the challenge is broader: They are recognizing that it’s not just that climate change is affecting farmers, it’s also that farmers are affecting the climate. While plants like argan trees can help store excess carbon that would otherwise add to the world’s emissions, many agricultural practices create greenhouse gases. They, in fact, account for about a quarter of such emissions worldwide.

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Mayans Have Farmed the Same Way for Millennia. Climate Change Means They Can’t

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Author: Gabriel Popkin | Published: February 3, 2017

Dionisio Yam Moo stands about four-and-a-half-feet tall, and his skin is weathered from years in the tropical sun. A “proudly Mayan” farmer, he grows corn, beans and vegetables on a six-hectare farm in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. The farm is surrounded by dense tropical forest, and crops grow amid fruit trees in thin soil, with the peninsula’s limestone bedrock protruding in places.

Yam Moo farms using a traditional, rainfed practice called milpa, which has long involved cutting and burning patches of forest, planting crops for a few years, then letting the worn-out land regenerate for up to 30 years, before cultivating it again. Milpa has enabled generations of farmers like Yam Moo overcome the Yucatán’s poor, thin soil and grow a stunningly diverse set of crops — multiple varieties of beans, squash, chili peppers, leafy greens, root vegetables, spices and corn, the plant at the heart of Mayan identity.

In recent years, however, Yam Moo and other Yucatán milperos have struggled to keep their farms alive. Climate change has brought erratic rainfall, making the growing season less predictable. Yam Moo says he has always planted his corn in May. But in 2015 for example, he says the rains didn’t come until August. And then it flooded. He lost most of his crop, he says. Because milpa farming depends entirely on rainfall, which is never fully predictable, “there has always been a level of uncertainty, and the Maya have dealt with that for millennia,” says José Martínez Reyes, an anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “But with climate change, I think that uncertainty has grown exponentially.”

Years of unpredictable rainfall and failed crops pushed Yam Moo to find a solution, and it’s one that could in turn help fight climate change. Along with other farmers in the area, he developed a modified milpa called “milpa maya mejorada” or “improved Mayan milpa.” Yam Moo no longer cuts down new forests, but he still grows the same diversity of crops. And he has incorporated into the ancient practice a host of modern techniques that help him farm despite the more unpredictable rains. A recently installed irrigation system, which relies on an above-ground rain water collector (the Yucatán has almost no surface water) ensures that Yam Moo can survive droughts. And he has found that by tilling in compost, chicken manure and other organic additions, he can grow far more crops per hectare. The added nutrients keep the soil healthy and productive, meaning he doesn’t need to clear new ground as often, or perhaps at all.

In 2015, after the rains ended in late summer, he replanted corn in a nearby field, arranging seeds in tight rows with the aid of a small garden tiller, and added organic fertilizers to boost yields. Later that year, he planted beans and vegetables. “As long as you keep feeding the soil, the soil will feed you,” he says.

Today, he’s back on his feet, feeding his family with what he grows on his plot. He hopes that his success can be a model for the more than 70,000 Yucatán milperos who, like him, are facing the punishing effects of climatic changes.

Yam Moo’s efforts have gotten some high-profile attention. As part of a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and private donors, the environmental group Nature Conservancy (TNC) is providing technical and financial support to get more farmers to adopt improved milpa. By helping farmers like Yam Moo adapt to the changing climate, TNC hopes to fight climate change, by reducing the deforestation traditionally involved in milpa: the practice is estimated to cause up to 16 percent of the deforestation on the peninsula. At a larger scale, the project aims to help Mexico receive payments from private companies and governments of developed countries to combat climate change.

“We’re addressing drivers of deforestation with cutting-edge, science-based practices that are good for the producer, that are good for the ecosystem, and that mitigate climate change risks,” says Mariana Vélez Laris, a local coordinator for TNC. The organic fertilizers and reduced burning help soil microbes thrive, she says, while sparing forests and the many species that thrive in them.

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Reversing Climate Change One Step at a Time

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Author: Alex Madison | Published: February 11, 2017

Carbon is the basis of all life. Plants, animals, humans and everything living is made up of the element, but carbon once combined with oxygen becomes carbon dioxide, the excess of which is the primary cause of global warming.

In fact, just recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced 2016 as the hottest year on record. As in the hottest year since modern record keeping began in 1880. 2015 and 2014 made the same record in their time.

Although President Trump has previously said global warming is a “hoax” created by China, and the climate change webpage has now been removed from the White House’s website, an overwhelming consensus of scientists disagree.

In California, a large contributor to CO2 emissions is agriculture, accounting for more than 8 percent of the emission in the state, and globally accounting for roughly 16 percent. This is due to a number of factors like tilling and the manure and gas of livestock. California being one of the leading agricultural states in the nation, took action with the passing of a climate law in July 2016 to regulate cow methane, which requires the reduction of methane emission coming from dairy farms by 40 percent by 2030.

So what are farmers doing? Or maybe the better question, who is helping these farmers understand sustainable agriculture practices and how to become part of the solution, not the problem?

This is the ambition of Torri Estrada, environmental scientist and co-founder of the Carbon Cycle Institute in Petaluma. Its mission is to stop and reverse climate change by advancing natural, science-based solutions that remove atmospheric carbon. For the Carbon Cycle Institute, it’s all about the soil.

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3 Circular Principles for Healthy Agriculture

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Author: Hunter Lovins | Published: February 11, 2017 

Proponents of the regenerative economy are realizing that it is dependent on the circular economy of soil. The soil is one of the key natural capitals on which we all depend. Its loss is our demise.

This chapter advocates three ways to move towards regenerative agriculture: return farming systems to harmony with nature’s cycles; make and use biochar; and implement holistic management across the world’s grasslands.

The challenge: climate destructive agriculture

Most of the climate crisis results from burning fossil fuels, but almost a quarter of the problem derives from agriculture. After 150 years of unsustainable practices, the earth’s soil has been depleted.

Modern agriculture worsens climate change. Unchecked, climate change will destroy our tenuous ability to feed ourselves. For every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the norm, yields of wheat, rice and corn drop 10 percent. Given that more than a billion people in the world already suffer from malnutrition, this is serious.

Soil that has been de-carbonized (lost its organic matter) requires large amounts of fossil fuel-based fertilizer if it is to grow crops at industrial scale. Petrochemical use in fertilizer releases greenhouse gasses (GHGs), especially nitrous oxide, a gas 300 times more potent per ton in causing global warming than CO2.  Plowing and poor nutrient management release the nitrogen from soils in quantities. When out of place, both carbon and nitrogen, key building blocks of life in nature, are serious threats to the stability of the climate.

Regenerative agriculture: there is a better way

Critics of current agriculture call for a beyond-modern approach, combining the best of traditional agriculture with the finest science, to deliver abundant, sustainable food and high-quality life to all the world’s people. The Rodale Institute, the Soil Association of the U.K., the Agroecology Lab at U.C. Davis, and the Leopold Center at Iowa State University are a few of the early centers of scientific research into organic agriculture. They are building bio-diverse systems to reintegrate us into living systems agriculture. It takes a longer view of production, not maximizing yields in any one year, but ensuring yield over many years and decreasing chances of crop failure in bad ones.

Regenerative farming practices increase soil-held carbon or organic matter. Farms using crop rotations and animal manure deliver better biodiversity than fields farmed with industrial practices. Organic fields reduce nitrogen runoff and the release of nitrous oxide. Systems that integrate livestock with vegetable production, use perennial pastureland and organic production deliver higher profitability while creating the circular economy of the soil. These methods include long crop rotations, leguminous crops and cover crops and manure produced by livestock as fertilizer.

They take carbon from the air and sequester it in soil. These regenerative methods treat the farms as holistic systems. Farmers use only what is produced on site. Such practices restore soil structure, build healthy topsoil, nurture soil microbes and promote biological activity, all of which contributes to long-term productivity and nutritious crops. Water use is optimized and the best practices in irrigation are applied. Farm worker safety and investment in local dollars sustain farming communities.

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