Tag Archive for: Soil Carbon Sequestration

Grazing to Improve Soil Health, Producer Profits

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Author: Kay Ledbetterd | Published: July 14, 2017 

Richard Teague might be considered a cowboy of a different kind. He’s not rounding up stray cattle, but rather wrangling the best management practices on ranches to help the cattle and their owners.

Teague, a Texas A&M AgriLife Research ecologist at Vernon, grew up on a farm and knows firsthand there are some unintended consequences from traditional long-standing agricultural practices that might not readily be seen.

“I’m an ecologist and know that for an adequately functioning ecosystem, you have to have good soil function,” Teague said. “Many things we do in industrial agriculture break down the function of soil. The ranchers and farmers we are working with have demonstrated how to increase productivity by improving soil health, manage for decreased inputs, improve the health of their cattle and increase profits.”

Teague’s long-term research, which began in North Texas, is getting noticed. He recently was asked to join the leadership of a research group that includes 26 researchers from 18 universities and private entities.

The project is titled “Can Adaptive Multi-Paddock (AMP) grazing contribute to sequestering carbon in soils and improve delivery of ecosystem services and socio-ecological resilience in grazing ecosystems?”

On this project, Teague will be in charge of the grazing management project design and oversight. He is joined on the project by fellow AgriLife Research scientist Urs Kreuter in Texas A&M University’s department of ecosystem science and management, College Station.

Teague said this study will help bridge a big gap in the science between management effects on a ranch scale and results from small-plot research.

The group started with a $500,000 grant from Shell Alberta in 2016 to do reconnaissance sampling to provide proof of concept that AMP grazing management improves ecological, water catchment and economic value, as his research showed in Texas.

“We were successful in getting some smaller grants to do preliminary sampling to make sure the principles held true in cooler areas to the north, wetter areas to the east and drier areas in the west,” he said. “With these results and data, we started putting together grants to expand this work.”

McDonald’s Corp. kicked off the effort with a $4.5 million grant and is facilitating obtaining additional funding, Teague said. Now more entities are indicating a willingness to put money into this research effort.

“The reason they support the research is because they want to help address the food and health concerns of consumers,” he said. “Agriculture has a role to play in finding solutions to our health problems. Many groups are realizing that in the future they are going to have to show their food comes from healthy sources and ones that do not damage the environment.”

KEEP READING ON HIGH PLAINS JOURNAL 

6 States Tapping Into the Benefits of Carbon Farming

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Author: Diana Donlon | Published: July 12, 2017 

A handful of states around the country have begun to recognize the importance of carbon farming as an expedient tool to fight climate change. What’s carbon farming? Eric Toensmeier, author of The Carbon Farming Solution, describes it as “a suite of crops and agricultural practices that sequester carbon in the soil and in perennial vegetation like trees.” If carbon farming were widely implemented, it could return billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere—where there’s currently too much, to the soil where there’s too little. Carbon in the soil, i.e. soil carbon, becomes a resource that increases food, water and climate security.

Last month, Hawaii became the first state in the nation to pass legislation officially supporting the Paris climate agreement, just days after President Trump announced he was pulling the U.S. out of the global agreement. One of the two landmark laws signed in Hawai’i was an act creating the Carbon Farming Task Force. Written and championed by Hawai’i Center for Food Safety, along with the Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi and Surfrider Foundation O’ahu Chapter, the task force went into effect July 1 and will develop incentives for Hawai’i’s farmers and ranchers to improve the resilience of their lands by increasing the soil’s carbon content.

University of Hawai’i assistant professor of agricultural ecosystem ecology, Rebecca Ryals, believes “Hawai’i’s Carbon Farming Task Force is a critically important first step toward finding local solutions to global climate change, and soil carbon farming strategies should be emphasized in its incentive programs.”

Hawai’i is just one of a growing number of states preparing to protect rural livelihoods from the threats posed by climate change by tapping into the multiple benefits of carbon farming. Here are five others:

1. In May, Maryland established the Maryland Healthy Soils Program introduced by Delegate Dana Stein. Stein’s legislation (HB 1063) passed unanimously in the Senate and had the support of both the Maryland Farm Bureau and the soil and climate communities (including thousands of Center for Food Safety members who responded to our action alert in support of the bill). The act, as approved by Gov. Larry Hogan, requires the Maryland Department of Agriculture to provide incentives including research, education and technical assistance contributing to healthy soils.

2. Massachusetts is right behind Maryland. “An Act to Promote Healthy Soils” (No.3713) presented by Paul A. Schmid III, would establish a fund for education and training for those engaged in agriculture that regenerates soil health. Indicators of healthy soil include levels of carbon, rates of water infiltration and biological activity.

3. Meanwhile, in New York, Assemblywoman Didi Barrett introduced A3281, a first-of-its-kind bill to use a tax credit model for farmers who maximize carbon sequestration potential on their land. Although the bill did not pass this past year, Barrett was able to incorporate the Carbon Farming Act into the state budget which is providing $50,000 to study incentives for carbon farming tax credits, grants and other programs.

KEEP READING ON ECOWATCH 

Carbon Farming: An Introduction

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Author: Tobias Roberts | Published: July 7, 2017 

As we struggle to find ways to deal with the excess amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, much attention has been given to high-tech solutions and cutting fossil fuel use. While these are good and worthy discussions to have, carbon farming offers an opportunity to revolutionize the agricultural sector to improve soil and store excess atmospheric carbon where it belongs: in the ground.

CAN WE STORE CARBON IN THE SOIL?

We hear all of the time about the dangers that come with excess amounts of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. During the last century or so, our civilization has released enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the air through the burning of fossil fuels, the deforestation of our forests, and the degradation of our soils.

Plants breathe carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. That seems like a pretty good compliment to us humans who do just the opposite. As our human quest for domination of the planet has increased, however, we have thrown that balance into turmoil.

Plants can take carbon dioxide floating around in the atmosphere and turn it into plant biomass. As those plants eventually die, their organic material decomposes into fertile top soil which is filled with carbon. The carbon dioxide that was floating around in the atmosphere causing global warming and climate change, is thus placed back into the soil through the process of healthy soil growth.

The main problem with this apparently simple and reasonable solution is that our current, industrial agricultural methods do nothing to promote the storing of carbon in the soil. Instead of promoting the growth of diverse and abundant plant biomass, we clear cut forests (the ecosystem with the densest biomass) for pasture lands. Instead of growing cover crops to add biomass to the soil, we use glyphosate and other herbicides to kill off any and all plant growth that “threatens” our monoculture grain crops.

The excessive tillage of soils year after year actually takes carbon out of the soil and sends it into the atmosphere. Farming, then, instead of taking carbon out of the atmosphere and placing it into the soil is one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
What is Carbon Sequestration and Carbon Farming?

Carbon Sequestration is a fancy scientific term that denotes the storage of carbon in a stable solid form. In other words, the opposite of carbon dioxide gas that is floating around our atmosphere in excessive quantities. Carbon sequestration occurs when plants have chemical reactions that turn the carbon dioxide gas into inorganic compounds such as calcium and magnesium.

KEEP READING ON PERMACULTURE RESEARCH INSTITUE 

Finding Common Ground on Carbon

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Author: Chelsea Chandler | Published: June 9, 2017 

Even though global warming is a politically polarizing topic, it’s worth considering some areas of common ground—both figuratively and literally—when it comes to how we manage the carbon dioxide (CO2) that we’re releasing into the atmosphere. Natural carbon storage, for instance, is a win-win for Wisconsin’s citizens, our land, and the global climate, and the type of common sense solution we can all get behind.

To understand natural carbon storage, it’s important to recognize that carbon naturally cycles between different reservoirs on the planet: the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere, and geosphere. We can think of it like a budget: the carbon stored in one place generally offsets carbon naturally emitted in another place, creating a sort of carbon equilibrium. However, too much carbon moving into any one of these reservoirs—especially the atmosphere and oceans—can wreak havoc on this delicate balance.

Carbon overload happens when we have too much input from sources, and not enough capacity in sinks in which to store the carbon. Since the Industrial Revolution, scientists have measured more and more CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere through the burning of hydrocarbons long-stored as fossil fuels such as oil and coal. Meanwhile, by removing and degrading important ecosystems that act as carbon sinks, such as forests cleared for lumber and prairies converted to farmland or urban use, we diminish our capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Just as humans can manage the sources of CO2 we add to the atmosphere, we can also play a big role in managing carbon sinks that can take up and store CO2. Forests, for instance, are important biological sinks in which carbon is stored long-term in wood and soil. Sustainably managing forestlands and working to preserve large tracts of forests are two ways in which we can help to decrease levels of atmospheric carbon.

Prairies, where the majority of carbon storage is in the soil, were once massive biological carbon sinks. However, the USGS reports that since 1830, tallgrass prairie in Wisconsin has decreased over 99%, greatly diminishing our capacity for capturing carbon. In addition to preventing further agricultural or urban land conversion, landowners can help increase our natural carbon storage capacity by working to restore prairies, forests, and wetlands.

Farmers are active land stewards. It is in their best interest to sustain the soil because it in turn sustains them. More than many other professions, farmers are intimately linked to long-term changes in the weather. When someone makes a living off the land—and provides food and resources essential to others—long-term thinking is about sustainability in every sense of the word. Many farmers are already implementing common sense land management practices for storing more carbon, though there are many other opportunities. We’re only currently tapping about 10% of the soil carbon storage potential in U.S. cropland, and there’s a lot more we can do to maintain health of our environment, locally and globally.

KEEP READING ON WISCONSIN ACADEMY 

California Farmers Creating Healthier Soil to Help Battle Climate Change

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Author:Wilson Walker | Published: June 7, 2017

California farmers and researchers are helping rethink approaches to climate change by reworking traditional farming practices.

At Green String Farm in Sonoma County, Bob Cannard grows produce for some of the most celebrated restaurants in California.  “The soil is the foundation of all life, and it can hold so much carbon, and produce so much bounty,” says Cannard, walking through fields that might look overgrown.

This ground cover explosion, however, is entirely by design, because the life and death of these weeds will bring new life to this dirt.  “It doesn’t all burn out in one year,” says Cannard. “You build carbon into your soil.”

That’s the big idea California will now invest in, moving carbon out of the atmosphere and back into our soil.  This summer the state of California will spend seven million dollars encouraging farmers to embrace practices that would make their soil more carbon absorbent.

It’s just a trial program, but the practices that are being encouraged have already been adopted by many climate-conscious farmers.  “The atmospheric carbon, bringing it in and doing positive things with it instead of frivolous or negative things,” explained Cannard, who has embraced the idea of so-called carbon farming for decades.

“I love that soil is becoming part of the story line, that people are saying the word out loud,” said a beaming Kate Scow, soil scientist with the University of California, Davis.  Near the town of Winters, Scow and a team of researchers are conducting a 100-year study on how land responds to different farming practices.

KEEP READING ON CBS SF BAY AREA 

California Farmers Climate Pledge

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As California farmers and ranchers, our livelihoods as well as the ability to feed America entirely depends on the climate. Working close to Nature, we are the first to notice shifts in weather. On our land and in our harvests, we bear the brunt of floods, drought and rising temperatures.

We are soil stewards who belong to a community beyond our own fields; we don’t plant for seasons but for generations. It’s with this legacy in mind that we pledge our support for the science, commitment and goals outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement.

We vow to continually improve our own on-farm practices to conserve energy and sequester carbon, but we also believe in the dire importance of a collective, worldwide commitment by all nations—including our own—to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius target stated in the Paris Climate Agreement, all while building a cleaner, 21st century economy.

As members of the agricultural community, we are concerned by our president’s decision to pull America out of this agreement. We disagree with the current administration that this international accord will harm our economy without mitigating the climate crisis.

We ask that our leaders return America to its role as a collaborative, global leader in combating Climate Change. And in the meantime, we support state-based initiatives as well as citizen-funded programs—unbeholden to federal policy shifts—that recognize not only the dire consequences that inaction will have on our farms, ranches and food supply, but also the regenerative role that we farmers and ranchers can play in reversing these dangerous trends and restoring a healthy carbon cycle.

America depends on farmers. And farmers depend on the climate. Now is the time to act.

SIGN THE PLEDGE AND LEARN MORE ON THE FARMERS GUILD

 

Soil Networks Become More Connected and Take up More Carbon As Nature Restoration Progresses

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Authors: Elly Morriën and S. Emilia Hannula | Published: February 8, 2017 

Many ecosystems worldwide face exposure to intensified human use1,2,3, which has resulted in loss of biodiversity4, altered functioning5and altered provisioning of ecosystem services6. The abandonment of disturbed land represents one of the most widely used restoration strategies implemented at a global scale7, with the potential to promote biodiversity, and associated ecosystem services. However, the restoration of natural ecosystem functioning and soil properties is known to be a long-term process7,8, dependent upon the time it takes to restore connections between different components of the community9. Over half a century ago, Odum10 identified mechanistic linkages between the successional dynamics of natural communities and the functioning of natural ecosystems. Specifically, as communities progress through succession, diversity is expected to increase and nutrients will become ‘locked-up’ in the biota, with consequences for the build-up of soil organic matter and closure of the mineral cycles10. More recently, the interplay between aboveground and belowground biodiversity has emerged as a prominent determinant of the successional dynamics in biological communities11. However, little is known about how changes in the soil biota contribute to the associated changes in ecosystem functioning.

In ecosystems undergoing secondary succession, it is evident that available nitrogen diminishes, primary productivity decreases and the plant community shifts from fast- to slow-growing plant species12. There is less evidence of an increase of soil biodiversity13, and evidence of a relationship between soil biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is mixed, at best5,13,14,15. As a result, it is still unclear how soil and plant community composition relate to each other and what is the relative role of plants and soil biota in driving soil processes and plant community development12,17.

Interestingly, studies on a time series (chronosequence) of abandoned arable fields revealed that carbon and nitrogen mineralization by the soil food web increases during secondary succession18. This implies a more active soil microbial community in later successional stages19,20,21where bacterial-dominated systems are expected to be replaced by fungal-dominated systems22 with more carbon turnover via fungi23 and their consumers24. However, data to test these assumptions are largely lacking. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine how biodiversity, composition and structure of the soil community change during successional development of restored ecosystems.

We used a well-established chronosequence of nature restoration sites on ex-arable, formerly cultivated, lands that represent over 30 years of nature restoration. We determined biodiversity of almost all taxonomic groups of soil biota, analysed their network structure and added labelled carbon dioxide and mineral nitrogen to intact plant–soil systems in order to track their uptake by the soil food web. We tested the hypothesis that functional changes in carbon and nitrogen flows relate more strongly to the belowground community network structure than to belowground biodiversity.

We analysed variations in species co-occurrence and considered enhanced correlations as network tightening, which we define as a ‘significant increase in percentage connectance and an increase in the strong correlations as a percentage of all possible correlations’25. Our results reveal increased tightening and, therefore, connectance, of the belowground networks during nature restoration on the ex-arable land. A combination of correlation-based network analysis and isotope labelling shows that soil network tightening corresponds with enhanced efficiency of the carbon uptake in the fungal channel of the soil food web, without an increase in the total amount of soil biodiversity or in fungal-to-bacterial biomass ratios. For nitrogen, the non-microbial species groups revealed a similar pattern as for carbon. Tightening of the networks reflects stronger co-occurring patterns of variation in soil biota25. Increased carbon and nitrogen uptake capacity by the fungal channel in the soil food web can be explained by stronger co-occurrence of preys and their predators24, which enhances the efficiency of resource transfer in the soil food web compared with a soil food web where preys and predators are spatially isolated.

KEEP READING ON NATURE.COM

Carbon Farming & Cutting Food Waste: Climate Solutions That Don’t Require Trump’s Buy-in

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Author: Twilight Greenaway | Published: June 5, 2017 

Donald Trump’s recent decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate has many wringing their hands. But Paul Hawken doesn’t have time for despair. In fact, the veteran author and entrepreneur has spent the last several years working with a team of scientists and policy experts to map and quantify a set of climate solutions he says have the power to draw down the carbon in the atmosphere and radically alter our climate future. And he’s confident that many of these efforts will continue to take place with or without government buy-in.

Hawken’s new book, Drawdown, illuminates 100 of the most effective of these solutions and points to food and agriculture as hugely important when it comes to both sequestering current greenhouse gases and releasing fewer of them in the first place. From composting and clean cookstoves to managed grazing and multistrata agroforestry, Drawdown makes a compelling case for radically changing the way we eat, farm, and tend to the land. Civil Eats spoke to Hawken about the book, the surprising role food has come to play among climate optimists, and his advice on how to keep our eyes open while imagining the future of our planet.

Can you tell us about what you wanted to do with this book and how food plays a role in the picture it paints?

We mapped, measured, and modeled the most substantive solutions to reversing global warming. We didn’t have a horse in the race. We may have biases, I’m sure we do, but our process and methodology was to eliminate bias and just to look at [the solutions] from the point of peer-reviewed science in terms of the carbon impact.

There are only two things you can do really with respect to the atmosphere, which is to stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and then bring them back home. There’s nothing else. Some solutions—like land use solutions—do both.

We didn’t go into it knowing what would be the biggest sector. Or even what would be the top five or 10. We went in very open-ended and it turns out food is eight of the top 20 suggestions.

You ranked the solutions in terms of potential impact. Number three is reduced food waste and number four is the shift to “a plant-rich diet.” Why then, do you think food and ag are so rarely a part in the mainstream conversation about climate change?

My guess as to why food and land-use solutions have been marginalized and even ignored is because of the way solutions have been approached by climate scientists. Estimates vary, but at least 65 percent of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are due to combustion of fossil fuels, so it is easy to come to the conclusion that replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy is the biggest solution.

One of the reasons reducing food waste ranks high is because most of the food that is discarded ends up in landfills where it is buried in an anaerobic environment causing methane emissions, which are 34 times more potent in their greenhouse warming potential compared to CO2. A plant-rich diet reduces the consumption of animal protein, and the production of meat—whether grass fed or in CAFOs—is also a very significant source of methane.

And finally, there is agriculture itself, another source of significant emissions as practiced by conventional and industrial agriculture. Tillage removes carbon, mineral fertilizers create another potent greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, glyphosate sterilizes soil life creating emissions, monocultures expose the soil to sun and heat, an emission cause, etc.

When you change these three practices, and cultivate types of sustainable food production techniques, like system of rice intensification and agroforestry, it turns out that food has a greater potential to help reverse global warming than the energy sector. That’s also due to the fact that land use can sequester carbon, whereas renewable energy simply avoids carbon emissions.

However, your question stands. Why did we not look at this more closely sooner? That is a mystery at Project Drawdown. These data, math, and conclusions detailed in Drawdown could have been calculated and disseminated a long time ago. The science these calculations are based on has been known for a long time.

Food is seen as inherently personal. Do you think the urgency about the climate has the potential to get more people thinking about food on a systems level?

I tend to think of food as more cultural than personal. In the U.S., subsidies have allowed people the ability to eat large quantities of expensive foods, like milk and meat. In most countries, the true cost of these items limits the stroke and heart-disease outcomes we have in the U.S. I believe people move toward healthier food because of their own needs and understandings, not because of the climate impact.

What we see in our research is that regenerative practices (in many areas besides food) are increasing because they work better, are less expensive, create greater productivity, can be locally sourced, create meaningful jobs, enhance human health, engender community, and much more. In other words, making choices that are better for your body, the soil, workers, your children, and your community are almost invariably practices that reverse global warming.

Let’s talk about the term “regenerative.” I’ve heard from several folks in the organic community who worry that another label will confuse consumers. Why did you choose to highlight regenerative agriculture vs. organic? 

KEEP READING ON CIVIL EATS 

“Carbon Farming” Offers New Chance for Cattle Ranch

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Author: Deborah Sullivan Brennan | Published: May 12, 2017 

he cattle herds at Santa Ysabel Ranch have provided meat and milk for centuries, and now they’re on the cutting edge of a new kind of agriculture: carbon farming.

By bunching cattle together and grazing them intensively for short periods, ranchers hope to restore grasslands and soil, and capture carbon from the atmosphere. In the ideal scenario, the operation could sequester more carbon than it produces, offsetting greenhouse gas emissions from cars or electric power.

If it sounds counterintuitive that grass-munching cows could beef up vegetation, or that cattle ranching — often criticized for its deep carbon footprint — could be a climate solution, Kevin Muno and his partner Jarod Cauzza aim to prove otherwise.

Through their company, Land of Milk and Honey, they’re conducting an experiment on the back country ranch in what they call regenerative agriculture, a process that aims to improve the area’s ecology. And they’re betting they can turn a profit doing it.

“We want to build soil, have more wildlife, have more cattle and more money for the families” working the land, Muno said.

They plan to sell grass-fed beef online, and eventually add other livestock to the operation. For now, they’re developing the system, which they hope will be a template for other ranches in the county.

The Resource Conservation District of Greater San Diego County received a $10,000 grant to develop a carbon farming plan with the ranchers that could guide similar efforts throughout the county, said executive director Sheryl Landrum. With more than 5,000 small farms and 208,564 acres of range land, San Diego could employ carbon farming to help meet its climate goals.

“We’re hoping that through this plan we might have something tangible for other agencies and other interested parties,” Landrum said.

KEEP READING ON THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE

Regeneration: The Next Stage of Organic Food and Farming—And Civilization

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Regenerate—to give fresh life or vigor to; to reorganize; to recreate the moral nature; to cause to be born again. (New Webster’s Dictionary, 1997)

When a reporter asked him [Mahatma Gandhi] what he thought of Western civilization, he famously replied: “I think it would be a good idea.”

A growing corps of organic, climate, environmental, social justice and peace activists are promoting a new world-changing paradigm that can potentially save us from global catastrophe. The name of this new paradigm and movement is regenerative agriculture, or more precisely regenerative food, farming and land use.

Regenerative agriculture and land use incorporates the traditional and indigenous best practices of organic farming, animal husbandry and environmental conservation. Regeneration puts a central focus on improving soil health and fertility (recarbonizing the soil), increasing biodiversity, and qualitatively enhancing forest health, animal welfare, food nutrition and rural (especially small farmer) prosperity.

The basic menu for a Regeneration Revolution is to unite the world’s 3 billion rural farmers, ranchers and herders with several billion health, environmental and justice-minded consumers to overturn “business as usual” and embark on a global campaign of cooperation, solidarity and regeneration.

According to food activist Vandana Shiva, “Regenerative agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the health crisis, the climate crisis, and the crisis of democracy.”

So how can regenerative agriculture do all these things: increase soil fertility; maximize crop yields; draw down enough excess carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in the soils, plants and trees to re-stabilize the climate and restore normal rainfall; increase soil water retention; make food more nutritious; reduce rural poverty; and begin to pacify the world’s hotspots of violence?

First, let’s look at what Michael Pollan, the U.S.’s most influential writer on food and farming, has to say about the miraculous regenerative power of Mother Nature and enhanced photosynthesis:

Consider what happens when the sun shines on a grass plant rooted in the earth. Using that light as a catalyst, the plant takes atmospheric CO2, splits off and releases the oxygen, and synthesizes liquid carbon–sugars, basically. Some of these sugars go to feed and build the aerial portions of the plant we can see, but a large percentage of this liquid carbon—somewhere between 20 and 40 percent—travels underground, leaking out of the roots and into the soil. The roots are feeding these sugars to the soil microbes—the bacteria and fungi that inhabit the rhizosphere—in exchange for which those microbes provide various services to the plant… Now, what had been atmospheric carbon (a problem) has become soil carbon, a solution—and not just to a single problem, but to a great many problems.

Besides taking large amounts of carbon out of the air—tons of it per acre when grasslands [or cropland] are properly managed… that process at the same time adds to the land’s fertility and its capacity to hold water. Which means more and better food for us…

This process of returning atmospheric carbon to the soil works even better when ruminants are added to the mix. Every time a calf or lamb shears a blade of grass, that plant, seeking to rebalance its “root-shoot ratio,” sheds some of its roots. These are then eaten by the worms, nematodes, and microbes—digested by the soil, in effect, and so added to its bank of carbon. This is how soil is created: from the bottom up… For thousands of years we grew food by depleting soil carbon and, in the last hundred or so, the carbon in fossil fuel as well. But now we know how to grow even more food while at the same time returning carbon and fertility and water to the soil.

A 2015 article in the Guardian summarizes some of the most important practices of Regenerative Agriculture:

Regenerative agriculture comprises an array of techniques that rebuild soil and, in the process, sequester carbon. Typically, it uses cover crops and perennials so that bare soil is never exposed, and grazes animals in ways that mimic animals in nature. It also offers ecological benefits far beyond carbon storage: it stops soil erosion, re-mineralizes soil, protects the purity of groundwater and reduces damaging pesticide and fertilizer runoff.”

If you want to understand the basic science and biology of how regenerative agriculture can draw down enough excess carbon from the atmosphere over the next 25 years and store it in our soils and forests (in combination with a 100-percent reduction in fossil fuel emissions) to not only mitigate, but actually reverse global warming, read this article by one of North America’s leading organic farmers, Jack Kittridge.

If you want a general overview of news and articles on regenerative food, farming and land use, you can follow the newsfeed “Cook Organic Not the Planet” by the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), and/or sign up for OCA’s weekly online newsletter (you can subscribe online, or text “Bytes” to 97779.)

You can also visit the Regeneration International website, where you’ll find this list of books on regenerative agriculture.

Solving the soil, health, environmental and climate crises

Without going into extensive detail here (you can read the references above), we need to connect the dots between our soil, public health, environment and climate crisis. As the widely-read Mercola newsletter puts it:

Virtually every growing environmental and health problem can be traced back to modern food production. This includes but is not limited to:

  • Food insecurity and malnutrition amid mounting food waste
  • Rising obesity and chronic disease rates despite growing health care outlays
  • Diminishing fresh water supplies
  • Toxic agricultural chemicals polluting air, soil and waterways, thereby threatening the entire food chain from top to bottom
  • Disruption of normal climate and rainfall patterns

Connecting the dots between climate and food

We can’t really solve the climate crisis (and the related soil, environmental, and public health crisis) without simultaneously solving the food and farming crisis. We need to stop putting greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere (by moving to 100-percent renewable energy), but we also need to move away from chemical-intensive, energy-intensive food, factory farming and land use, as soon as possible.

Regenerative food and farming has the potential to draw down a critical mass of carbon (200-250 billion tons) from the atmosphere over the next 25 years and store it in our soils and living plants, where it will increase soil fertility, food production and food quality (nutritional density), while re-stabilizing the climate.

The heavy use of pesticides, GMOs, chemical fertilizers and factory-farming by 50 million industrial farmers (mainly in the Global North) is not just poisoning our health and engendering a global epidemic of chronic disease and malnutrition. It’s also destroying our soil, wetlands’ and forests’ natural ability to sequester excess atmospheric carbon into the earth.

The good news is that solar and wind power, and energy conservation are now cheaper than fossil fuels. And most people are starting to understand that organic, grass-fed and freshly-prepared foods are safer and more nutritious than chemical and GMO foods.

The food movement and climate movements must break through our single-issue silos and start to work together. Either we stop Big Coal, Big Oil, fracking, and the mega-pipelines, or climate change will soon morph into climate catastrophe, making it impossible to grow enough food to feed the planet. Every food activist needs to become a climate activist.

On the other hand, every climate activist needs to become a food activist. Our current system of industrial food, farming and land use, now degenerating 75 percent of all global farmland, is “mining” and decarbonizing the soil, destroying our forests, and releasing 44-57 percent of all climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and black soot) into our already supersaturated atmosphere, while at the same time undermining our health with commoditized, overly processed food.

Solving the crisis of rural poverty, democracy and endless war

Out-of-touch and out-of-control governments of the world now take our tax money and spend $500 billion dollars a year mainly subsidizing 50 million industrial farmers to do the wrong thing. These farmers routinely over-till, over-graze (or under-graze), monocrop, and pollute the soil and the environment with chemicals and GMOs to produce cheap commodities (corn, soy, wheat, rice, cotton) and cash crops, low-grade processed food and factory-farmed meat and animal products. Meanwhile 700 million small family farms and herders, comprising the 3 billion people who produce 70 percent of the world’s food on just 25 percent of the world’s acreage, struggle to make ends meet.

If governments can be convinced or forced by the power of the global grassroots to reduce and eventually cut off these $500 billion in annual subsidies to industrial agriculture and Big Food, and instead encourage and reward family farmers and ranchers who improve soil health, biodiversity, animal health and food quality, we can simultaneously reduce global poverty, improve public health, and restore climate stability.

As even the Pentagon now admits, climate change, land degradation (erosion and desertification), and rural poverty are now primary driving forces of sectarian strife and war (and massive waves of refugees) in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. U.S. military intervention in these regions, under the guise of “regime change” or democratization, has only made things worse. This is why every peace activist needs to become a climate and food activist and vice-versa.

Similarly corrupt, out-of-control governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of $5.3 trillion dollars a year, while spending more than $3 trillion dollars annually on weapons, mainly to prop up our global fossil fuel system and overseas empires. If the global grassroots can reach out to one another, bypassing our corrupt governments, and break down the geographic, linguistic and cultural walls that separate us, we can launch a global Regeneration Revolution—on the scale of the global campaign in World War II against the Nazis.

One thing we the grassroots share in all of the 200 nations of the world is this: We are sick and tired of corrupt governments and out-of-control corporations degenerating our lives and threatening our future. The Russian people are not our enemies, nor the Chinese, nor the Iranians. The hour is late. The crisis is dire. But we still have time to regenerate our soils, climate, health, economy, foreign policy, and democracy. We still have time to turn things around.

The global Regeneration Movement we need will likely take several decades to reach critical mass and effectiveness. In spreading the Regeneration message, and building this new Movement at the global grassroots, we must take into account the fact that most regions, nations and people (and in fact many people who are still ignorant of the facts or climate change deniers) will respond more quickly or positively to different aspects or dimensions of our message (i.e. providing jobs; reducing rural and urban poverty and inequality, restoring soil fertility, saving the ocean and marine life, preserving forests, improving nutrition and public health, eliminating hunger and malnutrition, saving biodiversity, restoring animal health and food quality, preserving water, safeguarding Mother Nature or God’s Creation, creating a foundation for peace, democracy, and reconciliation, etc.) rather than to the central life or death message: reversing global warming.

What is important is not that everyone, everywhere immediately agrees 100 percent on all of the specifics of regenerative food, farming and land use—for this is not practical—but rather that we build upon our shared concerns in each community, region, nation and continent. Through a diversity of messages, frames and campaigns, through connecting the dots between all the burning issues, we will find the strength, numbers, courage and compassion to build the largest grassroots coalition in history—to safeguard our common home, our survival, and the survival of the future generations.

Ronnie Cummins is international director of the Organic Consumers Association and a founding member of Regeneration International.