Can Big Farm Practice Sustainable Agriculture?

Andrew Kimball expresses the belief that changes in agricultural practices could reverse climate change.

World leaders who met last month at the United Nations climate summit took stock of the sobering reality that a global pact on climate change very likely will not be achieved in Copenhagen this December… However, there is a solution being overlooked in climate negotiations that could result in rapid greenhouse gas reductions with comparatively low financial investment and little technology transfer — a transition toward ecological, organic agriculture.

$This figure shows the relative fraction of human-caused GHG emissions by sector$: Image via Wikipedia

“At least 60 percent of all nitrous oxide (NO2) emissions, the most potent greenhouse gas, are caused by industrial agriculture, primarily from the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Nearly 40 percent of methane (CH4), the second strongest greenhouse gas, is due to industrial farming practices, much of this from intensive industrialized livestock operations.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conservatively tells us that industrial agriculture methods contribute at least 14 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Many scientists say this figure could as high as 25-30 percent of emissions when the total energy backpack of the current food system is taken into account. Some greenhouse emissions related to agriculture are embedded in other sectors cited by the IPCC — forestry, transportation, and industry. These areas include inputs such as the use of fossil fuels to produce chemical fertilizers and pesticides; processing, packaging, refrigeration, and transport of food; and land conversion from biodiverse ecosystems to giant, monoculture food plantations.

The HuffPo contributor opines neither international nor U.S. domestic policies are adequately addressing the issue that industrial agriculture is one of the major contributors to global warming. From the standpoint of U.S. federal policy, this comes as no big surprise given the influence that Big Farm has on our ear tagged policy makers.

Still some change might yet occur. The Kerry – Boxer bill (S.1733) includes language that begins to address harmful emissions caused by current agricultural practices.

Critical policy decisions not only need to be made about GHG emissions from agricultural practices, but as this blog has noted, we also need to consider changes in agricultural practices to protect our valuable water resources.

Specifically, policy needs to put into place that restrict pollution from feedstock operations. And, such a change actually could be profitable. AG readers should be familiar with ways to convert waste to energy. For instance, a NRDC report (National Resources Defense Council) found unprecedented biogas opportunity for Indiana.

Note: The report also mentioned biopower. As a proponent of anaerobic digesters, this blog tends to favor co-digestion of waste biomass There is considerable potential for such development in agricultural states, especially those states leading in factory farms.

Advocates claim that the optimized diversion of manure to bio-gas production by means of anaerobic digestion results in a negative value for production and is the only alternative fuel to do so.

We need to shift away from energy-intensive and toward bio-intensive practices. Debbie Barker, international program director of the Washington, D.C. based not-for-profit Center for Food Safety, says that “we need large-scale change in the way we grow our food.”

The way forward, the great U turn, is to transition toward regenerative, living carbon systems and away from non-renewable, dead fossil-carbon systems. A rapid, global transition is an imperative both for mitigating climate change and for ensuring food security.

Given that industrial agriculture methods are a major part of the global warming problem, why not turn agriculture around to make it a major climate solution? …A Rodale Institute study projects that the planet’s 3.5 billion tillable acres could sequester nearly 40 percent of current CO2 emissions if they were converted to “regenerative” organic agriculture practices. The same 10-year study submits that if U.S. cropland (based on 434 million acres) were converted to organic farming methods, we could reduce nearly 25 percent of our total GHG emissions.

Many studies have drawn similar conclusions. In India, organic farming research shows increases in carbon absorption by up to 55 percent (even higher when agro-forestry is added into the mix), and water holding capacity is increased by 10 percent. A study of 20 commercial farms in California found that organic fields had 28 percent more carbon in the soil than industrial farms.

…

The environmental problem of climate change that industrial agriculture is now causing will guarantee that we simply won’t be able to feed a hungry world. And, contrary to general belief and prejudice fostered by agribusiness, industrial crops do not consistently yield more food. In fact, it is a pernicious myth that ecological organic agriculture yields less than conventional agriculture. A comprehensive study of 293 crop comparisons of industrial and organic agriculture demonstrated that organic farm yields are roughly comparable to industrial farm yields in developed countries; and result in much higher yields in developing nations.

The World Bank and United Nations International Assessment on Knowledge, Science and Technology concluded that fundamental overhaul of the current food and farming system is needed to get us out of the food (and fuel) crisis, and that small-scale farmers and agro-ecological methods are the way toward food security. Further, numerous studies unequivocally state that our survival depends on the resiliency and biodiversity of organic farm systems free of fossil fuels and chemical dependency.

Topsoil: The World’s Urban Sponge (ecocity.wordpress.com)

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jcwinnie

Posted 2009-11-7 at 10:30 am | Permalink

HuffPo contributor J. Carl Ganter informs that the Barcelona talks, the last set of preliminary negotiations before Copenhagen, “were marked by urgency, frustration and pleas for patience and trust, while all mention of water is pulled from documents” (My emphasis). Circle of Blue Water News contributor Keith Schneider has the scoop.

By directly joining the warming planet and its steadily melting, flooding, and drying landscape the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change was also taking the first steps to establishing common financial, policy and management solutions. The intent of the authors of Non-Paper 8 passage was clear: Fix the climate problem and a number of the planet’s big water problems would also be solved.

But just days before the start of this week’s five-day meeting on climate change in Barcelona, the UNFCCC released a new draft of Non-Paper 8, re-titled with the catchy name Non-Paper 31. When water advocates pored through it they discovered that every single mention of the word “water” had been deleted. In essence, water had been scrubbed from the climate negotiations.

In an interview with Circle of Blue today, Karin Lexén, a project director with the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), one of Europe’s top water research and policy groups, described the consequences of the missing word.

“We’re fighting here in Barcelona to get the references to water back in the text,” she said. “Otherwise it’s a hidden issue within this process. It isn’t getting the attention it deserves in the climate talks and that means that it won’t be on the agenda for action. There’s too many people affected to allow that to happen.”

EROWI chart taken from an article by Robert Service in Science Magazine. The data originally came from “Energy demands on water resources (PDF)”, a report to Congress in 2006.

While farming consumes a large portion of fresh water resources, the abridgment before COP15 also reflects the powerful interests of energy companies. Such abridgment occurred in spite of, or perhaps, as a result of inclusion in the 2007 Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change of the statement, “The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people won’t have enough water….”

“Water is, of course, a renewable resource but a lot of the water used today is ‘fossil’ water,” writes Ugo Bardi. “It comes from deep aquifers which can be drained empty as it has happened, for instance, in Saudi Arabia.”

“In addition, climate change may further reduce the water supply in many areas of the world. How much these factors will affect energy generation worldwide in the near future is difficult to say at present, but surely the problem shouldn’t be underestimated. The EROWI problem, in the end, is just an indication that we are hitting yet another limit of our finite environment.”

Lexén, a 44-year-old environmental chemist and mother of two teenagers from Stockholm, is part of a small team of water advocates who’ve launched a campaign to push the global water crisis higher on the list of priorities within the U.N. climate action process.

Next month, negotiators meet in Copenhagen to try and finish a new climate treaty, but delays caused largely by ideological differences in Washington are making that an increasingly difficult goal to achieve.

Lexén and her fellow water advocates here in Barcelona say they want to finish a new climate treaty in December, but the delay may be a blessing. It affords her more time to make the case that the water crisis merits formal consideration in the final text of the new climate treaty.

Last summer, the annual World Water Week, which Lexen’s organization manages in Stockholm, concluded with a statement that urged climate negotiators to ensure that “a strong and fair agreement on future global commitments on climate change measures—both mitigation and adaptation—is crucial in order to secure future water resource availability.”

This week Lexen helped organize a day-long Water Day conference in Barcelona to further explore the links between freshwater and the climate crisis.

Photo by Will Andruschack

The EROWI concept is examined in depth, especially for biofuels, in an article titled “Burning Water: A Comparative Analysis of the Energy Return on Water Invested” by Kenneth Mulder, Nathan Hagens and Brendan Fisher, in press on AMBIO (The Journal of Human Environment).

She noted that while diplomats and scientists working on the new treaty are trying to push water aside, that is not the case with the world’s people.

In August, Circle of Blue and the Toronto- and London-based GlobesScan, a public opinion survey firm, released the first global survey of public attitudes about freshwater.

Some 15,000 people were polled in 15 countries. According to the survey, people around the world view water pollution as the most important facet of the freshwater crisis; shortages of freshwater are very close behind. Concern about both issues tended to be higher in developing countries than in developed nations. In each country access to and contamination of freshwater ranked higher than any other environmental concern, including climate change.

“To me it’s a matter of justice,” said Lexén. “We’re trying to do what we can to safeguard a future not just if you’re rich, but also for the poorest. It was big luck for me to be born in Sweden in a country with a lot of wealth. It’s big luck for my children to be born in a country with a lot of wealth. How would it have been for me and my children to be born in Bangladesh, a poor nation? To me it’s an ethical issue.”

The disparity between acting in the interests of the global community versus serving “entrenched interests” is becoming more and more ludicrous. Yes, even in Almost Heaven, a.k.a., the state of West Virginia in the United States of America.

Also see Circle of Blue’s day-one coverage of Barcelona and Schneider’s wider analysis of the Barcelona negotiations. And, worth reading is “The Future Is Drying Up” by John Gertner, NYT Magazine, October 21, 2007

After Gutenberg