Over the last few months I’ve been coming across little bits of information that really point to agriculture as the most important aspect to climate change, and I thought I would put some of them together here in a post.
The Numbers
Just where are all the greenhouse gases coming from is not as easy a question to answer as you might think. The working diagram seems to be this from the World Resources Institute. Looking at the diagram one can see that the agriculture sector accounts for 13.5% of greenhouse gases, but at the same time deforestation accounts for 18.3%. It’s clear some portion of deforestation is connected to agriculture, but how much? Where do biofuels fit in here? Other sectors like transportation and industrial processes also clearly play an important role in agriculture. Even though it’s not possible to clearly see agriculture’s role in this diagram, some interesting comparisons with other sectors can still be made.
According to Dr R. K. Pachauri’s presentation notes, on the website linked to below in the meat section of this post: Green house gas emissions from livestock production are 80% of emissions from agriculture and 18% of all green house gas emissions from human activities. For these he sites an FAO report from 2006 I haven’t been able to locate.
From these figures it’s possible to deduce that green house gas emissions from agriculture are 22.5% of all those related to human activities. Many of these gases are not just CO2, but other more environmentally damaging gases like N2O and CH4.
Emissions Are Only Part of the Story
Beyond the actual emissions from agriculture, there’s another important factor to consider. Agricultural land is one of the most important sources of carbon sequestration on the planet, and our current system of chemical intensive agriculture destroys the soil’s ability to store carbon. This is because the soil contains an enormous number of microorganisms and is an ecosystem within itself, but one fungus in particular is largely responsible for sequestering the carbon, which can’t grow in soil damaged by agricultural chemicals.
Reforming our current system of agriculture to one that uses organic methods would likely turn an industry that’s a net producer of 22.5% of the worlds man made greenhouse gases to one that’s a net consumer of green house gases. This change is unlikely to reduce agricultural output.
How can it be that if we got rid of all the agricultural chemicals there would be no reduction in yields? It’s the simple fact that most modern crop varieties were bred to need chemicals, for no reason except corporate profits. When a company like Monsanto or Dow sells both chemicals and seeds, it’s natural when they create a new variety they would want to promote their own chemical products too. Therefore they breed their new varieties specially to not be able to grow without these chemicals. This is one of the reasons the same company who sells Round-Up sells Round-Up ready seeds, and so on. There’s no credible evidence to suggest commercial varieties are any more productive as a whole than properly maintained non-commercial varieties which don’t need the chemicals in the first place.
Anne of Agrarian Grrl’s Muse made a great post on this and the associated Rodale Institute report. Be sure to check out the video.
According to the report if the US switched it’s corn and soy bean acreage to organic production, this alone would meet 73% of it’s Kyoto Protocol obligations. And again, there’s likely to be no significant loss of crop yields in the long run.
When carbon is sequestered into the ground one of the results is higher quality soil, and associated higher yields. Many gardeners know sequestered carbon in the form of compost, and even non-gardeners know the term topsoil. As well as reducing global warming, this would be a very good thing for agriculture in the long run, building up our topsoils and putting carbon into the ground. There would be other benefits. Carbon would significantly improve the soil’s ability to retain water, meaning greater tolerance to drought. This would also significantly reduce N2O emissions (from livestock), because nitrogen binds to carbon when it’s in the ground.
Perennial vs Annual
One of the characteristics of modern agriculture are large swaths of farmland planted with mono-cultures, then plowed under at the end of each year and replanted the next. These are called annual crops.
It turns out annual crops are significant green house gas producers. In the process of plowing, the ground is damaged and sequestered carbon is released. In addition more work needs to be done by tractors which also emit CO2. The plants are weaker, with shallower roots, and more prone to diseases and drought.
Perennial crops on the other hand, those which stay in the ground for more than one year, are more disease and drought resistant, and generally stronger plants. They stand up better to weeds, because they maintain their ground cover and more firmly establish themselves into the ground. Their deeper root systems tend to sequester more carbon, in addition they need less tractor work and chemicals.
The Seed Ambassadors recently posted a paper discussing perennial grains.
Biochar
This is something that’s been in the news lately, and a number of blog posts have appeared on the topic.
Basically biochar is made with a process called pyrolysis which involves burning farm waste at low temperature with reduced oxygen. The result is something similar to charcoal, and when buried in the ground decomposes into soil with a very high carbon content. While a lot is still unknown about it at this point, it’s believed this is a system that can be used to sequester large amounts of carbon quickly into the ground, building up fertility rapidly in the process.
Alan of Bishop’s Homegrown, as well as publishing several posts on the topic, is making his own. He refers to the ground made with biochar as Terra Pretta, the name given to the fertile ground created by an ancient civilization with this technique in the Amazon rainforest.
Biochar is already attracting the attention of big business. Anne recently posted about trojan efforts at producing Terra Pretta, requiring fossil fuel inputs!
It’s clear there’s a lot of potential for turning organic farm waste into sequestered carbon and rich agricultural land using this technique, and a lot more work needs to be done on it.
Meat
I posted on this controversial subject before, and I noticed a tense silence amongst my readers, resulting in only a few polite comments.
18% of greenhouse gases related to human activity comes from producing meat, the largest single source. In addition, the gases like N2O and CH4 that come from livestock, are some of the most significant contributors to global warming. While it’s certainly possible for people to eat meat if they want to, the rate it’s being produced and the production methods used are seriously damaging the planet. It seems pretty far-fetched to think we can continue as we are, even increase production to meet demand in emerging economies like China, while at the same time addressing global warming. People who eat meat need to eat a lot less of it.
If you’re interested, the person who recently made this statement and attracted attention to this issue is the chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. R. K. Pachauri. He has a blog! He also made a post about his statement and the controversy it caused, and for those of you who showed restraint here and didn’t say anything negative, you can go there and blast him with a comment personally! In fact, you can be the first, because at the time of my writing this post there were 34 comments on his post, none of them negative. Now we just need to convince him to set up an RSS feed…
Agriculture Opted Out
In Europe both the automotive and airline industries tried to opt out of the Kyoto Protocol green house gas emission limits, and there was an outcry. They have since been brought back into the carbon credits trading scheme.
On the other hand the agriculture ministers announced they were opting out of these same limits, and it seems like there wasn’t a single voice of opposition. For some reason it seems the most natural thing in the world that something sacred like our food production should not have to change, even though reform of the agriculture sector would probably by itself meet almost all of Europe’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.
In fact Europe is very unlikely to be able to meet it’s obligation under the Kyoto Protocol without significant participation from the agricultural sector.
What Can You Do?
Eat less meat.
Grow your own organic vegetables, or buy them locally from someone you trust.
Grow heritage/heirloom plant varieties in your vegetable garden, save your own seeds and learn basic plant breeding. The resulting skills and plants are going to be needed in the next century.
Compost your household and garden waste when possible.
Use common sense when driving a car, travelling by plane and heating your house.
Tell your politicians it’s not our position as consumers to have something trivial like low energy light bulbs forced upon us, rather it’s their responsibility to save the planet by reforming agriculture in a meaningful way!
While you’re at it, tell your politicians we don’t want biofuels made in a way that results in net CO2 production, reduces available land for food based agriculture, results in environmental pollution, results in deforestation or involves any new technologies like GMOs, synbio or nanotechnologies without proper regulation and long term testing.
Great post as usual (and I am enjoying your posts on seed saving as well). You’ve given me fodder for a very long letter to my representatives! I think you are right that the question of ‘agricultural practices’ is more central than is immediately apparent in the question of climate change and a whole lot more. And I just thought that it was my particular focus that made me think that 😉
Great, post.
I agree we eat far too much meat, but factory farming meat, excessive tillage, burning crop residues and other bad farming probably attributes the bulk of those Ag CO2 statistics. So, for the sake of discussion I’ll weigh in on one paradox. If like good biodynamic farmers or small scale farmers who wish not to purchase inputs ..could you not see a place for animals within the whole farm system? Its difficult, not impossible to grow food without composted manure – it requires more land to rotate crops (more equipment and labour) or purchased inputs, the production and transport of which produce carbon.
I see a place for animals in a sustainable small scale system. Better still if they are multi-purpose (meat/milk/draught/manure or eggs/meat/weeders, for e.g) Sheep are amazing multipurpose animals and produce much less CO2 than cows.
Thanks for the link to my blog Patrick, I appreciate it.
I agree with Anne myself, animals will have to be an ever important part of agriculture in sustainable systems, most of these emissions are coming from large feed lots and slash and burn methods, many of these methods are the type used by corporate farmers, but when it comes time to point fingers, world governments will point at the self sustainable farmer and let the corporate idiots get away with their unsustainable practices, it’s a way to control what people do, how they do it, and where their money and power goes.
Composting and using animal manures is one of the most important practices of self sustainable farming, and in small scale farming, even collectively around the world, the amount of emissions released would be nothing compared to a huge feedlot.
Bio-Char is an interesting concept, unfortunately in the technological hands that it lies now it will be used as a “feel good” economic crutch for someone with less than stellar and pristine morals to further rape the environment and rip off the people.
In today’s world us small and sustainable farmers have to stand up for what is right and truly sustainable and take the power back from the power brokers, particularly when they are talking about “cow taxes” which would ultimately include carbon taxes on activities such as composting as well, this would effectively shut down the last of the small self sustainable farms across the U.S. and eventually the world.
Anne and Alan, thanks for the great comments, and yes I mostly agree with you.
I certainly agree with you that livestock are essential for small holdings. They are critical for the whole waste and land management cycle, and they give farmers something productive to do in seasons when crops can’t be grown. No argument from me here!
It’s not that there aren’t some environmental issues even with livestock on small holdings, but the same is true when we turn on the light. Everything has to be put in perspective. The real problems are the feedlots and industrial slash and burn style farming.
However, small holdings aren’t going to be able to supply the amount of meat the world is now consuming or projected future consumption. Everyone still needs to eat less meat, and now is the best time to start!
Anne, I’m not sure I agree completely when you say:
Animals require land too. Don’t you need something like 5 acres for a pasture raised cow? You guys are the expert here, I’m not a farmer. This extra land could handle a lot of rotated crops.
Which produces more greenhouse gases, a tractor or a cow? There’s a philosophical debate! I don’t think I better go there, but it is an open question. It’s true a cow potentially needs fewer external inputs.
My understanding of how the whole green revolution got started was basically farmers were having a problem in that ‘cash’ crops could not be intensively grown on the same land without rotations from less valuable crops. Farmers began adding manures in various ways to extend the amount of time the more lucrative crops could be regrown on the same spot, and found that it helped but wasn’t a complete solution because among other problems pests started becoming established.
Along came the chemical companies with artificial ‘manures’ containing a more complete and balanced mix of plant nutrients, as well as products to combat pests.
This is how we got ourselves in this whole mess in the first place!
Like I said, I’m not a farmer and you guys are really the experts here. I’m also certainly not trying to grow cash crops.
My experience in my own garden however, is that animal manure is not very useful. I use it sometimes to make my compost go faster, but nitrogen fixing plants are a much better way to put nitrogen into the ground and plant materials are a better source of organic material.
Alan,
The issue of a ‘cow tax’ is all in the details.
Obviously something needs to be done to keep it from becoming a burden on small farmers, but livestock does now account for 18% of man made green house gases on the planet, and a tax may be one way of addressing the issue.
For example, if you have a ‘tax’ of $100 per cow and at the same time give every farmer a $500 subsidy, there would be no net cost for all farmers with less than 5 cows. In fact, farmers with fewer cows would in effect be paid for the cows they didn’t have. If you have 10 cows, the effective tax would only be $50 per cow, because you still get the $500 subsidy to offset the tax. If however you run a feedlot, you end up with a pretty hefty tax bill.
By the way, this is how they tax home electric use in the Netherlands, and if you use a very small amount of electricity it’s possible to get money back from the utility company instead of paying something.
Something like a fair ‘cow tax’ would be complicated to work out, and the US is a very political place. It may not be possible to do in the end, but the potential is there. In my mind it’s not as simple a thing to do to just openly oppose it. I do understand your position however.
I’m arguing here that Vegan organic farming is possible, but more difficult/labour intensive and requires more land to rotate crops. What I mean by that is land requirement is “out of production” not total land mass. So say an organic vegan farm grows on 5 acres, without inputs, blood bone meal for eg or for sake of idealism (which may be absurd, cause who is?) inputs like seaweed, soymeal and alfalfa meal have hidden carbon consequences and questionable purity…
Vegan composts while microbrially rich, are perhaps not as good a source of nutrients as composts made with manures. So greenmanure is key for long term soil fertility. With animals in the system (and traditional farming has long utilized that) rotations of legumes, grains and heavy feeders (like most vegetables) lend themselves well to a balanced system: with well organized grazing regimes, the legumes feed the soil, provide biomass and feed the animals. With long (7- 12 year) rotations as well as permanent pastures sequestering carbon, a 5 acre vegetable field is a part of the rotation.
Unless one grows a huge propotion of cash crop legumes, vegan farming would need green manures planted and tilled under. Yes intercropping works and is fabulous, so too with permaculture. But I see very few farms working like this on a scale where a living is made (particulary in cooler climates) , and I suspect this is because of the labour intensity… and land that is set aside for creation of fertility. Point out some examples Patrick, I’d love to learn more about this. I’ll admit I’m wrong about the land requirement, in terms of acreage…but in terms of how that land is used to maintain its health.
I fail to see how agriculture is the “most important” contributor to climate change. In looking at the chart you link to, it would seem to me that transportation, electricity/heat, other fuel, etc. are by far the “most important”. And, these are all petroleum-based and all are human activities.
Certainly agriculture plays a role, but are some getting carried away….and pushing this idea simply as a way to promote their own beliefs – as in “organic” or vegetarian lifestyles or something else?
An interesting link here: veganics…they have a standard, pretty neat and I’ve yet to read it but sure to add to the discussion.
http://www.veganorganic.net/index.php?Itemid=75&id=23&option=com_content&task=view
Anne,
I think it’s a little funny you choose a dietary/lifestyle preference to describe a way of farming, but only because that’s how I often do it. On Homegrown Goodness I recently said
I manage my garden in a similar way. Again for decades, since the agricultural industry is the same as the food industry, it has been dividing up the components in our garden soil and selling them to us one at a time in a box at the garden center (plant vitamins, if you like). I just don’t pay attention to the individual components, at least not for the purposes of adding vitamins to my garden. This is mostly what I see in your second comment here; blood bone meal, seaweed, soymeal, alfalfa meal, composts made with manures, greenmanure, in the context you present them these all seem like vitamins you are planning to add to the soil. For me it’s not a matter of being anti-animal, it’s a matter of being anti-vitamin.
It’s very possible for anyone to discover a deficiency in their soil, and need to do something about it. Maybe for example your phosphate levels are low, so you add rock phosphate. Maybe you need some lime. You might notice these things from a soil test, or you may notice problems with your plants and determine the problem that way.
Once you fix whatever problems you may have, with the exception of maybe needing to add more lime over time, in theory you don’t need any more inputs. It’s true, you will harvest some things that may take trace elements with them, but this is pretty minor. Some nutrients will temporarily become in short supply with heavy feeding plants, and you need to manage this with rotations. As long as you recycle your waste back into the land, by composting directly or feeding it to animals and reusing the manure, except for carbon and nitrogen (I’ll get to these two in a second), it’s a closed system. If you think you need something along the lines of plant vitamins, you are probably pouring something unnecessary into the ground that mostly washes away.
Okay, I know this is a very unscientific and a little oversimplified way of describing nitrogen, but it’s the way I think of it. There are basically three main forms of nitrogen; gas, soluble and fixed. Nitrogen is constantly moving between these forms, nitrogen fixing plants will convert the gas in the air into fixed nitrogen, the soluble nitrogen in manure mostly turns into the gas form if you age it, if you combine manure with a source of carbon and compost it the soluble nitrogen becomes fixed, and so on.
In order for plants to be able to use any nutrient, but in this case nitrogen in particular, it must be available in the soil. The ideal situation if for the nitrogen to be fixed, because it tends to become available as the plants need it.
If you grow your plants with soluble nitrogen, it’s all available immediately, which can make the plants big and green and maybe make the gardener feel good about what they’re growing, but really this is an unhealthy situation and can lead to a lot of problems like plant diseases or ‘burning’ of young plants. The other thing about soluble nitrogen is, per definition, it rinses away (usually contaminating the ground water or passing into the air as a greenhouse gas). This means you need to keep adding it like a vitamin. Of course it’s not just manure, but any fertilizer you add to the ground with nitrogen in it will contain soluble nitrogen.
Compost is not normally a great source of fixed nitrogen. Yes it has some, but the whole process of combining with carbon is pretty inefficient. When you are composting something like fresh manure, which is very high in nitrogen, you also need a tremendous amount of carbon for a proper mix. Given enough time, compost tends to balance out it’s carbon/nitrogen ratio by converting soluble nitrogen to gas or gas in the air to fixed. Properly made compost has no remaining soluble nitrogen, and if you notice a difference between compost made with or without manure, you are probably using too much manure for the available carbon and are ending up with a lot of soluble nitrogen left over. If your compost smells like ammonia, you have soluble nitrogen.
The most efficient way to fix nitrogen into the ground is to use nitrogen fixing plants. The important aspect of this is that these plants tend to fix nitrogen according to their needs. If there is soluble nitrogen available in the ground, they will fix considerable less!
What happens when you start growing plants without manure, and only with fixed nitrogen, there becomes a lot more inertia in the situation. In effect what you are doing is fixing nitrogen into topsoil and you don’t have the problem of needing to keep soluble nitrogen at the right level in the ground. The more topsoil you build up, the more nitrogen it holds, which it releases according to the needs of the plants. Once you have good topsoil built up, it’s very forgiving when it comes to rotations and nitrogen deficiency. You only need to grow beans or peas from time to time, or use a nitrogen fixing green manure.
When I grew up my parents were organic (mostly ornamental) gardeners, and my mother hated manures so we never used them. In my early years they added chemical fertilizer to our suburban lawn, but by the time I was 10 or so they didn’t even do that any more. Otherwise gardening was completely without inputs, only home made compost and some nitrogen fixing plants. The lawn did go a little brown after a while, but otherwise they had a great garden with few problems and very rich soil.
wow, first of all we don’t eat to much meat and don’t blame something on what runs America. You all probably live in the city and don’t know what u r talkin about.
Hi Ranchin’ Man,
You’re right, I live in the city, Amsterdam, Netherlands to be exact, and you probably know a lot of things I don’t.
My computer tells me you’re in Ennis, Montana.
While I was born and grew up in the US, I’ve never been to Montana, and I’ve spend most of my life in cities. Montana is probably very different from here.
If you have the time and feel like it, I’d like to hear more about you. What’s your job or do you own a business? How is the bad economy changing things for you? What kinds of things are important for you from one day to the next? What do you think of Obama? Anything you want to say or not say is okay with me.
I’d also like to hear anything you have to say about whatever I write here.
We may not agree on meat or climate change, but we must have something in common!
Someone said that the world could be farmed for vegans and then mention crop rotation. Guess what grass is very important in any crop rotation it rests the land between tillage and horticultural crops and prevents soil erosion. People do not eat grass, cattle do. Vegans raving on about feeding the world with vegetables should learn more about farming. Do vegans know that when they eat vegetables that they support cattle farming? Keep up the good work vegans us meat eaters need the balance to keep cattle farming going, if you have a problem with that don’t eat at all.
Hi Mick,
You’re right of course in everything you say, but only in the perspective of now current/modern agriculture.
I think calling it vegan farming is an unfortunate name, and only serves to make it more of a devisive issue than it needs to be. I for one don’t think it’s necessary to grow vegetables totally without animal inputs.
At the same time, with global warming and the urgent need to cut greenhouse gasses, it’s impossible not to take into account agriculture, livestock and the greenhouse gasses generated from the food we eat.
I’m assuming here you’re a farmer.
While there’s no denying the usefulness of animals in agriculture like you describe, it is also possible to grow vegetables without them. The UK for example has a program to certify vegetables as vegan. Even though I don’t call it vegan, this is mostly how I grow my own vegetables in my own garden, and they do grow well.
It may not be the way you want to farm, and it may be more expensive and labour intensive, but it is certainly possible.
Please come back! Your comments are always welcome here.
The world is a great place, but it is falling apart and we all are responsable for this. Be responsable now and try to make it better.
Biochar, one of the newest option can contribuate to atmospheric CO2 reduction. Find out more:
http://www.biochar-books.com
The Biochar Revolution is exactly what it says !
Hi New Biochar Land,
While it’s okay to mention your book here, I also want to point out there are a number of free sources for the same information on the Internet.
This is also sometimes referred to as ‘Terra Preta’, and there’s a very informative discussion of this here:
http://alanbishop.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=soilbuilding&thread=1862&page=1
You’re also welcome to register and ask questions on this thread, from people who have actually done it.
Using Google you can find a lot of other free information, and it’s not necessary to buy a book on the subject.