Toxic Airborne Microbes

Most of the work done on aerosolized microbes has occurred in the ocean. That research shows that sea spray increases with increasing wind speed and salinity. Raymond Leibensperger, a PhD student at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, studies how aerosols in polluted water—from both sea and river spray—correspond to poor air quality and hydrogen sulfide complaints from communities. More study is needed to determine whether microbes in lake spray are taking a toll on Salton Sea communities, he says, but it could be a significant contributor.

The Salton Sea is fed by agricultural runoff from the Coachella and Imperial Valleys, billion-dollar farming regions that adjoin the sea, which produce the country’s winter salad vegetables like lettuces and broccoli, as well as citrus and dates. Colorado River water supplies, the only source of irrigation in these valleys, is declining sharply as Great Basin states are required to take steps to reduce demand.

The sea’s shrinking footprint mirrors mandatory conservation cuts. And, as the increasingly salty sea recedes, tens of thousands more acres of playa will be exposed—as will decades of pesticides already trapped in the sediments from past farm runoff. These could become airborne too, sickening humans and wildlife alike.

Agricultural Runoff as the Root Cause

“At the root of a lot of the [Salton Sea] difficulties are nutrient inputs that are coming in from agriculture,” said Tim Lyons, a geochemist at U.C. Riverside, at the summit. Due to this agricultural runoff, the Salton Sea is hypereutrophic, a term scientists use to describe water bodies that contain excessive nutrients.

Ammonium sulfate fertilizer inputs are so high in the Salton Sea, Lyons said, that it has 10 times the amount of sulfate measured in seawater. As a result, blooms of gypsum, or sulfate crystals, can occur. The consequence of a gypsum or Harmful Algal Bloom is the same: Blooms cause already low oxygen levels to plummet in the Salton Sea.

Once the water is depleted of oxygen, other microbes, including those that can transform sulfate into hydrogen sulfide or produce additional harmful compounds, can flourish and become airborne. Furthermore, microbial interactions impact the water chemistry, which affects the release of metals, such as arsenic or selenium, from sediments into the water.

At the October summit, the U.C. Riverside scientists made the case that policymakers should account for all of the public health consequences of eutrophic waters when developing plans to stabilize the sea. And that may require more strategic water and air monitoring than is currently being conducted. “This isn’t rocket science,” Lyons said. Eutrophic water bodies have been studied all over the world, he added, but “sadly, they’ve been neglected at the Salton Sea.”

Overlooked Microbes Run Amok

Further investigation identified the dust irritant as a compound called lipopolysaccharide, or LPS, in the Salton Sea sediments. LPS is a key component of the outer cell membrane of bacteria that protects them from threats such as antibiotics. LPS can also elicit an immune response in humans.

Keziyah Yisrael, a biomedical sciences postdoctoral fellow at U.C. Riverside, distinguishes between two types of asthma—an allergic form, most commonly helped by inhalers, and a non-allergic form of lung inflammation. The mice exposed to Salton Sea dust, particularly dust collected from the southern portion of the sea, exhibited the non-allergic form of asthma. No inflammatory response occurred when mice were exposed to dust from a canyon miles away from the sea.

“LPS itself is not toxic to cells,” Yisrael says. Instead, it appears the immune system’s hyper response to LPS is what cause inflammation and tissue damage, she said. “Our current hypothesis is that the microbes are chemically modifying [their] LPS, possibly to better withstand the increasingly extreme conditions—which elicits a stronger immune system response,” Yisrael says. She and colleagues believe that LPS is not the only cause of respiratory inflammation in Salton Sea communities, but “is a large piece of the puzzle” of what’s causing health problems in those living near the lake.

What has gone unnoticed in previous studies is that particles in the air are “not just being generated from the playa, but also from lake spray,” Aronson says. Her team confirmed that LPS in the Salton Sea can survive in aerosols emitted as lake spray, a bigger concern when winds churn the sea’s surface and can carry particles up to 30 miles away.

Additional research from U.C. Riverside suggests that respiratory hospitalizations may be associated with windblown particles originating from the Salton Sea. In a new study, Will Porter, a U.C. Riverside atmospheric scientist, and his colleagues compared observed particles from a range of nearby surfaces—including the Salton Sea—to the number of daily respiratory hospitalizations in Coachella and Imperial counties.

They found the strongest correlation occurred when winds came from the Salton Sea—especially during bloom events there. “I did not expect to see this strong of a signal,” Porter says.

The findings challenge the overarching narrative: that dust particles from the playa are the sole health concern. Rather, the sea’s microbes may also be producing airborne compounds that merit greater attention, the scientists say.

However, any direct impacts on health are not yet conclusive. “What we need is causation,” says Ryan Sinclair, an environmental microbiologist at the Loma Linda School of Public Health. “The epidemiological studies necessary to demonstrate causation simply haven’t been done yet,” he adds.

Poor Water Quality, By Design

“In our Clean Water Act terms, [the ag runoff into the Salton Sea] is essentially wastewater and that has a different standard of protection,” said Laurel Firestone, member of the California State Water Resources Control Board, at this year’s October Salton Sea Summit. For example, there are no nutrient discharge limits on the two main rivers or the agricultural drains that deliver agricultural and industrial runoff from Imperial County into the lake.

Nutrient discharge regulation occurs only at individual facilities such as wastewater treatment plants, which must have permits to discharge into the Salton Sea tributaries. The Salton Sea is a glaring example of how the Clean Water Act has failed to address agricultural pollution.

Last year, the Regional Water Quality Control Board began developing a total maximum daily loads (TMDL) in a bid to regulate nutrient pollution flowing into the Salton Sea, but it will likely take years to implement. The board is also taking steps to limit pollutants and promote farming best practices to control the transport of pollutants into the rivers that flow into the Salton Sea. While these are significant changes, it will take time before they have any impact, since the sea is so polluted.

Yet the consequences of the high nutrient loads were clear decades ago, before the vast majority of the Salton Sea’s fish and bird populations plummeted. As far back as 2000, the Salton Sea was characterized by high nutrient concentrations, high algal biomass, low dissolved oxygen, massive fish kills, and noxious odors.

In general, water quality monitoring for nutrients and salinity in the Salton Sea has suffered in recent years. State agencies abandoned water quality measures between 2020 and 2023, citing that existing boat ramps no longer reached the sea. The water board received a $350,000 grant to collect water quality samples for three years, starting in July 2023, but so far sampling has only taken place in one location in the southern portion of the sea that has an accessible boat ramp. The data are not yet publicly available.

And, as playa stabilization and habitat construction projects get underway, some critical data simply aren’t being gathered. “The lack of baseline data being collected on salinity, pollutants, and overall water quality of the newly constructed habitat areas will make it difficult to assess success,” says Michael Cohen, a senior researcher at the Pacific Institute, which provides independent environmental policy analysis.

“It is impossible to get water quality data from public agencies,” says Isabella Arzeno-Soltero, an environmental scientist at UCLA, who has resorted to filing public records requests to access data.

Since 2020, university researchers and citizen scientists have been monitoring water quality and posting it online to fill the gap—including Sinclair, the environmental microbiologist at the Loma Linda School of Public Health, working with Alianza CV.

In 2023, Alianza CV also mounted a hydrogen sulfide monitor on a platform above the sea on the north side to track production of the gas. Based on their results, researchers say the state monitoring isn’t sufficient.

Between January and August 2024, the Alianza hydrogen sulfide (H2S) monitor, mounted directly above the Salton Sea on the northern side, found 214 incidents in which H2S exceeded the 30 ppb threshold set by the California Air Resources Board compared to only 42 such events documented by the South Coast Air Quality Management District monitor on Torres Martinez land to the northwest. (Source: Diego Centeno)

Data from the monitor differs from a hydrogen sulfide monitor run by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SC AQMD). “Since January, our sensor has detected 200 hydrogen sulfide exceedances; the SC AQMD sensor detected only 40,” says Diego Centeno, a doctoral student working with Arzeno-Soltero at UCLA, who grew up around the Salton Sea.

The California Air Resources Board established the one-hour hydrogen sulfide standard at 30 parts per billion; anything beyond that is deemed an exceedance.  The discrepancy, they believe, is due to the fact that the SC AQMD monitor sits on land northwest of the sea, and the exceedances the Alianza monitor detects typically occur when the winds come from the north.

Arzeno-Soltero says accurate exceedance data is crucial for public health protections. Even chronic hydrogen sulfide exposures below the level authorities consider dangerous have been associated with an increased prevalence of neurological effects, including headaches, mood disorders, and depression, according to a 2023 study.

There’s even less monitoring for HABs, which can produce cyanotoxins that can cause headaches, sore throats, nausea, vomiting, and other symptoms. A pilot study conducted between September 2020 to August 2021 found at least twelve genera of cyanobacteria were detected in the nearshore Salton Sea, and at least one animal was reported dead from ingesting toxins.

Despite the report’s conclusion that the algal blooms presented “a significant health risk” from toxins, there is minimal monitoring at the state level. “Due to funding, recent Harmful Algal Bloom monitoring has only occurred before holidays when people may be recreating on the sea,” the Regional Water Quality Control Board responded in an email.

“Currently, there are no federal or state regulatory standards for cyanotoxins in recreational waters,” the board said. Participating state agencies have developed voluntary guidance for responding to HABs in recreational waters. The guidance suggests that if field screening determines cyanobacteria or cyanotoxins are present, responding organizations should collect water, scum or algal mat samples for laboratory analysis; if HABs or toxins meet or exceed trigger levels, the responding organization should report to the HABs hotline and post an advisory sign.

UCLA graduate student Cruz Marquez checks the mooring for the Alianza water quality monitor in the Salton Sea. (Photo credit: Alejandra Lopez)

Roxana Chavez, a regional organizer for a women’s farmworker leadership organization, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, Inc, says the Imperial County Division of Public Health put up a billboard in early October near her home in Desert Shores, a community on the northwest shore of the Salton Sea. The billboard explains: “In certain conditions, the water may produce toxic Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs), in which children and pets are most susceptible to illness from water contact and/or ingestion.”

It also offers a QR code that it says will be updated to reflect current water quality as yellow, orange, or red, corresponding to caution, warming, or danger, respectively. But they’ve done little else to inform the community about HABs. “We notice the smell but also the color when the water changes—it becomes more greenish,” Chavez says.

Jasmyn Phillips lives in Calipatria, on the sea’s southern end. Beyond billboards, she wants to see more effort to educate Salton Sea communities about HABs—and more consistent water quality monitoring, since the Salton Sea is such a dynamic ecosystem. “Just because there are algal blooms doesn’t necessarily mean they are producing toxins,” she says.

Looking to Nature-Based Solutions

The “LPS in sea spray” hypothesis is an intriguing one that needs further research—but it’s not clear how the story ends, says Cohen. “Even if you stopped nutrient inputs immediately,” he says, “you would not see immediate benefits, and you might not see benefits for decades, because there’s too much nutrient cycling within the Salton Sea.”

Community members, including Eric Reyes, executive director of Los Amigos de la Comunidad, a nonprofit organization that aids underserved communities facing environmental injustices in Imperial County, say the lack of engagement from policymakers as well as the agricultural community is wearisome. “We have a sense of urgency that we don’t see anyone else expressing,” says Reyes.

Palomino rejects the notion that nothing can be done to soak up nutrients. “How do we preserve wetlands or construct more, so they are a nature-based solution?” she asks.

The biggest challenge: Constructing wetland habitat is expensive. Tamping down windblown dust has been a key goal of the ten-year Salton Sea Management Plan so far. Over the last two years, roughly one-third of the $750 million state and federal dollars for restoration were used to develop the first large-scale project, called the Species Conservation Habitat (SCH), to suppress dust and create ponds of less salty water to support fish and fish-eating birds, as well as wetland habitat on 4,100 acres of exposed playa. While projects like these are valid, the surrounding community is frustrated that water quality is not also on the agenda, says Palomino.

The shrinking Salton Sea is also proving to be more dynamic than the conservation projects it has taken over a decade to design and construct. At the SCH, for example, nature’s attempts to restore itself have been thwarted by slower-moving conservation measures. Wetlands have been naturally forming on exposed playa where agricultural drains no longer reach the lake. The water that now spills on the playa allows vegetation to thrive, preventing dust. But in a twist, 153 acres of those emergent wetlands were destroyed during the creation of the SCH, according to Keilani Bonis-Ericksen, a geospatial scientist at Audubon California.

This year, the SCH project got a one-time $70 million boost from the Inflation Reduction Act to expand the wetland habitat by another 750 acres. Yet Cohen anticipates the incoming federal administration could further hamper both state and federal funding levels, which will stymie progress at Salton Sea.

Two years ago, an international team of researchers explored “algae turf” farming, purposefully growing algae to soak up contaminants in the Alamo River wetlands, one of the tributaries to the Salton Sea. The algae harvest effectively removed nitrogen, phosphorus, selenium, and other metal contaminants, but it’s not clear whether similar projects will continue.

“We need to be more ambitious,” says Palomino. “I’m tired of going back to community and saying, ‘I don’t know what we can do about the water.’”

Reporting for this piece was supported by the Nova Institute for Health.

This article was updated with the name of the water quality board and the current depth of the Salton Sea.

The post Farm Runoff May Be Tied to Respiratory Illness Near the Salton Sea appeared first on Civil Eats.

Tire-derived microplastics are a growing source of plastic pollution and a target of the United Nations International Plastic Treaty negotiations. Further, concern is growing about the hundreds of chemicals, up to 15 percent of the weight of the tire, that are shed into the environment via tire microplastics. “It is the additives that are the toxic compounds,” says Thilo Hofmann, an environmental scientist at the University of Vienna.

While scientists agree that tire particles contribute significantly to microplastic emissions in the environment, the numbers are difficult to quantify. Recent studies have found tire particles made up to 30 percent of microplastics in Germany, roughly 54 percent in China, 61 to 79 percent in Sweden, and a whopping 94 percent in Switzerland.

Researchers have already demonstrated that some crops, including lettuce and fruits, can take up microplastics, possibly putting human health at risk. But a new study has shown for the first time that store-bought lettuce contains chemical tire additives. It is an unexpected finding, according to study co-author Anya Sherman, a doctoral student working with Hofmann at the University of Vienna.

Sherman and colleagues found one or more of the 16 tire additives they looked for in 20 of 28 lettuce samples. The concentrations of tire additives in leafy vegetables were low overall, but two compounds were most common: benzothiazole, used to strengthen rubber, was detected in 12 of the 28 samples; and 6PPD, used to prevent its oxidation, was found in seven.

It’s hard to know the exact source of the pollutants. Leaching from tire-wear particles is a major source of benzothiazoles in the environment, but the compound is used in other applications, including agrochemicals and consumer products. Likewise, 6PPD can be found in sporting equipment and recreation facilities.

Sherman’s methodology, meanwhile, couldn’t target all of the tire additives, and therefore can’t provide the total chemical load in lettuces. “We don’t know the total chemical burden; that’s left out of the conversation,” she says. “Some compounds are toxic or mutagenic at trace levels.” Even less is known about the toxicity of the mixture of chemicals.

Still, the study highlights the increased dangers from our industrialized world. Scientists have documented microplastics in human breast milk, semen, placentas, and blood. These tiny particles can accumulate in organs including the lungs, heart, and brain. Microplastics can have a range of health impacts: They can cause oxidative stress, disrupt metabolism, interfere with gut microflora, disrupt immune systems, and alter reproductive health. Perhaps the biggest concern is cardiovascular distress caused by microplastics.

In March, scientists revealed that people who had microplastics in their carotid arteries had a four-fold higher risk of heart attack or stroke. Perhaps not surprisingly, researchers are urgently trying to determine the degree of microplastic risk from ingestion versus inhalation.

To that end, Sherman’s lettuce findings were a surprise in another regard: How did these chemicals get into lettuce fields in the first place? Of the three most likely suspects—biosolids, atmospheric deposition, and recycled irrigation water—none has emerged as the most likely offender.

Biosolids to Blame?

Sherman analyzed lettuce grown in four countries with very different policies for biosolids or recycled irrigation water—the two most direct avenues by which tire plastics could concentrate in farm fields. Switzerland, for example, has banned biosolids applications; Spain and Italy had the highest and lowest application rate, respectively, of biosolids; and Israel relies heavily on recycled irrigation water. But there was no discernable pattern related to waste application policies, suggesting that these particles may be more ubiquitous than anticipated.

“There are so many different pathways by which contaminants can reach fields,” Sherman says. “We are nowhere close to understanding the full picture yet.”

Amid nutrient scarcities, many countries around the world, including the U.S., are dramatically increasing the application of biosolids to farmlands. But because pollutants can concentrate in biosolids, some scientists are concerned that soil biosolid applications could exceed the high concentrations have been found in marine environments. “The solutions are an attempt to be sustainable, but they could be introducing more contaminants to the agricultural environment,” Sherman says.

Roughly 56 percent of biosolids are applied to the land in California and across the U.S.—but state and county policies are sharply divided on their use. “The percentage of biosolids application varies by state,” says Scott Coffin, a research scientist at California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. Some states are near 0 percent; others are near 80 percent.

Atmospheric Microplastics and Chemicals

“Microplastics are very light,” Leonard says. They also don’t like water, and therefore they are less bound to the soil, which makes them loft into the air at windspeeds far lower than expected for bare soils. As a result, Leonard says, the current dust emission models may underestimate the microplastic component of dust from biosolid-amended soil. It may also help explain why microplastics are able to travel thousands of miles and contribute an estimated 6.6 million U.S. tons of tire particles globally per year, equivalent to approximately 5 percent of airborne ambient particulate matter concentrations.

That includes microplastics from tires, which tend to be overlooked, due to the technological challenges in identifying them. The biggest problem? Black microplastics, including tire wear particles, absorb (rather than reflect) radiation from the instrumentation used to find them.

An alternate approach exists to detect tire microplastics, one that involves heating up a sample to measure its composite chemicals via gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. But few laboratories have this equipment, Coffin says. “That’s why the tire particle aspect of microplastics wasn’t really considered until quite recently; they were just simply not detected.”

Biosolids are complex mixtures of nutrients and pollutants from disparate sources, and they present difficult challenges when trying to separate out microplastics. Scientists have to know which compounds they are searching for, as well as their breakdown products. Given there are thousands of chemicals in tires, it’s literally impossible to trace the environmental fate of all of them.

Furthermore, tire producers do not disclose what additives are used in tires because they’re considered a trade secret. “[Tire additives] are not regulated, which may change in the coming years,” Hofmann says.

Microplastics and Chemicals in Irrigation Water

Given that water is easier to work with than solids, the scientific community has begun to develop a methodology to quantify microplastics in aquatic environments.

“We were strategically using our very limited resources dedicated to microplastics on what we think that we can make the most progress on in the short term; pretty much all of our effort is focused on the marine environment,” Coffin says. Environmental researchers have so far developed hazard thresholds in marine environments, to be adopted by the California State Water Board, to evaluate water body impairment. For a long time, Coffin adds, “the conversation about water has detracted from what’s happening on land.”

Water is also far easier to monitor—and treat—than biosolids, Coffin says. “Treating biosolids is effectively out of the equation,” he says. “Even if we do determine this is a huge problem, we’re basically left trying to find solutions upstream,” he adds, meaning preventing microplastics from getting into biosolids to begin with. There’s also little incentive to challenge the use of biosolids in agriculture, as it’s been touted as an example of sustainable return of nutrients to the soil.

In response to a lawsuit by the Yurok, Port Gamble S’Klallam, and Puyallup tribes, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently reviewing 6PPD as tire makers scramble to come up with alternatives. California’s Department of Toxic Substance Control, which is also part of the state EPA, has a consumer products section that is evaluating safer chemical alternatives to replace 6PPD in tires as well.

Forging Ahead with Research

“We’re not even close to developing standardized methods for detecting microplastics in biosolids or soils or terrestrial samples,” says Susanne Brander, who studies microplastics at Oregon State University in Corvallis.  “Gathering data on [microplastics in] food systems is where [research] needs to go next.”

That research is starting to get underway. Funding to study plastics in agriculture is limited, but Brander says that the USDA is prioritizing microplastics research going forward. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley is sponsoring a Research for Healthy Soils Act to fund studies on microplastics in land-applied biosolids.

Although this is a move in the right direction, it sidesteps the main problem. “Those of us who are concerned and have been doing research for a decade are pushing for source reduction and waste management approaches that don’t create more problems,” Brander says. She says the singular focus on 6PPD in recent years risks overlooking the impacts of all the other tire chemicals that are leaching into the environment.

“We know enough to act—that’s the feeling and opinion of most of the other scientists in the [U.N.] global plastics treaty,” Brander says. “We need to push for chemical reduction and a reduction in the production of virgin plastics.”

Reporting for this piece was supported by the Nova Institute for Health.

The post Tracking Tire Plastics—and Chemicals—From Road to Plate appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2024/03/05/california-farm-counties-are-not-even-close-to-meeting-the-epas-new-clean-air-quality-standard/ Tue, 05 Mar 2024 09:00:33 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55512 The EPA lowered the annual standard for particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5) from 12 to 9 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3) of air. The move comes in the wake of dozens of studies that have shown how the tiny particles can travel deep inside the lungs and heart, increasing the risk of heart […]

The post California Farm Counties Are Not Even Close to Meeting the EPA’s New Clean Air Quality Standard appeared first on Civil Eats.

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In early February, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a long-awaited update to rein in an invisible killer: particulate matter—or the mixture of soot, dust, smoke, and liquid droplets that make up the world’s most dangerous air pollution.

The EPA lowered the annual standard for particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5) from 12 to 9 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m³) of air. The move comes in the wake of dozens of studies that have shown how the tiny particles can travel deep inside the lungs and heart, increasing the risk of heart disease, lung cancer, and strokes.

However, based on current air quality monitoring data, much of California—and notably all of the most intensively farmed counties, including those that make up the San Joaquin Valley—will likely not meet the newly updated standard anytime soon.

An EPA map showing which U.S. counties do not meet the new PM 2.5 particle pollution standard. Dark-green counties do not meet the standard.

The San Joaquin Valley Air District, which is home to massive tracts of almond, citrus, produce, and dairy operations, has yet to meet the 12 µg/m³ standard, which the EPA established in 2012. At a recent workshop held by the San Joaquin Valley Air District, a spokesperson for the district described how despite progress lowering PM2.5 levels, “initial modeling completed by CARB [the California Air Resources Board] suggests that attainment of the 2012 standard by 2025 is impracticable.” Instead, the spokesperson said that the district and CARB are revising a plan, and requesting a five-year delay, to reach the now outdated standard by 2030.

Community advocates expressed their continued frustration at the district’s failure to achieve clean air standards. “Back in 2018, we saw the aggregate commitments and weak rules come forward and warned that we would not meet the standard. We said, ‘We need to do more,’ and we were ignored. And here we are today,” said Genevieve Amsalem, research and policy director for the Central California Environmental Justice Network, at the workshop. She calls San Joaquin Valley’s failure to meet air quality standards a civil rights issue: “The people most impacted are more often low-income people of color.”

The San Joaquin Valley is the largest agricultural producing area in the nation; it produced  crops, livestock, and agricultural commodities worth $36.5 billion in 2022. The southern half of California’s 450-mile Central Valley is also home to some of the worst annual air pollution in the nation. Mountain ranges trap emissions from highway traffic, locomotives, municipal composting facilities, tractors, and burning. But agriculture’s full impact is difficult to assess using the data available to the public.

“The people most impacted are more often low-income people of color.”

The PM2.5 levels in the valley have decreased in recent years, due largely to state-wide regulation of automobile and industrial emissions. When asked over email about the policy actions that have helped lower emissions, the San Joaquin Valley Air District pointed to “tougher regulations on various industrial sources such as boilers, industrial flares, glass melting furnaces, and engines.” But those changes have only gotten the region so far.

Since 1992, the air district has employed 670 rules to reduce air emissions in the valley, yet only a handful pertain to agriculture. “Ag is the sector that has gotten off the hook,” says Catherine Garupa, executive director of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition.

As industrial and mobile sources of pollution decline, air quality advocates and members of the public are paying more attention to agricultural emissions, explains Mark Rose, the Sierra Nevada program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, who has monitored the San Joaquin Valley’s air quality efforts for seven years.

Agriculture’s contribution to PM2.5 stems from burning, soil management, and gaseous emissions from both tractors and soil. While most of the focus has been on farm equipment, burning and soil management are also coming under increased scrutiny—especially as the San Joaquin Valley braces for a massive land transition.

An estimated 500,000 to 900,000 acres of irrigated farmland will likely be taken out of production to satisfy state-level groundwater laws by 2040. The worry is that fallowed farmland, especially in the eastern Central Valley where it is turning to desert, could generate more dust leading to more PM2.5 in the air.

“The most cost-effective way to prevent dust is to maintain [living plant] cover—which is difficult in areas that are desert,” says Andrew Ayres, an economist professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the co-author of a report on dust and air quality for the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC).

According to the 2018 emission inventory, farm operations were estimated to generate 13 tons of direct PM2.5 emissions a day, or roughly one-third of the total direct emissions in the area.

But farming also contributes to PM2.5 in other ways. PM2.5 is also formed in the atmosphere when gases react to form tiny particles. Ammonium nitrate, one of the most widespread particle types formed in the atmosphere, contributes half of the daily PM2.5 in the San Joaquin Valley, according to the California Air Resources Board (CARB).

Ammonium nitrate forms when nitrogen oxides, a by-product of combustion from sources such as trucks and tractors, combines with atmospheric ammonia from fertilizers, which are abundant in the valley. But a growing number of studies, including international ones, suggest that soil microbes are also a significant source of nitrogen oxides, especially in intensively fertilized areas—which could hinder efforts to decrease PM2.5.

Farmers Struggle to Address Air Pollution

Growers are trying to make what changes they can despite challenging economic conditions, says Cork McIsaac, president of Agriculture Industries, Inc., a company that manages over 110,000 acres of farmland throughout the Central Valley. “When you’re in a negative cashflow position already, which a lot of farming is right now, it’s pretty challenging,” he says.

McIsaac and Roger Isom, president and CEO of the California Cotton Ginners and Growers Association and Western Agricultural Processors Association, anticipate that agriculture will be a target for additional regulations to achieve the stricter air quality standard.

“The most cost-effective way to prevent dust is to maintain [living plant] cover—which is difficult in areas that are desert.”

“We have the most stringent air quality regulations of anybody in the country for ag,” says Isom, who has spent over a decade working with the state air board and local air district to find ways for growers to lower their contributions to PM2.5, both fugitive dust and nitrogen oxide emissions. While there may not be many rules aimed at agriculture, he says agricultural burn bans, conservation management, and dust mitigation plans, as well as incentives for cleaner truck and farm equipment replacement, have all had a significant impacts on farmers’ bottom lines.

Citing the difficulty of securing a burn permit in recent years, McIsaac’s operations have turned to chipping orchard residue, which is more expensive than burning. The practice reduces PM2.5 emissions and can build soil health when the resulting mulch is incorporated into soil.

A near-total burn ban goes into effect in 2025, and Mark Rose and Genevieve Amsalem consider it a significant step toward cleaner air. But, Rose says, if the air district hadn’t postponed adoption of the law for 20 years, the valley might have attained some of the previous air quality standards.

Incentives have been key for growers to find alternatives to burning, such as mulching the crop residue on or offsite, as well as replacing dirty vehicles. At least $760 million in state funds have supported growers who adopt new technology and approaches to farming that would result in less particulate matter in the air. Isom says the incentive approach is crucial to give growers flexibility and still achieve air quality gains.

“If it [was] mandatory, there would have been more farms going out of business,” he says  Since 2016, for example, over 12,000 tractors have been replaced with lower-emissions models via a voluntary cost-share program.

But Ansalem would like to see tractors face the same regulation as other vehicles in the state. “Agricultural tractors are a huge source of NOx in the San Joaquin Valley,” she says. “They remain one of the only mobile sources in the state not regulated by the California Air Resources Board.”

Land manager McIsaac also points to the fact that growers are required to have a dust management plan that details the steps they take to minimize dust. Many farmers avoid field work on windy days to the extent they can or water roads to tamp down dust. Their plans are described as mandatory, and subject to annual inspections every year if out of compliance, otherwise inspected every five years.

Rose and Amsalem, however, don’t think the current rules go far enough. “If you look at all the regulations that exist for agriculture, there’s basically a de facto policy in the state of California not to regulate agriculture as an industry,” Rose tells Civil Eats.

And as farmers determine which parcels of land must be taken out of production to satisfy groundwater laws, there are no guidelines for how to manage the dust on fallowed land. “There is a little bit more urgency in terms of evaluating what needs to be done with those lands,” says University of Nevada’s Ayres.

The San Joaquin Valley Air District is in the midst of a process to evaluate potential additions to the region’s Conservation Management Practices rule. First adopted in 2004, the rule promotes reduced tillage and other management practices on cultivated lands to reduce dust and improve soil health. The air district continues to evaluate the impact of those practices, but they currently estimate up to 5.5 tons of PM2.5 have been reduced per day.

“If you look at all the regulations that exist for agriculture, there’s basically a de facto policy in the state of California not to regulate agriculture as an industry.”

Ayres anticipates the new EPA standard could light a fire under the effort to bring more conservation practices onto fallowed land. “If you are taking this ag land out of production, and don’t have a management requirement, that could be very negative moving forward,” he says. The goal should be to avoid the worst possible outcomes—such as patchwork fallowing with no dust management practices—and to figure out how to do that most cost effectively, he adds.

Isom says farmers are at the table to find further ways to cut emissions, but it’s going to be tough because the easiest cuts have already been made. “The low-hanging fruit is gone; now, we’re going after the hard stuff,” he says. “What ultimately comes out of [efforts to meet the new standard] in terms of new regulations or tighter regulations, we are certainly very scared,” he adds.

Farms’ Contribution

The EPA’s new PM2.5 standard will trigger a multi-year state implementation plan to achieve it. But the San Joaquin Valley Air District estimates that it won’t be developed until fall 2027. And it’s not clear how agricultural sources of PM2.5 might be addressed to reach the stricter standard.

Complicating matters, pollution sources are shifting. “Air pollution in the 21st century is not what it was in 20th century,” says Ian Faloona, an atmospheric researcher at University of California at Davis.

For example, PM2.5 is increasingly formed in the atmosphere through what is called a secondary process when abundant gases such as nitrogen oxides and ammonia react to form tiny particles, notably ammonium nitrate. Reducing secondary PM2.5 requires a robust accounting of gas sources to determine how best to prevent this process.

Nitrogen oxides—nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2)—are collectively known as NOx. Since NOx is in shorter supply than ammonia in the atmosphere, the air district has focused their efforts on reducing it as the most cost-effective way to minimize ammonium nitrate, which makes up half of the daily PM2.5 in the San Joaquin Valley.

In San Joaquin Valley, farm equipment and food processing contribute roughly 22 percent of NOx emissions, according to the air district’s 2018 emissions inventory. The bulk of NOx emissions are estimated to come from vehicles.

But NOx emissions from soil may also be higher than previously understood. In 2018, Faloona co-authored a study that found that agriculture’s contribution increased the NOx budget by 20 percent to 51 percent above what state agencies estimate. The researchers found that the existing models for soil NOx emissions underestimate emissions, “leading to a poor assessment of the relative roles of mobile and agriculture sources of NOx in the region.”

“Essentially, our study was a process model based on fertilizer applications, soil temperature, and moisture, while the air district based their numbers on extrapolations from a few soil measurements,” explains Faloona.

When the state conducted a follow-up study in 2020, their numbers agreed with the San Joaquin Valley Air District. Other studies, however, have also found that higher levels of soil NOx in the San Joaquin Valley and in intensively farmed areas in China and the European Union contribute to PM2.5.

If there is a larger pool of unaccounted-for NOx emissions in the San Joaquin Valley, it could stymie progress on efforts to curb PM2.5. Faloona’s 2023 paper, for example, found that the amount of NOx in the air has not declined in California rural areas in recent years.

Since 2018, Rose and Amsalem have been asking the air district to investigate whether nitrogen emissions from soil microbes—a potentially large source of agricultural emissions—is being overlooked.

CARB is in the process of establishing an expert review panel on nitrogenous emissions from soils. “In 2018, we asked them to look into soil NOx,” says Amsalem. “That didn’t happen until 2023, and we still don’t know who is on the expert panel.” CARB expects to finalize and announce the panel within the next month.

“Ag is a big piece of the [pollution] puzzle, but the state won’t even tell us how much agriculture contributes to the overall problem,” adds Rose.

While growers are wary of its implications, the new federal PM2.5 standard still isn’t as stringent as that of the World Health Organization, which lowered its air quality guidelines to 5 µg/m³ in 2021. And it’s not just people’s health that’s on the line—air pollution’s cost to taxpayers is also staggering. A 2021 study found that strengthening PM2.5 standards to 8-10 µg/m³ in California would provide public health benefits valued at $42–$149 billion.

And yet Isom questions whether the San Joaquin Valley can even achieve the 9 µg/m³ standard. “I don’t see us getting into attainment in my lifetime, but hopefully my kids will,” he says.

“We realize [farms are] part of the issue, and we’ve got to do our part,” adds Isom. “We just have to find ways to improve that without putting us out of business.”

Reporting for this piece was supported by the Nova Institute for Health.

The post California Farm Counties Are Not Even Close to Meeting the EPA’s New Clean Air Quality Standard appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2023/07/17/as-the-salton-sea-shrinks-agricultures-legacy-turns-to-dust/ https://civileats.com/2023/07/17/as-the-salton-sea-shrinks-agricultures-legacy-turns-to-dust/#comments Mon, 17 Jul 2023 08:00:46 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=52678 Building on findings from a recent study documenting the health impacts of poor air quality around the Salton Sea, California’s largest inland lake, López was one of 15 mothers who subsequently agreed to photograph their children and their environments. Three-quarters of the 36 caregivers in the study identified as Hispanic or Latino, and 24 percent […]

The post As the Salton Sea Shrinks, Agriculture’s Legacy Turns to Dust appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Ana Rosa Villegas López points to the scattered images of her son on the walls of the Mecca Public Library in Southern California. In one, he stares straight at the camera, his sleeplessness etched into the dark circles under his eyes. The walls are covered with photos of children playing on a small square of artificial turf, dust-coated door mats, and the children’s inflamed, rashy arms, runny noses, inhalers, and humidifiers.

Building on findings from a recent study documenting the health impacts of poor air quality around the Salton Sea, California’s largest inland lake, López was one of 15 mothers who subsequently agreed to photograph their children and their environments. Three-quarters of the 36 caregivers in the study identified as Hispanic or Latino, and 24 percent identified as Purepecha, an Indigenous group from the Mexican state of Michoacan. Over half of them are farmworkers, as is common in the small, unincorporated communities that surround the sea.

On bad air quality days, López keeps her 8-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter inside to protect them from a cascade of symptoms that she says worsen with outdoor exposure, including congestion, skin allergies, and shallow, labored breathing that makes sleep elusive. A 2019 survey found that 22 percent of children have asthma in the region, almost three times the national rate of 8.3 percent.

“We watched as fish died by the millions and dozens of bird species disappeared. I always wondered, ‘What about us?’ We have been ignored.”

“The park in Salton City is covered in dust,” explains Nancy Del Castillo, one of the promotoras, or community health workers, who recruited caregivers to take pictures of their children. “It’s an undignified life,” she said at a recent event at the Mecca Library designed to share the findings to the community.

López’s family moved to Salton City from Arizona in 2018 when her then-husband got a job working in greenhouses in the Imperial Valley, south of the sea. Imperial Valley grows an estimated two-thirds of the country’s winter vegetables, as well as alfalfa for animal feed—but cattle has remained the No. 1 commodity for the last 64 years. Date palm plantations and orchards cover the eastern Coachella Valley to the north. Agricultural runoff from both valleys is the primary input into the Salton Sea, and with that runoff comes pesticides and nutrients such as phosphorous and nitrogen.

The Salton Sea is a complicated, dynamic ecosystem on the decline. At 240 feet below sea level, it has filled with water and dried many times over the centuries. In 1905, Colorado River floodwaters breached an irrigation canal and filled the depression with water. Since then, the sea has served as the dumping ground for decades of pollution from farming as well as legacy bomb-testing material.

In 2002, U.S. Geological Survey conducted sediment sampling from 73 locations and concluded that “the agricultural runoff that keeps the sea alive is loaded with salts, pesticides, selenium, and other metals.”

But a drought and reduced agricultural runoff have helped to shrink the shallow sea in the last two decades. Over that time, only a handful of smaller-scale research projects have attempted to document current sediment contaminants on what is now almost 20,000 acres of exposed playa that is adding dust to the region’s already poor air quality.

Chart source: The June 2022 Salton Sea Emissions Monitoring Program report by Formation Environmental for the Imperial Irrigation District.

The air quality in the Salton Sea region is among the worst in the nation. Imperial Valley routinely gets a failing grade for particulate matter and ozone from the American Lung Association’s annual State of the Air report. Imperial Valley has already been out of compliance with national air quality standards since 2014—due to a host of factors, including the Salton Sea, industrial farming in a desert, a well-trafficked border crossing, and factory emissions from Mexicali.

Imperial County residents were exposed to over 1,200 pounds of pesticides—via the air, water, and on the plants themselves—per square mile from 2017-2019. That exposure rate is over 90 percent higher than the rest of California. On top of that, the region is the hottest in the state—with over 117 days over 100 degrees, according to a 2022 Hazardous Heat report.

Farmers around the Salton Sea have worked to use water more efficiently and reduce field burning. But they also use intensive, conventional practices that rely on chemical inputs. And there is little if any conversation about changing those practices for the good of the Salton Sea or the area’s residents.

In the last few years, the long-neglected region has been dubbed Lithium Valley as it has received unprecedented attention due to its precious lithium reserves needed to fuel the state’s clean energy economy. But residents, scientists, and public health advocates worry that this new gold rush will further an extractive dynamic without adequately addressing community health. And new science about the connection between water pollution and air quality suggests more investment is needed.

Health Impacts a Growing Cause for Concern

Like most of the roughly 100,000 residents who live within 10 miles of the sea, López describes the environment as “toxic.” Experts have identified layers of environmental insults in the region—including sulfuric odors, arsenic and selenium, dust storms, airborne pesticide residue, and smoke from agricultural burning—which are all possible contributors to the children’s chronic health conditions, including respiratory illnesses such as asthma, bronchitis, and pneumonia, as well as chronic nosebleeds. Yet little research has focused on the cumulative public health impacts.

The shore of the Salton Sea. (Photo credit: Virginia Gewin)

Sandra Ramirez, a community advocate and former farmworker who picked grapes and lemons in Coachella Valley between 1995 and 2002, attended the presentation in Mecca. “We watched as fish died by the millions and dozens of bird species disappeared,” she said afterward. “I always wondered, ‘What about us?’ We have been ignored.”

Over the last 10 years, the state’s natural resource, water, and wildlife agencies crafted the Salton Sea Management Program (SSMP) to “improve air quality and provide critical environmental habitat.” But the effort is woefully behind schedule. The goal is to create wetland wildlife habitat and plant vegetation to suppress dust on 30,000 of the 60,000 acres expected to be exposed by 2028. As of March 2023, only 290 had been completed.

“The community’s public health issues have not been addressed, regardless of the amount of funding being allocated for the past two to three decades.”

The state of California has committed $583 million to the 10-year SSMP. But separate state funding designated to address the human impacts of air pollution in the region more directly is only a fraction of that number. Under Assembly Bill 617, the California Air Resources Board established the Community Air Protection Program to address and reduce air pollution health impacts in environmental justice communities. To date, however, only roughly $30 million of the total AB617 funding has gone to Imperial County, which currently has two of the state’s 19 designated communities—one was named earlier this year. And AB617’s ability to improve air quality has come under scrutiny.

Yet politicians claim that residents’ health concerns are front and center. “Lithium Valley will serve as a model for how we can protect our community’s health while we advance these [mining] objectives,” Representative Raul Ruiz (D-California) said at a March press conference.

Lillian Garcia, a Coachella Valley-based advocate with United for Justice Inc., bristles at that characterization. “The community’s public health issues have not been addressed, regardless of the amount of funding being allocated [to the wider region] for the past two to three decades,” she says. Since 2018, Garcia has been a consistent presence at public forums, requesting—unsuccessfully, so far—indoor air purifiers, public health research on exposure to contaminants, and improved medical access. Currently, there is only one clinic to serve communities nearest the northern shore of Salton Sea.

Many residents who do have access to transportation cross the border in search of prescriptions or medical care—which makes it difficult to track public health impacts. “Roughly one-third of our participant families seek medical attention in Mexico rather than locally,” says Ann Cheney, co-author of the Salton Sea children’s respiration study and a public health researcher at the University of California, Riverside.

Tracking Dust

Ruben Partida, a 41-year-old farmworker sprayed pesticides from a backpack in Imperial County for a decade. He says he routinely worked in unsafe conditions, without adequate protective equipment, and in extreme heat and poor air quality. In 2021, roughly 5 million and 3 million pounds of pesticides were applied in Imperial and Riverside counties, respectively, making them the 12th and 15th highest-pesticide application counties in California.

“We always work, whether there are dust storms or not,” says Partida, who stopped spraying when he was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2016, and is now working in irrigation. He added that the farm owners and contractors tend to view farmworkers, especially undocumented workers, as “disposable.” To protect workers from wildfire smoke, the state’s division of occupational safety and health (OSHA) implemented a Wildfire Standard that is triggered where the current Air Quality Index (AQI) for PM2.5 is 151 or greater. But, Partida and other farmworkers interviewed often work when the AQI around the Salton Sea is at 151 or higher without wildfires.

Partida says helicopters spray pesticides even when it is windy. As a result, the chemicals drift. Partida uses an inhaler and believes the air quality in the region has worsened over time—not just from dust storms and pesticides, but also due to particle emissions from farm animals and manure.

Amato Evan, a dust researcher at University of California, San Diego, installed a dust monitor east of Salton City in 2020. The data so far indicates that dust storms have occurred almost once a week, on average. Studying satellite images of dust over the last 20 years, Evan added, the upward trend of dust emissions in the region suggests they could double within 20 to 30 years.

Number of dust storms in the Salton Sea area, January 2020 – December 2022. (Chart by Alex Kuwano and Amato Evan)

Most of the winter and spring dust comes from the west, where the Anza Borrego desert stretches up to the western shore of Salton Sea, Evan says. Dust plumes billow up behind off-road vehicles, which are popular in the area. But it’s the wild swings in temperature that fuel winds over arid land. In October 2022, a 3,000-foot-high wall of dust from a thunderstorm-driven haboob blanketed the region from Salton City to Palm Springs. It hit the top of the AQI scale at 500—a number that’s considered hazardous for all people.

There are no EPA regulatory air quality monitors in the region, but agencies, tribes, and local community groups have monitors sprinkled throughout the region. Of the 2022 data available, “last year was exceptionally dusty,” says William Porter, a U.C. Riverside environmental scientist. In 2015, a community-university partnership established a network of 40 air quality monitors, dubbed the Identifying Violations Affecting Neighborhoods, or IVAN network, in Imperial County. The IVAN data reveals that last year had some of the highest recordings of PM10, or fine particulate matter. Over half of the highest 50 daily IVAN PM10 recordings occurred after January 2022.

The state’s most visible dust mitigation project is in Salton City, where over 300,000 hay bales have been placed on the dry sandy shores that surround the sea. Elvira Herrera, an organizer for the farmworker advocacy organization Lideres Campesinas and a resident of Salton City, thinks the bales have made little difference. But state officials in charge of the project say otherwise. At a July 13 webinar, Steven Garcia, senior engineer at the California Department of Water Resources, says that dust emissions from the hay bale site are down roughly 90 percent compared to last year.

Elvira Herrera stands on the shore of the Salton Sea, where 300,000 hay bales have been placed to mitigate dust. (Photo credit: Virginia Gewin)

But, scientists say, the goal of the hay bales and other dust mitigation projects is simply to prevent playa dust from making poor air quality worse.

“If the emissions aren’t from the shoreline, no amount of straw bales is going to improve the air quality,” says John Gillies, an atmospheric physicist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada.

“The dirty secret is that people are being impacted by agricultural and desert lands much more than the Salton Sea playa,” says Earl Withycombe, retired air resources engineer with the California Air Resources Board. But, he cautions, “that will change over time.” In Imperial County, most of the PM2.5 emissions come from agricultural lands, pasturelands, and unpaved roads. But, Withycombe adds, agricultural sources are not being studied, evaluated, or regulated in any decent fashion.

Data showing the sources of PM10 pollution in the Imperial Valley. (Source: Imperial County Air Pollution Control District)

The exposed playa area, however, is expected to double—to over 60,000 acres—by 2028. And as more playa is exposed, more of the pollutants those sediments contain could enter the air.

Environmental monitoring for toxins in the exposed playa has been minimal over the last two decades—despite continued calls for more. The Imperial County Air Pollution Control District (ICAPCD) says characterizing any sediment or dust contaminants would likely cost millions, and that’s money they don’t have. “We are agencies that are subject to the pull and push of the legislature . . . . and we only have so much manpower. And, quite frankly, it’s expensive,” says Monica Soucier, a division manager at ICAPCD.

While ICAPCD has spent just under $2 million to improve school air filtration systems and $580,000 for urban greening projects, they have not provided community members with affordable access to home air purifiers as has been done in wildfire-impacted counties, although they are exploring the option.

The lack of coordination between agencies overseeing dust mitigation, wildlife habitat restoration, water quality, air quality, and public health is a source of frustration in the communities around the sea. “Even if every agency [involved in the SSMP] did everything it was supposed to be doing, it still wouldn’t begin to address all the [air quality] problems in the area,” says Michael Cohen, a senior researcher at the Pacific Institute, which provides independent environmental policy analysis.

‘A Soup of Microbial Material in the Water’

On a Saturday in April, Daniel Ramirez, born and raised in Oasis, a small community on the north shore of the sea, huddled under a canopy to measure nitrate and sulfate levels collected from various points around the Salton Sea. He is one of 10 community scientists who volunteer every other month to track the sea’s water quality. “I suffered from asthma as a kid,” he says, and that experience has motivated him to explore the links between water and air quality in the region. Whatever is in the water can end up in the air he and his family breathes, he says. The team posts the data online so it is accessible to the public.

Daniel Ramirez and other community scientists volunteer to track the Salton Sea’s water quality every other month. (Photo credit: Virginia Gewin)

Several of the volunteers push the inflatable boat over the salt-encrusted playa and a few wooden planks to launch it in knee-deep muck. The team is organized by Ryan Sinclair, an environmental microbiologist at Loma Linda University, and Alianza, a community organization. They began collecting data in 2020 to fill a gap left after water receded from the sea’s few existing docks and the Bureau of Reclamation stopped taking samples.

“We’re trying to make the connection between water quality and air quality,” says Aydee Palomino, an environmental justice advocate at Alianza. To that end, the team plans to mount a monitor in the sea for hydrogen sulfide, the rotten-egg smelling gas produced when microbes lack oxygen. Their first attempt ended after two days when a small, cheap air sensor became corroded by salt. (The sea is twice as salty as the ocean.)

Like many freshwater bodies in the U.S., the Salton Sea is also suffering from eutrophication, an excess of nutrients, in part from fertilizer runoff, that fuels algal blooms that deplete oxygen. “Everyone has been focused on the accumulation of salt, but the nutrients are arguably the bigger problem,” says Caroline Hung, a Ph.D student who has been taking cores of Salton Sea sediment for the last three years.

Quinn Montgomery takes a water sample from the Salton Sea. (Photo credit: Virginia Gewin)

“Water quality appears to be decreasing,” said Sinclair in the California Water Resources Board meeting in May. “Water quality isn’t just water quality. It’s associated with air quality, ecology, and biologicals in the lake. We need to look at this in terms of public health,” he added.

At the same meeting, Tim Lyons, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Riverside, laid out the elevated levels of selenium, molybdenum, and nutrients—and what he sees as the biggest hurdle. “This is not just a money problem,” he said. Rather, he expressed frustration at the lack of coordination across so many state agencies. He likened the Salton Sea discussions to a monster with 20 heads. “Half of those heads are eating each other and the other half aren’t talking to each other.”

For example, long after the vast majority of fish have died, the state has just started drafting a document with total maximum daily loads (TMDL) for nutrients. But it will likely be years before regulators start working with farm owners in the area to ensure they release fewer nutrients in the water running off their land. TMDLs are needed to stabilize the sea’s water quality, says Michael Stenstrom, a professor of environmental engineering at University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s going to be so expensive, and there’s so much resistance to the kinds of things that are needed to fix it, I wonder if they’re ever going to happen,” he says.

Farmers will surely fight it, as restricting fertilizer use often involves systemic changes such as reduced tillage, cover crops, and other costly practices that focus on soil health.

The sea’s microbes are also likely contributing more to poor air quality than previously understood. New science shows that airborne algae and harmful toxins produced in oxygen-free, nutrient-rich waters are a growing concern.

Last year, David Lo, director of the Center for Health Disparities Research at University of California, Riverside, published startling findings suggesting that Salton Sea residents’ symptoms could be a different type of asthma. Mice exposed to Salton Sea dust experienced lung inflammation, but it wasn’t the allergic response common to asthma. Instead, exposure resulted in a greater numbers of neutrophils—the cells that make up the first line of immune defense against invading pathogens. Lo’s working hypothesis is that biological toxicity from the dust may be a key trigger.

“We have a soup of microbial material in the water,” said Lo, while presenting his research at the Salton Sea Authority Board meeting in March 2023. “We are interested in whether that material is pulled into playa, and into dust,” he added. To identify which communities are most severely affected by particulate matter, Lo wants to conduct a detailed epidemiology study to document specific symptoms, as well as winds and environmental conditions. But funding has yet to come through.

And Colorado River water cuts are not going to help matters. The Imperial Irrigation District, the largest and arguably most powerful one in the nation, has used the ongoing concerns over rising Salton Sea dust to keep a hold on precious Colorado River water for years. In November 2022, the Imperial Irrigation District agreed to conserve up to 250,000 acre-feet of water per year—in exchange for $250 million in federal funds and indemnification against any liabilities arising from potential environmental and public health impacts from the cuts.

What Will it Take to Spur Change?

“I don’t know of any community benefits from the ag industry,” says Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comite Civico del Valle Inc., a community advocacy organization based in Brawley, California. He cites the lack of unions or profit-sharing models. “If we are going to be eating the waste or contaminants in our environment, we need to have a return,” he adds.

Although the Imperial Irrigation District rigorously models only desert and playa dust emissions, farm soils in this wind-prone region are routinely disturbed. Agriculture’s contribution to air quality is dominated by wind-blown dust, says Withycombe, the former California Air Resources Board member. The existing rules and regulations for dust mitigation plans from agricultural lands—if properly enforced—would further reduce emissions to some extent. “That would result in the biggest improvement in air quality in my opinion,” says Withycombe.

Adoption of conservation practices in the region is quite low. Of the almost 540,000 acres in production in Imperial County, less than 10 percent, or just under 46,000, are organic. And the 2017 USDA census data indicate that only 5 percent of farmers practice no-till, which disturbs the land the least, and 1 percent use cover crops.

The eastern Coachella Valley AB-617 community is also working to tackle pesticide use concerns. It’s “a courageous decision because emissions of pesticides are controlled by the Department of Pesticide Regulation, which has historically been very supportive of the industry it governs, agriculture,” explains Withycombe. As a result of residents’ advocacy, the state is overseeing a review of three different fumigant pesticides used in the region.

And Withycombe agrees with Sinclair that more effort is needed to determine the exact public health impacts from the nutrient-saturated sea. In February, Ramirez, Sinclair, and others wrote a letter to the Colorado River Basin Regional Water Quality Control Board urging the establishment of total maximum daily loads to improve public health and air quality.

In the near term, Porter  is teaching residents how to make their own low-cost air filters using box fans. Until now, Withycombe adds, air pollution control districts have focused on reducing emission sources rather than providing air filtration equipment. “But given what we know,” he says, “it would be a good investment at this time to improve [community] health.”

Cohen has been working on the Salton Sea, and with the marginalized communities that live around it, for roughly 25 years. He is relieved to see dust suppression projects finally being built, but he says the region is going to need much more to improve environmental conditions. “We’ve always said that if the Salton Sea was [in] San Francisco, Sacramento, or Los Angeles, the problems would have been solved long ago,” he says.

This reporting was supported with funding from the USC Center for Health Journalism.

The post As the Salton Sea Shrinks, Agriculture’s Legacy Turns to Dust appeared first on Civil Eats.

Water from Navajo Lake flows through 70 miles of canals before heading down an additional 340 miles of lateral irrigation ditches to a sea of roughly 700 central pivot-irrigated circles. There, the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry, known as NAPI, grows blue cornmeal, whole sumac berries, and juniper trees, among other culturally relevant foods under the Navajo Pride label.

Alfalfa and corn are the top cash crops, however. Total sales have made NAPI profitable enough to contribute over $1 million to the Navajo Nation in 2020. “The rangeland is depleted,” says Delane Atcitty, the executive director of Indian Nations Conservation Alliance and a NAPI board member. “That’s why the alfalfa [for cattle feed] is selling.”

But NAPI would make a lot more money if it sold all the alfalfa off the reservation. Instead, it balances tribal food security with economic development. Locals can buy Navajo Pride products at an outpost near NAPI headquarters and at outlets such as Walmart off the reservation, but the Navajo Nation’s 13 grocery stores typically don’t carry the products.

The farm, located near Farmington, New Mexico, a small town with a 19.9 percent poverty rate, spans almost 72,000 irrigated acres. However, it should have 110,630 irrigated acres.

The U.S. government has yet to uphold its end of a deal struck over 60 years ago, in which the Navajo Nation traded some of its water rights to divert San Juan River water, a major tributary to the Colorado River, to the growing urban areas along the Rio Grande in exchange for irrigation infrastructure for NAPI. Sixty years later, and as water resources dwindle, the remaining 40,000 acres of irrigation originally promised to the farm remain undeveloped.

Tribal communities typically have the most senior water rights in a region—at least on paper—yet they often lack the resources to build infrastructure to utilize the water. As a result, not only have Southwestern tribes’ ability to farm been compromised, but approximately 30 percent of the Navajo Nation has no access to clean, reliable drinking water. Currently, about 25 percent of Native communities receive some form of federal food assistance, but they would prefer to expand the markets for Native American farmers.

As water grows scarce in the West, two different branches of government are sending mixed signals on tribal water. One the one hand, the Biden administration recently announced that $13 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law would be invested directly into tribal communities, including $2.5 billion to implement the Indian Water Rights Settlement Completion Fund, which will help deliver long-promised water resources to tribes. And there is more focus than ever before on tribal water settlements, 34 of which had been enacted by the Department of Interior (DOI) by 2021.

On the other hand, later this month, the Supreme Court will hear a high-profile case in which the federal government has decided to push back on its responsibility to provide tribes with an adequate water supply. In 2003, the Navajo Nation sued the DOI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona arguing that the 1868 treaty established the Navajo Nation reservation as a permanent homeland and pledged support for agricultural settlement, and therefore required the federal government to provide water.

Last year, the Ninth Circuit Court upheld the fact that the Navajo reservation’s purpose expressly included farming. Most of the 16,000 farms in the Navajo Nation are family-owned, and there is no other commercial farm the size of NAPI. While the Supreme Court case, which will be heard on March 20, was not brought on behalf of NAPI, any decision the top court makes could impact the massive operation. For example, water rights settlements on the Colorado River and Little Colorado River could decrease overall water available for NAPI to utilize.

The implications of the case are striking, says Dylan Hedden-Nicely, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, head of the Native American Law program at the University of Idaho, because the Navajo Nation “wants to use this [river] water for agricultural and production and economic development while also freeing up groundwater for domestic use.”

All of this is taking place despite that fact that the critical need to provide water on arid reservations was made clear all the way back in 1865, during the first congressional appropriation debate for irrigation of what was then called the Colorado River Indian Reservation.

“Irrigating canals are essential to the prosperity of these Indians. Without water, there can be no production, no life; and all they ask of you is to give them a few agricultural implements to enable them to dig an irrigating canal by which their lands may be watered and their fields irrigated, so that they may enjoy the means of existence,” a delegate from the territory of Arizona said at the time.

Of course, just because the government understands the need doesn’t mean its leaders have felt responsible to meet it, say Native water right experts. “We have arrived at this existential threat because, after 200 years, there’s still no structural place for tribes to engage in the water policy conversation at a level that acknowledges their sovereignty and their self-determination,” says Daryl Vigil, co-director of Water & Tribes in the Colorado River Basin and water administrator for the Jicarilla Apache Nation, of the state of the Colorado River negotiations amid the Supreme Court case.

And without adequate water, tribal communities in the region have often been unable to develop their water resources to achieve food sovereignty. And, if NAPI—a profitable, efficient agricultural operation run by members of the largest tribe in the U.S.—is still owed water infrastructure according to a 60-year-old treaty, what confidence should the other 29 Colorado River Basin tribes have that their water needs will be met?

Broken Promises

Unfortunately, NAPI’s story isn’t unique. “There are a lot of outstanding claims from [Native American] nations to water,” says Laura Bray, a research scientist at the University of Oklahoma. If anything, she adds, NAPI’s plight “is exemplary of the failure of the U.S. government to provide adequate water, something very basic for sustaining society.”

Vigil agrees. “In the Upper Colorado River basin, 40 percent of the tribal water rights have been unused because of their inability to participate in conservation programs and inability to develop water rights usually because of a lack of infrastructure funding,” he says.

At the same time, tribes are doing their part to conserve water. In 2022, NAPI used only 60 percent of its diversion rights, according to the farm’s CEO, Dave Zeller. “NAPI does not bank any unused water. The unused water is released from Navajo Dam by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, where water managers can then decide whether it flows down into Lake Powell,” he said via email. “That’s water rights going down the river,” adds Atcitty. He says the capacity to develop water infrastructure is the key to tribes’ ability to take responsibility for their own food systems.

A map of the 11 blocks that make up NAPI; blocks 9-11 have never been developed. (Photo by Virginia Gewin)

“I don’t think the federal government wants NAPI to fail because that would reflect poorly on them, but there doesn’t seem to be much incentive on their end to build the project out with the water [the farm] is not using yet [but] is entitled to,” says Zeller.

And NAPI is operational for only eight months of the calendar year. “The canal system would need to be winterized annually if it was to operate 12 months a year,” adds Zeller.

Tribes Are at the Center of Water Negotiations in the West

And the amount of water under tribal control is only likely to grow as the remaining 12 tribes settle unresolved water rights claims.

Long-term in the region, “there’s only two sources of new water rights in the Colorado River basin—agricultural water and Indian water,” says Daniel McCool, a political scientist who studies Native American water rights at University of Utah. “That’s where the action will be in the next few years.” Just last week, the Klamath tribes, senior water users on the river, called for more water, which could prove devastating for farmers in the Rogue River Valley and Medford irrigation districts.

The Supreme Court case promises to clarify the degree to which the federal government has an obligation to provide water to the tribal reservations it created. “Tribes are the weakest actor in water rights and allocation—part of that is historical, [as they were] purposely excluded from the Colorado River Compact (completed in 1922),” says Andrew Curley, a Diné member who studies water governance and Indigenous geography at the University of Arizona.

Vigil adds that while tribes may have senior water rights, they often have no way to leverage those rights into usable water. “We just want the same opportunities [to develop water infrastructure] that was afforded to other stakeholders,” he says. The federal government wanted to assimilate tribes by turning them into farmers and ranchers. “These unfulfilled promises, like to NAPI, prevent tribal sovereigns from being able to create their first-time economies for themselves,” says Vigil. “And if you can’t create self-sustaining economies, it’s really hard to start thinking about how you feed yourselves.”

“No water was ever allocated in the Colorado River basin willingly by Western politicians. They were forced to do it by the courts,” says McCool. For most of the 20^th century, Western states and the federal government ignored Native American water rights when developing water projects, he adds. In fact, he says, “the first time the Anglo water holders along the Colorado River said, ‘Let’s bring the Native Americans to table,’ is when they had to engineer cutbacks.”

In most cases, Native water rights date back to the establishment of reservations and supersede state water law. One case in 1908—Winters vs. United States—determined that tribal rights to water are based on future need rather than past use and are not forfeited if tribes don’t exercise their claims.

“The Winters doctrine” is the tool still used by the one branch of government that has been most supportive of tribal water rights—the courts. “The Winters [precedent] has been a pretty big hammer for the last 100 years,” says McCool, “but we may see the big hammer disappear altogether with this conservative [Supreme] Court.”

Paper Water vs. Wet Water

The water in the Colorado River is already overprescribed, as climate change has reduced precipitation in the region over the last decade. “This basin’s hydrology has changed, but water use has not changed commensurately and the basin’s reservoirs are heading toward bankruptcy,” says Robison.

In a bid to save water over the last few years, for example, largely non-Indigenous farmers along the Middle Rio Grande received payment to voluntarily fallow their land and not use water. But tribes don’t enjoy payment for the water rights they don’t use. “There’s undeveloped [Native American] water rights that are considered system water,” says Crystal Tulley-Cordova, the principal hydrologist in the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources.

To decrease demand on Colorado River water this year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is aiming to pay farmers in California and Arizona to fallow their land as well. “Yet many Navajo families live in poverty while the water they have rights to gets used by others,” says Heather Tanana, a Diné member and law professor at the University of Utah. “Everybody, historically, was taking [tribal] water without any consideration of the impact to tribes, or what would happen when tribes did develop.”

For Indigenous communities, it’s a difficult moment to push for more water given the ongoing shortages. “Everyone is being pushed to conserve,” says Tulley-Cordova. “Tribes aren’t at the same level as everyone else; our big push is to secure our water rights, so we have a more secure and sustainable water future.” By that she means what are often called “wet water rights”—actual access to water, not the rights that exist on paper.

As a result, Indigenous communities spend an inordinate amount of time and money protecting the water they do have. “[Tribes] were promised this water, and now have to spend millions to protect it,” says Hedden-Nicely, who is a co-author of this amicus brief in support of the Navajo Nation. “And we have a solid chunk of our membership that are living in absolute poverty.”

As the Supreme Court wades into water relations, any decision promises to have far-reaching consequences. And the current court hasn’t shied away from upending precedent. “The worst-case scenario is that our whole system of water management in the West is disrupted,” says Tanana. On the other hand, “if the case recognizes an enforceable federal trust responsibility, then we’ll likely see more paper rights turning into wet rights,” says Tanana.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for tribes throughout the West. “Water negotiations right now are essentially fighting over what’s left,” says Curley. And crises have typically forced tribes to take less than they deserve. “That’s how colonialism has played out for tribes—’Take a bad deal now or lose even more later,’” he adds.

Regardless of the Supreme Court decision, it’s unclear whether NAPI will be able to irrigate the remaining 38,000 acres. Although the farm has received over $9 million in appropriations through the Water Infrastructure Improvement for the Nation Act since 2019, it has struggled to secure the estimated $242 million from the government for deferred maintenance costs on its existing irrigation infrastructure.

Zeller says NAPI needs an answer from the government either way so it can take steps to keep the farm profitable. “As expenditures on fuel, labor, and fertilizers continue to rise, NAPI’s revenues have grown stagnant because we can’t grow the farm out anymore,” he says. “If the federal government is not going to fulfill their obligation as per law, then it should buy NAPI out [of its water rights].”

Still, UW’s Robison is optimistic the enormous farm will ultimately prevail for two reasons. “Of the 30 basin tribes, the Diné have developed impressive capacity for water management,” he says. And, he adds, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act have set aside considerable water development funding for basin tribes.

“The most important thing is that tribes have the sovereign capacity to make their own decisions about water,” says Hedden-Nicely. “Ultimately, food security is going to be an integral part of that, but it could be to grow food for their own membership or to develop their economies.”

Atcitty agrees. “To us, true tribal sovereignty revolves around agriculture and means being able to feed your own people,” he says.

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https://civileats.com/2022/11/08/new-mexico-farmers-face-a-choice-pray-for-rain-or-get-paid-not-to-plant/ https://civileats.com/2022/11/08/new-mexico-farmers-face-a-choice-pray-for-rain-or-get-paid-not-to-plant/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2022 09:00:12 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=49319 The conservation district had, over the previous two years, piloted programs to pay some farmers and landowners to stop farming and fallow their fields. The water savings is meant to maintain flows for both aquatic species and downstream states, but adoption has been slow. This year, it boosted the payments. Facing bleak prospects, farmers had […]

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As the summer of 2022 began, 90 percent of New Mexico was in a severe drought. The largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history raged in the northern part of the state. Snowpack melted weeks early, leaving reservoirs throughout the Southwest running low. In late May, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD), the authority that manages water for agriculture in the Middle Rio Grande Valley, announced that it would not be able to guarantee farmers any water past June. The outlook for farmers was dire.

The conservation district had, over the previous two years, piloted programs to pay some farmers and landowners to stop farming and fallow their fields. The water savings is meant to maintain flows for both aquatic species and downstream states, but adoption has been slow. This year, it boosted the payments. Facing bleak prospects, farmers had to make a choice: plant and take their chances on the monsoon or play it safe and secure a payment to fallow.

The arid Southwest gets the bulk of its precipitation during the summertime monsoon—when Gulf of California moisture is lured northward as temperatures rise and is then converted into afternoon thunderstorms. It typically occurs sometime between June and September, but its duration and intensity are all but impossible to predict.

“I’m not going to be paid not to farm; that’s just not in my DNA.”

Mark Garcia and his brother farm just shy of 400 acres in Los Lunas, New Mexico—a rotation of oats, grass, and alfalfa, one of the thirstiest crops. When he heard the news, he grappled with the decision to put over half of those acres—those that were in oats—in fallow for a year. His knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss the idea. “I’m not going to be paid not to farm; that’s just not in my DNA,” he recalls saying to himself.

Then Garcia crunched the numbers and decided the $425 per acre offered by the district was a safer option than betting on the monsoon during an unprecedented drought that rattled the region. “It was with a heavy heart that I agreed,” he said.

Mark Garcia, pictured at his farm in Los Lunas, New Mexico, worries that the fallow program is a first step toward losing precious agricultural land to development. (Photo credit: Virginia Gewin)

A lot of other farmers gambled on their chances this year, Casey Ish, the MRGCD water resources specialist in charge of the fallow program, told Civil Eats in April. “We were honest about our inability to guarantee late season water. When we run out of instream flow, farmers will be at the mercy of monsoon,” Ish said at the time.

Everyone was well prepared for continued drought. Then, a historic monsoon season hit, bringing more rain than parts of the state had seen in 130 years. In late June, Garcia’s alfalfa fields, both established and newly-planted, had soaked up the initial rains, lush and green. By October, he was second-guessing his decision to leave unplanted acres idle. “Hindsight is 20/20,” he said as the above-average rains continued. If he could go back in time, he added, “I wouldn’t have done it.”

“This valley is wholly unprepared for the dynamic nature of water going forward.”

Garcia is one of the 190 irrigators who signed up over 2,500 acres for the 2022 fallow program. There are a growing number of fallow programs being offered at the state and national levels to pay farmers throughout the Southwest to idle their operations to save water. And while they reduce water demand, they’re also costly and can increase dust emissions during droughts. But as farmers increasingly face a monumental decision each season—whether or not to farm every acre—it threatens to alienate them and take more and more farmland out of commission.

“This valley is wholly unprepared for the dynamic nature of water going forward,” said Jason Casuga, CEO of the MRGCD.

More Demand Than Supply

Sandwiched between Colorado and Texas, New Mexico is hamstrung by limited options to satisfy all of the state’s water demands.

Years of drought along the Rio Grande have coincided with the renovation of the El Vado dam 160 miles north of Albuquerque, a project that has further hampered the district’s ability to store water for dry periods. And then there’s the elephant in the room. MRGCD is legally obligated to supply water to the Elephant Butte dam, the point of water delivery to Texas. The amount of water varies annually, depending on actual flows and precipitation run-off in the region.

The agreement is part of the 1938 Rio Grande Compact—on which New Mexico is dangerously close to defaulting. If the debt reaches 200,000 acre-feet, the state will incur a costly violation and litigation. For these reasons, the state’s fallow program offers a way for MRGCD to decrease demand by, hopefully, discouraging irrigators, particularly the least productive farms.

In addition to irrigation water for farmers and compact debt, the MRGCD is obligated to provide enough water for the endangered silvery minnow in the middle Rio Grande reaches that are prone to drying out. “The acreage that was enrolled in the fallow program this year is only going to support the minnow at strategic [river] outfalls,” said Ish.

Several farmers were adamantly against the fallowing program—despite the dismal forecast. “Every time there’s a shortage of water, it comes from the farmer; they take agricultural water and give it to endangered species,” said Glen Duggins, who farms chiles and alfalfa in Socorro, New Mexico. He’s also a MRGCD board member.

While Duggins chafed at MRGCD efforts to take agricultural water for the silvery minnow and other wildlife in the ecosystem, he pointed out that other aspects of the fallow program have a direct impact on the long-term survivability of farmers. For example, Duggins pays $150-170 per acre to lease most of the land he farms. “Why should [a landowner] lease it to me for $170 when he can get $425?” he asked.

“To idle the farm, and think you’ll start it up next year, that’s a dream.”

However, Ish said there are rules in place to prevent this very scenario. The program requires that leasing farmers co-sign the agreement, and it is up to both parties to decide how payment is split. There are also rules on rotating land in and out of the program.

In fact, one of Duggins’ landlords did end up taking advantage of the fallow program and signed up 35 acres that have an irrigation system in need of an overhaul. “Duggins didn’t want to be part of the agreement and allowed the district to work directly with the landowner,” said Ish.

Duggins sees the fallow program as yet another threat to farming in the region. “You don’t have a farm without a farmer,” Duggins said. In fact, his son and farming partner has found other work; his farming future is uncertain.

And, Duggins said, it will take a lot more work to bring a fallowed field back to life. “To idle the farm, and think you’ll start it up next year, that’s a dream,” he said.

Small-scale regenerative farmer Kristen Couevas points to her cover crop field in in Tomé, New Mexico. (Photo credit: Virginia Gewin)

In late June, Kristen Couevas, a small-scale regenerative farmer in Tomé, New Mexico, agreed with Duggins that leaving the region’s highly alkaline fields bare is a recipe for disaster. She predicted that if the sun doesn’t bake the life out of the fallowed fields or winds and rains don’t erode the soil, invasive weeds will put down roots. “Instead of a $15 million fallow program, why don’t we get some cover crops?” she asked. Cover crops would not only keep the soil alive, they could also help the land absorb and store water, she added.

One goal of the fallow program is to create enough of an incentive that water wasters—ideally, the most inefficient endeavors—opt in, which helps alleviate unnecessary water demand on unproductive lands. “We hemorrhage water inefficiently in areas of this valley,” Casuga said of small-acreage homes that can take over a dozen hours to irrigate a lawn. And they can because they have an untouchable water right.

“A water right to zero amount of water is zero amount of water,” Casuga explained. The water wasters further frustrate farmers who are asked to reduce their water consumption. “Somewhere we need to define what’s a farmer and what’s a farm. A 2-acre lot is not a farm,” Duggins said. He believes larger operations that feed the nation should have priority when it comes to water.

Perhaps not surprisingly, alfalfa is often criticized for being an inefficient use of dwindling water supplies and misplaced in the Southwest. But farmers say it is a low-input perennial crop, lasting about seven years, which helps prevent soil erosion. The region’s large dairies also rely on alfalfa, so the question of whether it belongs in the state is inextricably linked to that larger, very powerful industry.

To increase water use efficiency, the region also needs appropriate infrastructure. The aging, intricate web of dams, canals, and ditches was built for a different climate. “The dams are in the high elevations to capture snowmelt,” said Casuga. And deluges in the lower elevations not only have the potential to damage crops, but the water flows into the river below the point at which MRGCD can store and make use of it. “How we get [our precipitation] is going to change,” said Casuga. Forecasts predict the state will lose 70 percent of its snowpack by end of the century.

“[MRGCD] is stuck between a rock and a hard place, but farmers are not happy at all.”

Unfortunately, farther down the river, the federally managed infrastructure serves little function, in part due to changing conditions. The Low Flow Conveyance Channel was built in the 1950s to increase the efficiency of water going to Elephant Butte reservoir, but sedimentation leaves it prone to overbanking when flows are high, which threatens endangered species. As a result, it hasn’t been viable for anything other than drainage in years.

Monsoon: Miracle or Curse

In late July, while the region was struggling to keep the Rio Grande flowing through Albuquerque, the monsoon rains began in earnest. MRGCD banked enough water from the fallow program to satisfy the support needed for the silvery minnow—and it may even have a substantial amount leftover to apply to compact debt, said Ish.

By mid-October, west-central New Mexico finished the season with the wettest monsoon on record, according to New Mexico meteorologist Grant Tosterud. Still, after a series of very dry years, it wasn’t enough to fully lift the state out of drought.

Casey Ish (pictured left), a MRGCD water resources specialist in charge of the fallow program, said the program next year will likely offer more flexibility to respond to farmers’ needs. (Photo credit: Virginia Gewin)

And those record-level rains were a mixed bag for farmers, said Ish. Some alfalfa farmers were able to get multiple cuttings, while other operations saw lower yields due to stress. Farming has always been a gamble, but the stakes are getting higher as climate change alters water management. Ish pointed out that any farmer enrolled in the fallow program this year had the potential for a big year—a guaranteed $425 per-acre payment and the ability to make any feasible cuttings on established alfalfa stands that produced without irrigation. And, he says, there’s nothing in the program that would prevent anyone from taking advantage of monsoon rain conditions to put in a fall crop.

At the same time, the deluge decimated Duggins’ green chile harvest due to wet conditions that invited disease and made managing the proliferation of weeds impossible. He hopes the red chile harvest (which happens later in the year) will salvage his season. Either way, he plans to reduce his chile acreage from roughly 35 to 15 acres next year. “We’re one of the best known chile growers. But financially, I can’t do it anymore,” he said.

Duggins dismisses talk of drought following this year’s monsoon. Not surprisingly, wetter conditions have complicated water conversations with farmers.

“We’re trying not to be ‘the district that cried wolf,’” Ish said. “There have been a couple of times now when we’ve warned farmers that we are still at the precipice of a significant water shortage, and so far, Mother Nature has provided.”

Couevas, however, predicts that few farmers will take advantage of the fallow program again next year. “Everybody’s done,” she said. “[MRGCD] is stuck between a rock and a hard place, but farmers are not happy at all.” Still, MRGCD will have to wait to see how winter snowpack will shape up its ability to deliver irrigation water next year.

Although the monsoons mean that New Mexico’s water debt likely didn’t grow, it didn’t get any smaller either. And the only thing that is certain is that climate change will make conditions less certain. “What we experienced this year is consistent with what we expect to see in the future,” said Ish, of the more variable snowpack and the location and timing of precipitation. And that’s why MRGCD developed programs that offer farmers flexibility.

Still, driving home in an October storm as irrigation ditches brim with water, Garcia was frustrated to see his fallowed fields full of weeds like goat head and pigweed. Couevas consults for other farmers who are grappling with similar outcomes, and she says the fallowed fields often require deeper tillage and laser treatment to level the ground. Farmers thought they were saving money, but next year they will likely spend more to get the fields back into production, she added.

Garcia wants a fallow program that serves as an emergency lifeline that farmers only have to reach for when absolutely necessary.

Garcia is among the many growers who fear the fallow program is a first step toward losing precious agricultural land to development. “I don’t feel we’re being pushed out,” he said, adding “but I don’t think we’re being helped to stay in either.”

Garcia will have to make the same decision whether to fallow or not next year—knowing that there are long-term water shortages despite plentiful monsoons the last two years. “It’s a great program,” he said. And he’s grateful to have options. But he hopes MRGCD will continue to tweak the program so that “effectiveness meets efficiency,” he said. In other words, he wants a fallow program that serves as an emergency lifeline that farmers only have to reach for when absolutely necessary.

Ish said that next year’s program will likely offer more flexibility to respond to grower’s needs. “For a reduced payment, growers could be allowed one or two waterings in the shoulder of the season so they can establish a fall crop,” he said of the pending change.

Either way, until the El Vado dam storage is back online—likely around 2026—conditions will be at their most uncertain along the middle Rio Grande. And that will most likely leave Garcia and other growers’ rolling the dice on the monsoon.

The Water Desk, an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder, supported this reporting.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/11/08/new-mexico-farmers-face-a-choice-pray-for-rain-or-get-paid-not-to-plant/feed/ 3 https://civileats.com/2022/11/02/conserving-farmland-also-benefits-the-air-we-breathe/ Wed, 02 Nov 2022 08:00:38 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=49046 The study found that areas with more acres of land set aside through CRP had lower levels of fine particulate matter. Using data from 2,300 counties, the researchers cross-referenced national public health data from 2001–2016 with each county’s percentage of arable land enrolled in CRP. Fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, refers to particles no more than […]

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The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP)—a federal program that pays farmers to stop farming on low-quality pieces of their land through 10–15 year contracts—may be one of the most cost-effective ways to improve air quality, according to a new study. While the program’s benefits to habitat, soil, and water quality have been documented throughout the program, this study, published in the journal GeoHealth, is the first to quantify its life-saving air quality benefits.

The study found that areas with more acres of land set aside through CRP had lower levels of fine particulate matter. Using data from 2,300 counties, the researchers cross-referenced national public health data from 2001–2016 with each county’s percentage of arable land enrolled in CRP.

Fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, refers to particles no more than 2.5 micrometers in diameter. The particles are small enough to cause inflammation that leads to asthma, heart and respiratory diseases, and several cancers. This hazy cocktail often consists of dust, fossil fuel emissions, and the volatile organic compounds applied to farmlands. Ammonia from fertilizers, for example, breaks down to form fine particulate compounds. And when tractors and other heavy machinery till the soil it reduces plant cover, increasing windblown dust. Droughts also exacerbate PM2.5 levels. But the researchers found that areas with more CRP acreage also saw fewer deaths—“and many billions of dollars saved via those prevented deaths,” the study reads.

“Our findings represent the real possibility that [the CRP] could pay for itself many times over just based on one small component—reduced fine particulate matter concentration.”

In 2008, when CRP acreage was 35 million acres, the authors estimate there were 1,300 fewer deaths than would have occurred if all the land had been farmed. Placing the value of a statistical life at $7 million (a bit less than the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recommendation), CRP saved roughly $9.5 billion.

“Our findings represent the real possibility that [the program] could pay for itself many times over just based on one small component—reduced fine particulate matter concentration,” says study co-author Douglas Becker, a postdoctoral economist at the University of Idaho in Moscow. In fiscal year 2021, about 20.5 million acres were registered as part of CRP, costing the USDA roughly $1.8 billion per year. Given his preliminary estimated public health savings, “CRP could be a mind-bogglingly efficient program,” he adds.

While the air-quality benefits were not an intended goal of CRP, the findings shed further light on the impacts of intensive agricultural practices. “The key takeaway is that the air quality improvements are due to the absence of [agricultural] production,” says Michael Happ, who was not involved in the study and works on climate and rural communities at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).

Clear Ties to Farming

PM2.5 concentrations are measured in micrograms per meter cubed (mg/m3). While the GeoHealth study found that the average PM2.5 concentration for the entire period was 9.5, CRP reduced that average by up to 1.6 in heavy agricultural areas—including the former Dust Bowl region of the central and Southern Plains states, vast swaths of the Dakotas, and the windblown loess farming region of eastern Washington and Oregon.

“That’s huge,” says Becker. All this is happening in the “bread basket” Great Plains and Midwest. “CRP is a big deal in these places,” says Becker.

Last year, the World Health Organization updated their air quality guidelines for PM2.5—it is not to exceed 5 mg/m3 for annual mean concentrations—citing air pollution as one of the biggest environmental threats to human health. The EPA’s National Ambient Air Quality annual average standard for PM2.5 is 12 mg/m3—a limit that the agency is currently reconsidering after an independent panel called for the national standard to be lowered to 8–10.

“Air quality is one [of CRP’s environmental benefits] that was under the radar. . . . Look at all the environmental costs that we, the public, are bearing. People are getting sick and dying.”

“Even a small amount of air pollution over a long amount of time can have measurable impact on health,” says study co-author James Crooks, a climate epidemiologist at National Jewish Health hospital in Denver, Colorado. “Even though 9.5 is below the current EPA standard, there is significant evidence that these concentrations can still lead to premature death,” he adds.

“Air quality is one [of CRP’s environmental benefits] that was under the radar,” says Silvia Secchi, a natural resource economist at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the study. On the other hand, this study helps make the impact of agriculture on air quality more visible. “Look at all the environmental costs that we, the public, are bearing. People are getting sick and dying,” she adds. Ammonia reduction policies, the most cost-effective way to tackle PM2.5 pollution, also exist in Europe, but not so in the U.S. or China (another big agricultural powerhouse).

And Yet, CRP Numbers are Dropping

CRP acreage hit a peak in 2007 at around 36.7 million acres, but it has been decreasing since then. Currently, total acres enrolled sits at roughly 21 million—a decline fueled by high corn and grain prices, sent higher by global yield reductions due, in part, to the war in Ukraine. “The reduction [in CRP acreage] is not because we don’t need environmental benefits; it’s that farmers want more land to farm,” says Secchi.

She also points to the fact that the GeoHealth study findings don’t tease apart two things happening at the same time—farmers took the land out of CRP and employed more intensive practices on it. “Farmers turned to continuous corn, rather than the corn-soy rotation that employs less fertilizers, less tillage, and results in less emissions,” says Secchi. In fact, the ethanol boom has expanded corn production by 8.7 percent, or 6.9 million acres, between 2008 and 2016.

As grain prices continue to increase, American farmers have also been allowed to end CRP contracts a year early to plant wheat “for the country,” says Happ. Although the program’s environmental benefits are well-emphasized, economists highlight that the program also serves as a price control mechanism by keeping farmers from over-producing. “As discussions around the new farm bill come up, we need to talk about human lives and how we reduce particulate matter,” adds Happ. To encourage enrollment in CRP, Happ advocates for raising both the program’s acreage cap and the payment cap so that it’s more competitive with corn and other commodity prices.

In general, Secchi and Happ both want to see agriculture’s impact on human health receive more consideration as farm bill renewal negotiations get underway.

“It has been very frustrating for me as a researcher to see how secondary environmental goals are in the conservation title of the farm bill,” says Secchi. “The way to solve air quality is not to design better filters,” says Secchi. “You’ve got to keep those emissions out of the air to begin with.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/06/06/a-wild-windy-spring-is-creating-a-soil-erosion-nightmare-for-farmers/ https://civileats.com/2022/06/06/a-wild-windy-spring-is-creating-a-soil-erosion-nightmare-for-farmers/#comments Mon, 06 Jun 2022 08:00:17 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=47089 Not only did that wind event—technically categorized as both a derecho and a haboob—send soil airborne, it unearthed wet crop residue. “I had some oats that were about three inches or so—and it sheered them off,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it pulled up that amount of dirt; we had just had two inches of […]

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When he saw a roiling thunder bank of black clouds blowing into Salem, South Dakota, last month, farmer Kurt Stiefvater thought it would take 20 minutes to reach his property. It took five. “I couldn’t believe how fast it was moving,” he says of the over 100-mile-per-hour gusts.

Not only did that wind event—technically categorized as both a derecho and a haboob—send soil airborne, it unearthed wet crop residue. “I had some oats that were about three inches or so—and it sheered them off,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it pulled up that amount of dirt; we had just had two inches of rain two days before,” he recalls. The line of thunderstorms, which developed in Nebraska, raced into eastern South Dakota, northwestern Iowa, and western Minnesota. On his farm, Stiefvater says, the dust storm lasted only about 25 minutes.

“They saw this storm as one freak event. I don’t think they comprehend how much soil they are losing.”

“I was hoping [the soil] would stay in place better,” says Stiefvater, who grows corn, soybeans, alfalfa, and oats on his 1,800-acre crop operation. But, ultimately, he was one of the lucky ones. The storm killed two people, downed power lines, and most of his neighbors in the town of 1,500 saw damage to their houses, sheds, and grain bins. Not only was he in a safer location, but his approach to soil management as a farmer who grows cover crops and practices no-till likely helped him avoid bigger losses.

Overall the region lacks dust monitoring infrastructure, and the single air quality sensor in Sioux Falls suffered a power outage the day of the storm, making it impossible for local scientists to accurately gauge the actual dust concentration in the air the day the storm hit. But two weeks after the storm, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) generated rough estimates of soil loss during the event on a hypothetical 100-acre bare field. Given the fact that the storm hit during planting season in an area that doesn’t have much conservation tillage or cover crop usage, it’s fair to assume the estimate applies to many of the impacted fields. Erosion estimates for the day the storm hit range from 3 to 12 tons of lost soil per acre, said Chris Coreil, a Fort Worth, Texas-based soil erosion specialist at NRCS, in an email.

But what’s striking is that Coreil also ran the model for another day a week earlier that had sustained high winds, and found that farmers had lost even more soil—his estimate ranged from 3 to 29 tons per acre—without a dramatic storm. To compare, the maximum amount of soil experts say farmers in the region can lose before it impacts their production levels is 5 tons per acre, per year.

“If you had bare, dry, and unprotected fields on [both days], you probably exceeded the acceptable amount of annual soil loss on each of those days,” he explained. “Farms that use conservation practices are on the lower end of the range . . . and those with bare, tilled fields are on the high end.” For instance, if the soil most prone to wind erosion—a loamy fine sand—was covered with residue or had a crop actively growing in it at the time, it would have lost only a fraction of a ton on both of these days, explained Coreil.

Neither derechos nor haboobs are common in the Northern Plains states. But dusty conditions have been on the rise as a result of the drought. “We’ve been getting more frequent reports of these dust events, and this year the reports have been the most I remember,” says Eugene Backhaus, a state resource conservationist with NRCS in Denver, Colorado—a region, he points out, that was the epicenter of last century’s Dust Bowl. Backhaus says his office doesn’t even try to calculate the soil loss for large-scale events—rather they run those models for individual producers. “They are concerned,” he says.

And although it’s well-known that farming with the soil in mind and using regenerative practices can reduce the impact, it’s not clear whether the increase in dust storms throughout the Farm Belt will cause farmers to reflect and invest in different practices.

“The wind events, with the drought widespread in the plains, are feeding on each other, because any wind on poorly-managed soils allows for much more wind movement.”

Stiefvater, for one, doesn’t think it will. “They saw this storm as one freak event. I don’t think they comprehend how much soil they are losing,” he says. When he learns of the NRCS estimates of soil loss in May, Stiefvater wonders aloud:  How much top soil, the very thing farmers try to maintain or build, did the region really lose and where did it go?

The Perfect Storm for Soil Erosion

Aside from the derecho, this spring has been much more windy and dusty throughout the Northern Plains than usual. “The winds have been ferocious. I can’t remember more days of 40-mph sustained winds,” says Anthony Bly, a soils field specialist for South Dakota State University Extension in Garretson, South Dakota.

“The wind events, with the drought widespread in the plains, are feeding on each other, because any wind on poorly-managed soils allows for much more wind movement,” says Dennis Todey, director of the Midwest Climate Hub in Ames, Iowa. The dry soil has played an often-overlooked role, he explains, by heating the air above the surface, which warms and adds to the turbulence. “The lack of soil moisture adds energy to the atmosphere, exacerbating the wind,” Todey adds.

Dust storms require high winds and emissive soil. But three things dictate how emissive the ground will be—how loose it is, how dry it is, and how much is growing in it—i.e., “vegetative cover,” says Jennie Bukowski, an environmental scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles who studies haboobs. In spring, vegetative cover is at an annual low, especially in regions where farmers till a lot. But as the drought persists in the West, crop residue—the layer of stalks, stubble, leaves, and seed pods left on the surface of the soil after harvest—isn’t holding up. “What keeps residue resilient is the moisture in it,” explains Backhaus. “With humidity in the single digits, residue tends to break down faster,” he says. “And without residue to hold the soil [down], it blows [away]. It’s this vicious cycle.”

Tillage also reduces residue and loosens soils, making it more prone to blowing away. Researchers compared wind erosion under different tillage regimes in North Dakota in 2003, a dry year with two months of less than 30 percent of average precipitation, and 2004, which saw more typical precipitation. They found that the residue-destroying effects of a single tillage event can be considerably exacerbated by a moderate, seasonal drought. Erosion was more than five times worse in 2003 than it was in 2004. Two field passes with disk tillage, a common practice to manage post-harvest crop residue in the fall, resulted in 5 tons/acre of soil loss compared to just under 1 ton/acre in no-till fields. “It doesn’t take much tillage to disturb that surface and cause it to go,” says study co-author, Ted Zobeck, a retired USDA erosion specialist based in Lubbock, Texas.

In addition, SDSU’s Bly is concerned that the enormity of modern equipment causes even more tillage-based degradation. “I really think we are wrecking the soil quicker than 30-40 years ago,” he says. A recent study—comparing farm vehicles to dinosaurs—backs up his experience. The total weight of combine harvesters has increased nearly 10-fold, from around 8800 pounds in 1958 to about 80,000 pounds in 2020. At a time when farmers are desperate to hold onto soil moisture, the subsequent compaction caused by all this weight can limit water infiltration, which is particularly troublesome when high intensity rains can’t be captured and stored in the soil.

In these regions, there is very little conservation tillage, says Bly. Stiefvater estimates that at most 15 to 20 percent of his neighbors use conservation practices. “It’s maximum tillage, and very little cover crops,” says Bly. Backhaus says in Colorado no-till acres have been on the rise, but farmers still have a long way to go. “In my mind, no-till should be on 100 percent of cropped acres,” he says.

A Wake-Up Call?

Backhaus was in Minnesota when the derecho went through the area. “That was a first,” says the Iowa native. “This isn’t Arizona,” he says. “That tells me that a lot of changes—especially to storm intensity and duration—are occurring and somehow or another we have to reverse [the trend toward soil loss] to get it back to something sustainable,” he says. “If we don’t store some more moisture, we won’t be able to produce the food that feeds the world.”

“We do have a choice. Are we going to rise to the occasion in terms of climate, water resource management, and good farming practices—or are we not?”

Stiefvater says he hasn’t seen much interest in conservation or regenerative farming practices in South Dakota. “There is no long-term planning, it’s just routine,” he says. “We gotta break the routine.”

As Steifvater was helping clean up homes impacted by the dust storm in town last month, he says old timers brought up the “Dirty Thirties,” a decade when dust storms were common and millions of acres of cropland could simply not be farmed. “They remember having to shove rags in windowsills so babies didn’t choke to death,” he says. “We don’t want to go back there.” He wants farmers to take the initiative rather than risk government having to step in. “We don’t have to do it all at once, but let’s start moving in that direction,” he says.

Maxwell Webster, Midwest policy manager for the American Farmland Trust, agrees. “We’re really starting to see impacts from climate and extreme weather accelerate,” he says. “As an organization, we’re trying to expand adoption of conservation practices in a short period of time to minimize soil losses.”

Climate change models predict more intense rainfall, when it occurs,  and more frequent drought in the central and southern Plains in the near future. “Winter wheat farmers and rangelands will struggle [in the southern Plains],” says Webster. Changes that allow the land to soak up and hold moisture are key. “Part of the reason we focus on cover crops is to keep soil in place, and add organic matter back to help improve water retaining capacity,” says Webster. “It’s important for mitigating drought, but also mitigating the impacts of flooding,” he adds. Put simply: The aim is to keep water in crops rather than letting it wash into a drainage ditch.

Cover crop adoption, however, in most states hovers between 3 and 5 percent, says Webster. The USDA’s goal is to expand cover crops to 30 million acres by 2030, effectively doubling the amount in the ground currently.

Bukowski suggests farmers should adopt cover crops sooner rather than later, while it’s still an option. “At some point, we may not have enough precipitation for cover crops,” she says. “We do have a choice. Are we going to rise to the occasion in terms of climate, water resource management, and good farming practices—or are we not?” she asks.

There are encouraging signs that conservation incentives are having at least a modest effect. North Dakota, for example, had the most acres enrolled in the Pandemic Cover Crops Program (PCCP), a temporary USDA program that offered farmers receiving federal crop insurance $5 an acre to grow cover crops. In fact, several Plains states—Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota—also ranked high in PCCP acres. Perhaps the people conducting outreach in the Plains states did a better job of engaging farmers, but, Webster adds, “areas that have the highest soil health concerns are the areas where you see the highest level of conservation practice adoption.”

As a recent study demonstrated, soil erosion has been extreme—at a median historical erosion rate of roughly 2 mm per year, which is equivalent to 12 tons per acre—and continues today, despite conservation efforts. “The scale of current conservation practices is simply too small to meaningfully protect agriculture, soil health, and water quality from the damages of extreme weather,” says Webster.

One hurdle, however, is that NRCS doesn’t have the bandwidth to assist even close to the number of growers who need it. “Right now, we’re short staffed,” says Backhaus. “We’re trying to build staff back up, then we can educate them to provide technical assistance to producers.” And, he adds, producers like to work with a single person, and build a rapport, which is another challenge given staffing shortages. There is also way more demand for federal conservation  programs that support improved practices—such as Conservation Stewardship Program and Environmental Quality Incentives Program—than the funding allows for, says Jessica Michalski, South Dakota NRCS State Resource Conservationist.

But the amount of soil that blows into the air in the spring is also lost money down the line—in the form of additional fertilizer needed to offset losses, seed, and yield potential when topsoil is lost. “It’s easy to think about short-term economics when farming, it’s much more difficult to think about the long-term impacts to the land,” she says.

But, Michalski hopes to see more farmers “take first step and admit that you need to make a change.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/06/06/a-wild-windy-spring-is-creating-a-soil-erosion-nightmare-for-farmers/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2022/02/14/how-corn-ethanol-for-biofuel-fueled-climate-change/ https://civileats.com/2022/02/14/how-corn-ethanol-for-biofuel-fueled-climate-change/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2022 09:01:38 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=45628 For the last decade, ethanol has helped keep corn in high demand, and made it the most-planted U.S. crop. In fact, roughly 40 percent of all corn is now used to make ethanol. Meanwhile, the number of corn farms over 500 acres in size has increased over time, while the number of small corn farms […]

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The U.S. is the world leader in biofuel production—generating 47 percent of global output over the last decade. The ten-fold expansion in ethanol production in the U.S. from 2002 to 2019 has been driven by the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a federal program that since 2005 has required transportation fuel to contain a minimum volume of renewable fuels. So far, that has largely meant corn ethanol. Currently 98 percent of gasoline in the U.S. contains some ethanol, most commonly 10 percent, or E10.

For the last decade, ethanol has helped keep corn in high demand, and made it the most-planted U.S. crop. In fact, roughly 40 percent of all corn is now used to make ethanol. Meanwhile, the number of corn farms over 500 acres in size has increased over time, while the number of small corn farms is dwindling. And all this growth has led to record profits for the companies that buy and sell the nation’s corn. For instance, last month, Archer-Daniels-Midland, the food processing and commodities trading giant, reported its highest-ever earnings, a net income of over $2.7 billion, due in large part to rising biofuel demand.

For the last decade, ethanol has helped keep corn in high demand, and made it the most-planted U.S. crop. In fact, roughly 40 percent of all corn is now used to make ethanol.

Despite the promise that the RFS would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) today finds that expansion of U.S. corn cultivation has come at eye-popping environmental costs. Corn production expanded by 8.7 percent, or 2.8 million hectares (6.9 million acres), between 2008 and 2016. As a result, the researchers found that nationwide annual fertilizer use surged by 3 to 8 percent and water pollutants rose by 3 to 5 percent. The sheer extent of domestic land use change, however, generated greenhouse gas emissions that are, at best, equivalent to those caused by gasoline use—and likely at least 24 percent higher.

That’s because the RFS caused corn prices to spike by 30 percent and soybean and other crops by 20 percent. As a result, farmers planted corn everywhere they could, replacing other crops and pastureland, and plowing up land that had previously been reserved for conservation purposes. They also often skipped the soybeans in their rotations, despite the potential impacts on their soil.

Tyler Lark, who studies land use change at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has been tracking cropland expansion for years, but the burning research question in his field has been: To what degree have biofuels driven that expansion? Lark teamed up with agricultural economists and water quality experts for five years to produce what is one of the most comprehensive studies to date.

The bottom line is bluntly straightforward. “If you crank up demand, you get land use change,” says Lark, who is also a co-author of the new study. Every major agency in the U.S. that puts out data, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have all observed this rapid cropland expansion, adds Lark.

Previous studies, however, dramatically underestimated the impacts those land use changes had on carbon emissions; in fact, the models treated the land that was converted from conservation or pasture as if there was little change in the amount of carbon stored once it was planted with corn—which runs counter to existing empirical evidence.

The new study comes at a crucial moment. This year, the Biden administration will reset the biofuel volume targets of the RFS, and it’s yet to be seen how new targets could ultimately impact the price of corn, demand for soybeans to make biodiesel, the farms that produce these crops, and—ultimately—the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

Plowing up Carbon

Lark’s findings are the latest evaluation of the hotly contested biofuel carbon footprint. Several disparate data sources have confirmed the overall trend of grassland-to-cropland conversion in recent years, but researchers have used many different methodologies and assumptions to analyze that footprint over the years, leading to divergent estimates of greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the RFS.

The current study used the survey-based USDA National Resources Inventory (NRI), which had been endorsed previously by the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade association for the ethanol industry, to quantify cropland expansion area and the portion attributable to corn ethanol. Still, the organization criticized the findings.

“The claims in this report simply don’t align with reality and the facts on the ground. By slapping together a series of worst-case assumptions, cherry-picked data, and disparate results from previously debunked studies, the authors created a completely fictional and erroneous account of the environmental impacts of the Renewable Fuel Standard,” said Geoff Cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association in the statement responding to the study. (Requests for comment from the National Corn Growers Association and the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association were not returned.)

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to keep some of their land uncultivated, saw the acreage in the program decrease precipitously after 2007 as farmers capitalized on high corn prices. The CRP is now at its lowest enrollment in over 30 years.

Given the differing estimates of greenhouse gas impacts, Jeremy Martin, director of fuels policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), doesn’t think asking whether corn ethanol is better or worse than gasoline is the most important question. “I don’t think that biofuels are going to go away. But clearly they’ve had an impact on water quality and fertilizer usage—which are important findings to consider when setting future biofuels policies,” he says. He suggests a more relevant question is: How many acres of corn can farms plant while still meeting water quality or conservation goals?

The federal Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to keep some of their land uncultivated, saw the acreage in the program decrease precipitously after 2007 as farmers chose to capitalize on high corn prices. As a result, the carbon storage gained via the CRP was lost to the atmosphere. And now, the CRP is at its lowest enrollment in over 30 years—while the USDA just announced it plans to spend $1 billion to encourage carbon sequestration in soil.

Image courtesy of Silvia Secchi. Read about the difference between Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) enrollment and general CRP enrollment.

Ethanol critics say this study suggests what some have long suspected—that the RFS is a tool to prop up corn prices. “If this paper is discounted [in RFS deliberations], or we fail to acknowledge the net greenhouse gas effect of corn ethanol, we will be admitting this policy is all about income support for farmers,” says Silvia Secchi, a natural resource economist at the University of Iowa.

Secchi says 15 years ago, corn ethanol was touted as a means to energy independence as well as a climate change mitigation strategy. “But the U.S. is effectively energy independent with fracking, so that’s out the window,” she said. “The second argument—that it would reduce net greenhouse gas emissions—is destroyed by this paper.”

In addition to its role as a force for change for Corn Belt farms, ethanol has also become a cornerstone of Midwest politics. With 42 ethanol plants, Iowa is the nation’s biggest producer of both corn and ethanol. Political support for biofuels inevitably cites the industry’s economic importance to the region, and its role in keeping rural economies afloat.

Some say the numbers behind that narrative are routinely overinflated, however. The latest renewable fuels industry estimates claim 46,000 jobs through the Iowa economy, but Iowa State University economist Dave Swenson says he can only find around 7,200 jobs. By Swenson’s calculation, counties with ethanol plants actually averaged larger population declines, grew merely 0.2 percent more as measured by wage and salary jobs, and had a higher rate of farm proprietor decline. “Ethanol has not been any sort of a game changer for rural Iowa’s overall economies or their demographics,” says Swenson.

Corn’s Impacts Are Visible in the Gulf

The downstream costs of expanded corn production are increasingly difficult to ignore.

According to the new study, the states with the largest expansion of corn cultivation, between 50 to 100 percent, were North and South Dakota, western Minnesota, and other states further to the south in the Mississippi alluvial plain. The increased fertilizer use caused by more corn acres likely contributes to the nutrient pollution that causes the annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2021, more than 6,300 square miles of Gulf Coast waters, the equivalent of more than 4 million acres of fish habitat, were starved of oxygen—over three times larger than the 2035 target set by the task force working to shrink the dead zone.

In another example of this trend, the state of Illinois—where farmers planted 11 million acres of corn in 2020—aimed to reduce nitrates and nitrogen by 15 percent and phosphorus by 25 percent by 2025, but a recent report indicates that nitrogen loss actually increased by 13 percent and phosphorus losses increased by 35 percent during that time, as farmers planted an unprecedented number of corn acres.

“In places like Iowa, where farmers typically rotated corn and soybeans, we see a lot more continuous corn or three-year rotations of corn, corn, soybean,” says Secchi. She has also pointed to the fact that Iowa farmers receive the most federal subsidies in the country, meaning that taxpayers are essentially paying farmers to continue and expand practices that reduce soil health, maintain a dead zone that costs $2.4 billion in disrupted fisheries and damaged marine habitat, and at best generate the same carbon emissions as gasoline.

‘Fueling Jets with Vegetable Oil Is Even Worse Than Fueling Cars’

In 2008, contrary to EPA models suggesting otherwise, Timothy Searchinger, a senior researcher at Princeton University’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, was one of several who predicted that using U.S. croplands for biofuels would increase greenhouse gas emissions through land use change. Now, his assessment has been validated by the new study. Searchinger says the new study boils down to a simple, inescapable truth: Using land has a cost. And some uses simply don’t make sense because the cost is too high.

“It’s crazy to use this very limited resource—highly productive land—for energy,” he said. “It’s almost spectacularly inefficient.” Corn ethanol converts 0.15 percent of solar energy into usable energy, while a solar cell today converts 15 to 20 percent of sunlight to energy. “And the good news is you don’t need to put a solar cell on the best available farmland.”

The fact that the study only focuses on greenhouse gas emissions within the U.S., likely reveals only a fraction of the impact. “The international effects are undoubtedly larger than the domestic effects,” says Searchinger.

“It’s crazy to use this very limited resource—highly productive land—for energy. It’s almost spectacularly inefficient.”

Secchi says corn isn’t like other crops. Agricultural innovations over the last century have led to a system that produces so much of it that the agriculture industry has often found itself manufacturing demand to meet the supply. “It’s time to factor in the broader impacts of creating that demand,” she adds.

“We currently use over one-third of the corn we produce for biofuel, and it offsets 6 percent of gas use. We could get the same benefit by increasing fuel economy of cars from 22 to 24 miles per gallon,” says Jason Hill, a bioenergy researcher at the University of Minnesota.

Although the RFS targets have had an important impact on corn production in the past, it’s not clear whether they will be an important lever going forward. “Right now, corn ethanol consumption isn’t even meeting the targets of the RFS, but even if you got rid of these policies, you probably wouldn’t sell substantially less ethanol (than the current 10 percent blending rate),” said Union of Concerned Scientists’ Martin. (That said, the Iowa governor is pushing legislation that would require the state’s gas stations to have at least one pump at each station carry E15, a 15 percent ethanol blending rate.)

At the same time, the efficiency of electric vehicles is also expected to complicate the future demand for ethanol. And with this in mind, the budding biofuel industry is turning its attention to vegetable oil production to make other fuels.

“Post-2022 RFS targets are very unlikely to lead to dramatic increases in ethanol use. In the last decade, RFS policy has had a much more dramatic effect on the use of vegetable oil-based fuels, especially biodiesel” says Martin. “And looking forward, renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel could add substantially to the use of vegetable oil for fuel.”

That shift could create a similar—and likely more devastating—impact. Fueling jets with vegetable oil is an even worse idea than fueling cars, says Searchinger. Oil production requires even more land than starches do and new sources of vegetable oil would likely cause soybean and palm oil expansion in the tropics. “You could have staggering environmental effects if, for example, half of the aviation fuel is supposed to come from biofuels by 2050,” he explains.

Either way, it’s clear that the RFS presents an important crossroads for the future of biofuel production—and the land on which it is farmed. As study co-author Lark put it: “Decisions made this year have the potential to impact our climate and landscape for decades to come.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/02/14/how-corn-ethanol-for-biofuel-fueled-climate-change/feed/ 6 https://civileats.com/2022/01/06/dust-growing-problem-farmland-pollution-soil-cover-crops-tillage/ https://civileats.com/2022/01/06/dust-growing-problem-farmland-pollution-soil-cover-crops-tillage/#comments Thu, 06 Jan 2022 09:00:41 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=45130 Dust storms aren’t unusual in these areas, but they typically occur in the spring and at a smaller scale. And yet, as a two-decade drought persists in the West, scientists are concerned that they could become even more prevalent. This is, after all, Dust Bowl terrain. “It was never easy land to begin with; climate […]

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As hurricane force, record-breaking winds blew through eastern Colorado in mid-December, the skies took on an eerie sepia glow. Visibility dropped to almost zero as a massive dust storm roiled through the Great Plains states, impacting 100 million people. Two weeks later, high winds and severe drought led to the devastating Marshall wildfire in urban northern Colorado.

Dust storms aren’t unusual in these areas, but they typically occur in the spring and at a smaller scale. And yet, as a two-decade drought persists in the West, scientists are concerned that they could become even more prevalent. This is, after all, Dust Bowl terrain. “It was never easy land to begin with; climate change is just going to make it more difficult,” says Becky Bolinger, a Colorado state climatologist who shared a warning on Twitter about the possibility of a dust event the day before the storm.

As the percentage of dust in the air increases, so do hospital visits for respiratory complications, as well as dust-borne diseases such as Valley Fever and meningococcal meningitis.

Dust is a growing concern for a number of reasons. As the climate-fueled drought across the western half of the country continues and irrigation sources likely become limited on farms—resulting, potentially in the increasing the amount of bare, fallowed land—researchers are working hard to identify dust hot spots and how they are linked to agriculture.

As the percentage of dust in the air increases, so do hospital visits for respiratory complications, as well as dust-borne diseases such as Valley Fever and meningococcal meningitis. Traffic accidents are also a growing concern across the western U.S., where dust affects road visibility. In the last two decades, car crash victims and insurance companies have shown an interest in holding farmers accountable for poor practices that created dust sources—but their liability is hard to prove.

Importantly, many of today’s dust events are region-wide phenomena. All fall, throughout eastern Colorado, “it’s really been bone dry,” says Bolinger. “I’m not sure there was much that agricultural communities could have done to mitigate the amount of dust that was up in the air.”

At the same time, tillage has increased in the region in recent years as farmers work to combat a growing number of herbicide-resistant weeds, explains Eugene Kelly, a soil scientist at Colorado State University.

During the unprecedented December storm, satellite imagery captured dozens of sites in the southeastern corner of Colorado and the Oklahoma panhandle where the dust was first lofted into the air, a region known among dust researchers as an active source area. Eastern Colorado soils are 70 percent windblown loess, but cultivation, grazing, construction, and roads—anything that destabilizes the soil—can generate dust, says Kelly. “These episodic events are really damaging because they can move an awful lot of material,” he adds.

Still, scientists are working to understand “the chaotic cascade of dynamics that causes a dust storm to initiate a particular point in space and a particular point in time,” says Thomas Gill, a dust researcher at University of Texas at El Paso. Nevertheless, his research points to agriculture as an important source to watch.

Continued advances in modeling capabilities—and soon data from satellites to be launched in 2022 and 2023—not only promise to make pinpointing dust sources more routine, but also to enhance dust forecasting.

Gill co-authored a 2020 study using data from satellite imagery to characterize sources of dust in the Southern Great Plains. It showed that the Great Plains contained seven times more dust points than the Chihuahuan desert (over 1,200 compared to 187). Cultivated fields comprised 43 percent of them, while shrublands and grasslands combined contained 40 percent.

As the public’s interest in air quality grows, as evidenced by Purple Air’s network of over 10,000 air quality monitoring devices, researchers are eager to identify the dustiest sources to inform policymakers. And they will soon have new tools available. Continued advances in modeling capabilities—and soon data from satellites to be launched in 2022 and 2023—not only promise to make pinpointing dust sources more routine, but also to enhance dust forecasting. What that will mean for agriculture is harder to predict.

Monitoring Dust

Without a dedicated dust monitoring network, researchers have long relied on the two nationwide air quality sensor networks and happenstance satellite imagery.

One network was designed to monitor the particles that contribute to haze near national parks in order to maintain clear views. The other network, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Chemical Speciation Network sensors, are located predominantly in urban areas to implement the National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

“These were never designed to monitor dust,” says Jenny Hand, an air quality researcher at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Notably, a small percentage of the ground-based sensors from both networks are located in or near agricultural areas.

Still, the data these networks generate has shed light on modern dust dynamics. Two sizes of dust are typically monitored—PM2.5 and PM10, shorthand for particle micrometer diameters. In recent years, regulatory effort has focused largely on the smaller PM2.5 particles, which can penetrate deeper into the lungs than PM10. While interest has shifted to the health concerns of PM2.5, PM10 is still a problem. Exposure can aggravate heart disease and asthma and damage lung tissue. Recent research shows that long-term exposure to PM10 can also increase the severity and mortality of COVID-19. For example, a recent study found the relative risk of hospitalization for a range of conditions significantly increased after a dust storm in El Paso.

In fact, the nationwide decline in PM 2.5, as a result of the regulation of combustion, is an often-overlooked success story. But particulate matter is an ongoing concern, for example, in several parts of farm country.

While we don’t have the ability to identify the exact sources of the dust, agriculture is likely the cause given the seasonality of the dust, which is often heavy during harvest time.

Hand co-authored a 2019 analysis of dust particles sized between 2.5 and 10 micrometers, called “coarse mass”, between 2000-2016. The study revealed that California’s Central Valley, along with southwest Arizona and parts of the central U.S.—all agricultural areas—are coarse mass hotspots. And while we don’t have the ability to identify the exact sources of the dust, agriculture is likely the cause given the seasonality of the dust, which is often heavy during harvest time, explains Hand.

Last year, Hand and colleagues used satellite imagery to detect a 5 percent increase in airborne dust every year in the Great Plains between 2000 and 2018. Not only has cropland coverage increased by 5–10 percent in the same region, but increases in dust have been found to coincide with the harvest and planting of dominant crops—notably, soybeans in Iowa and corn in the southern Great Plains.

“Marginal lands are the ones being developed [as farmland],” says study co-author Andy Lambert, currently a physical meteorologist at the Naval Research Laboratory. All the best farmland has long been in production and prices have been high for corn and soy crops in recent years offer a greater financial incentive than the programs such as Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to leave the land undeveloped. As a result, adds Lambert, “Grassland is being developed at much higher rate than it used to be.”

Improving Technology

Scientists have been able to detect dust storms with satellites for over 55 years—but only if the satellites had the right sensors and were in the right place at the right time. For example, one of the most commonly used satellites for recording dust only takes one image at mid-day over the entire U.S. Yet dust storms often kick up in the late afternoon. When it comes to satellite imagery, there has long been trade-offs between the frequency of images, spatial reliability, and even the accessibility of the data, explains Gill.

But that is swiftly changing. NASA is upping its air quality monitoring considerably over the next year. The Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (dubbed EMIT), scheduled for launch to the International Space Station in May, will produce maps of the minerals transported from dust-producing regions. In December 2022, NASA is scheduled to launch a new satellite called TEMPO, which promises to further enhance not only the search for specific dust sources, but also other agricultural air pollutants, including nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and formaldehyde. TEMPO will make hourly observations and produce a new dust source map for North America, which will help scientists track dust plumes backwards to their sources.

Whether improved technology will alter land use policy or prompt more regulatory enforcement of dust-prone agricultural areas is yet to be seen.

And earlier this year, Gill and colleagues demonstrated how “CubeSats,” a constellation of over 200 nano-satellites orbiting close to Earth, can capture plume development in the Chihuahuan Desert. The images showed numerous distinct point sources, essentially 8 percent of the focus area was eroding.

Will More Science Bring More Regulation?

Whether all this improved technology will alter land use policy or prompt more regulatory enforcement of dust-prone agricultural areas is yet to be seen. For starters, little has been done in farm country to enforce the current air quality standards.

For example, California’s San Joaquin Valley is home to a great deal of the state’s farmland and is one of the primary areas that has experienced increased air quality standard exceedances since 2017. According to data obtained on the California Air Resources Board website, PM10 values in the district have steadily gotten worse over the last few years.

In 2020, 18 of the 21 PM-10 monitors in the San Joaquin Valley Air Basin exceeded the 24-hour maximum standard at least once, and often several times throughout the fall months that correspond to harvest—a typically dry period when the soil is disturbed. One site had air that exceeded the safety limit for a total of 36 days in mid-August through early November. On one day in September 2020, the PM10 reading topped 480—over three times the EPA standard.

The monitors gauging PM 2.5 in the air in the valley showed similar numbers. In 2020, 37 out of 45 PM 2.5 monitors exceeded the standards. In 2021, it was 28 out of 31.

“The San Joaquin Air Pollution District has a very hands-off approach in how it chooses to regulate agricultural sources,” says Brent Newell, senior attorney focused on food and farming at Public Justice, a national legal advocacy organization that works on civil rights and environmental justice. “When it does, the regulations are milquetoast.” For example, to comply with the rule, Regulation VIII, adopted in 1993, which governed directly emitted PM10 particles from agricultural operations and roads, farmers were only required to check boxes on a menu of actions that were basically what they were already doing, such as water or oil down roads or reduce the speed limit, says Newell.

Soil degradation is becoming a chronic problem, says Kelly. He argues that the amount of dust in the atmosphere offers a way to take the pulse of ecosystems.

Paul Cort, an attorney with Earthjustice who unsuccessfully challenged the agricultural dust control measures in the San Joaquin Valley in 2009, agrees. “To the extent any regulation has occurred, it’s been done in a way that is super flexible to the point of being almost toothless,” he says. If it’s dust, he says, the odds are good that it’s coming from agriculture.

“No one is arguing it comes from construction or road dust or from some other source,” says Cort. What’s more, there’s little public concern about PM10, which is often seen as simply airborne soil, and part and parcel of farming communities. “There’s some public perception that that’s not the pollution we need to be worried about. [That] it’s just dirt,” he says.

But soil degradation is becoming a chronic problem, says Kelly. He argues that the amount of dust in the atmosphere offers a way to take the pulse of ecosystems. “What’s happening now is we’re getting much larger events, not only in terms of the wind speeds, but over much larger geographic areas,” he says. And, he adds, it will take decades for the soils to recover from the ongoing drought.

Kelly suggests that a large-scale, multi-agency effort—one that combines satellite imagery, climate models, historical data, and new sensors is needed to identify the most vulnerable landscapes—and potentially stop farming them, at least for the time being.  “We need to get to the point where we can identify these areas and say we cannot put these lands into production because they are too risky,” he says.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/01/06/dust-growing-problem-farmland-pollution-soil-cover-crops-tillage/feed/ 4 https://civileats.com/2021/07/27/as-carbon-markets-reward-new-efforts-will-regenerative-farming-pioneers-be-left-in-the-dirt/ https://civileats.com/2021/07/27/as-carbon-markets-reward-new-efforts-will-regenerative-farming-pioneers-be-left-in-the-dirt/#comments Tue, 27 Jul 2021 08:00:21 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=42703 Ellis’s land, pieced together over a number of years, had several previous owners. One native pasture was severely overgrazed. “Another pasture is currently in the ICU being restored to native grasses,” she says. However, in May, Ellis documented 20 different plant species in one square meter of a recovered native pasture on the ranch. And […]

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Meredith Ellis views her family’s cattle ranch in Rosston, Texas, as a giant experiment in how to store more carbon in the soil, improve water quality, and maximize biodiversity. In recent years, Ellis, who works with her father, GC Ellis, has been adding warm-season cover crops to winter wheat fields, rotating the cattle between pastures more frequently, and leaving the grass much higher to build more soil carbon and habitat for wildlife.

Ellis’s land, pieced together over a number of years, had several previous owners. One native pasture was severely overgrazed. “Another pasture is currently in the ICU being restored to native grasses,” she says. However, in May, Ellis documented 20 different plant species in one square meter of a recovered native pasture on the ranch. And she regularly shares videos featuring crystal-clear water running off her land, bees pollinating blooming plants on the pasture, and the owls and wild turkeys she has spotted on the land. But it’s the black, organic matter-filled soil that she’s especially proud of. And she joined a pilot research project that first sampled 40 locations on her fields in 2019 to measure carbon—and document grass type, soil type, the number of cattle grazing, and the weather—to model carbon sequestered. They will sample the soil again at the five-year mark (in 2024).

And yet, even if their soil has already sequestered large quantities of carbon, Ellis’s land won’t be eligible for credits from many of the carbon credit companies—because of the fact that the carbon is already in the soil.

Many hope that carbon markets are uniquely positioned to do what voluntary government incentive programs, such as the Conservation Stewardship Program or Environmental Quality Incentives Programs, have not—galvanize a widespread transition to soil-building practices at the massive scale needed to soak up significant quantities of atmospheric carbon and slow, or mitigate, global climate change. The enthusiasm stems in part from the growing number of companies making voluntary pledges to achieve “net zero,” a balance between emissions produced and removed from the atmosphere.

The National Academy of Sciences estimates that regenerative agriculture can sequester 250 million tons of carbon dioxide in the U.S. annually, or around 4 percent of the country’s emissions. And, according to an analysis published in January, global demand for voluntary carbon offsets could increase by a factor of 15 by 2030 and 100 by 2050. Since May 2020, more than 2,100 companies have promised through the United Nations’ Race to Zero initiative to reduce their net emissions to zero by 2050 through various methods, including carbon offsets.

Indigo Carbon, Nori, TruCarbon, Bayer Carbon Initiative, and Nutrien are just a few of the most high-profile existing carbon credit companies. And they have been emboldened by the Biden Administration’s Growing Climate Solutions Act, which will allocate $4 million to help support those markets to get off the ground.

Ellis’s land isn’t eligible for most of the credits those companies are offering because of a concept known as “additionality,” which means that, since she has already adopted regenerative practices, she and other pioneering farmers can’t get paid for them. And she’s not alone. Most of these markets exist to pay farmers who agree to adopt new carbon-storing practices, so although the most experienced regenerative farmers took risks and invested money in establishing the practices, it will be the newbies—and primarily the largest conventional growers—that transition to these practices in the coming years who will reap the market benefit.

“[Additionality is] one of the biggest criticisms of the offset markets,” says Ben Lilliston, director of climate change and rural strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “It rubs many [people] the wrong way.”

Even though Ellis understands the market dynamics, they can make her feel defeated. “[My land is] a huge carbon sink,” she says.

Farmers sign contracts ranging from 5 to 10 years to get paid—typically around $10–15 per ton of carbon dioxide removed—to start planting cover crops, diversify their crop rotations, and reduce their tillage, or to expand the number of acres on which they utilize those practices.

Experts agree that effective market-based incentives able to encourage a greater transition to regenerative practices—on a scale necessary to reduce agriculture’s greenhouse gas footprint—would have undeniable benefits. In fact, they say that regenerative management is the only endeavor able to combat climate change, restore soil health, and improve resilience to increasingly extreme events, such as June’s record-breaking heat dome in the Pacific Northwest and the recent floods in Detroit, parts of Texas, and New York City.

At the same time, carbon offset markets are coming under ever greater scrutiny for a range of reasons—most notably, because “done poorly, carbon offsets can be a giant distraction, causing even more delays to meaningful climate action,” wrote Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown.

In fact, a proliferation of inexpensive carbon credits has so far led to more pollution in California. And there’s no guarantee the carbon will remain stored forever; a portion of the 400,000-acre Bootleg fire in southern Oregon is currently burning up trees used in a carbon offset project.

The rapidly evolving carbon credit marketplace, developed using a variety of protocols that make it difficult to compare climate impacts, has resulted in confusion over what carbon markets can and cannot accomplish. “The stakes for the climate and farmers are extraordinarily high,” said Emily Oldfield, lead author a new report on the carbon markets and agricultural soil carbon scientist at Environmental Defense Fund. As a result, many farmers are leery of all the disparate carbon credit companies. “There is tentative interest, but there’s also a lot of skepticism,” says IATP’s Lilliston.

Is it possible to create voluntary market mechanisms that could benefit veteran regenerative farmers like Ellis as well as new converts—while maintaining environmental integrity? Some companies are working to answer that question, but they’re taking decidedly different approaches.

A Revival of Carbon Offsets

Only a few years ago, carbon offset markets were fading away, says Mark Trexler, director of Climate Change Knowledge Systems at The Climatographers, a climate change advisory company in Portland, Oregon. “[They said], ‘Offsets cannot play a significant role in hitting the global targets.’ Then somebody came up with brilliant idea of ‘net zero,’ and everybody needs offsets again,” says Trexler. The only way most companies can make net zero pledges work is through offsets. “Now offsets are going to ‘save the world,’” says Trexler, noting that we haven’t solved any of the problems that bedeviled carbon markets the first time.

Markets come with a cold, hard truth, says Trexler. For offsets to meaningfully mitigate climate change, they have to differentiate between what he calls “good deeds” and legitimate, additional carbon removal. For example, because Ellis helped her land absorb carbon as part of a larger, holistic effort to improve it without a prior market incentive, her work, perversely, won’t count as an offset by most efforts.

Soils are dynamic and carbon most certainly won’t be sequestered forever. But the whole goal of the offset market is to ensure that credits translate into additional tons of carbon dioxide emissions removed from the atmosphere for as long as possible, he says. After all, companies that buy the credits are allowed to emit greenhouse gases that will stay in the atmosphere forever, says Trexler.

There is a huge financial incentive for those who have made early efforts into the offset markets—but if too many find their way in, “the environmental integrity of the market can quickly be undermined,” Trexler says, adding, “carbon offsets aren’t intended to be fair; [they] are intended to mitigate climate change.”

Debbie Reed, who helms the nonprofit Ecosystem Service Market Consortium (ESMC), agrees that additionality is an important requirement of offset markets. “Markets never pay early adopters; they don’t pay today for corn you sold yesterday,” she says. “If we don’t have an additional requirement, it does nothing to bring down atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. It’s business as usual.”

Still, the growers who have been practicing regenerative agriculture continue to build carbon that has value—and they could till up the soil or sell the land to a developer tomorrow—potentially releasing much of the carbon stored in the soil. To capture that value, ESMC, which is set to launch in September 2022, is also developing inventory accounting schemes in addition to a system for calculating new carbon offsets.

Valuing Existing Carbon Storage

Rancher Meredith Ellis has been involved in one of 12 regenerative cropland and ranching pilot projects conducted by the ESMC, which is working with a number of big companies, including McDonald’s, General Mills, and Cargill, to develop protocols to account for carbon emissions reductions throughout the supply chain. Ellis volunteers her time with the consortium to not only better understand how much carbon her practices are storing in the soil, but also in the hopes it will lead to a way to reward good stewardship over time.

ESMC is also developing a way to compensate long-time regenerative ranchers, such as Ellis, who have already achieved lower emissions through regenerative practices via Scope 3 emissions reporting. Corporations can report their greenhouse gas inventories across three different categories, called scopes, using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, developed by the World Resources Institute and its partners. Scope 1 is the organization’s directly owned or controlled emissions; Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from power generation.

Scope 3, however, includes indirect emissions from the company’s supply chain—for example, the production of wheat or the transport of sugar. Food and beverage companies often have more Scope 3 than Scope 1 emissions. In fact, 93 percent of Pepsi’s emissions are Scope 3, says Reed. ESMC has created protocols that companies can use to report the additional tons of carbon removed or reduced from the atmosphere as a result of interventions the company’s producers have put in place. As part of their pilot projects, farmers are paid $15 per ton for each additional ton of carbon dioxide removed or reduced—which is also the going rate of the carbon offset market.

“I can’t say for sure what that value [for Scope 3 assets] will be,” says Reed. “It may be nominal.” Beyond market-based approaches, ESMC hopes to see the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) find a way to compensate early adopters of regenerative practices—those who have used those practices for five years or more—because they can offer technical assistance that newcomers will need, says Reed.

Gary Price, owner of the 77 Ranch in Blooming Grove, Texas, has been working with ESMC for the last three years. He’s hopeful their supplier emissions reporting approach offers a way to account for all the carbon he and fellow regenerative ranchers sequester on their land. “It doesn’t make sense to not reward good behavior,” he says.

Unlike ESMC, some companies are looking for ways to circumvent the additionality requirement altogether. Nori, for example, issues credits to producers who have made a verified practice change any time after December 31, 2009, for each ton of carbon dioxide they’ve sequestered since then.

“We just need to agree on a [transparent and predictable] performance baseline, and anyone meeting or beating that baseline gets credit regardless of whether they’ve been doing the practices for 5 minutes or 25 years,” argues Aldyen Donnelly, co-founder of the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. “If we are serious, we want everybody to find profit in a new way of doing things,” she says.

But without additionality, Nori’s credits are not certified by the most widely used third-party registries, such as Climate Action Reserve, Verra, and Gold Standard. Each credit or Climate Reserve Tonne (CRT) represents one metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions reduction or sequestration. Most offsets are listed in these registries, which track projects and set standards and protocols for carbon accounting. To date, all the existing registries have only issued around 5 billion credits since 2002. Around 50 percent of those credits haven’t been retired or used, says Donnelly, in part due to a roughly five-year lag time between when the emission reduction occurred and the credits are issued and available for purchase.

“It’s too long for a project owner to wait to recover the costs of adopting new practices,” she says. “And buyers deem them too old when they become available.”

“Everyone agrees, [many of] the carbon registries included, that the way we’ve done this in past will not allow us to scale up,” says ESMC’s Reed. She says there has been a flurry of activity to digitize and encrypt the process, while also bringing down verification costs to make it work without abandoning credibility.

The existing credits are also dwarfed by the annual emissions from the top polluters. Just 100 fossil fuel producers have emitted nearly 1 trillion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which is over half of the total emissions released since the Industrial Revolution began in the 1750s.

Additionality has created confusion among farmers and tension among the competing market endeavors. But Reed points out that ESMC aims to generate other ecosystem service credits—including water quality, water conservation, and biodiversity habitat—that will also benefit long-term regenerative farmers. And as markets develop, Reed adds, “we can’t just be focusing on new carbon sequestration and new emissions reductions. Sooner rather than later, we have to also protect those existing carbon stocks because every ton of carbon lost is harder and more expensive to put back.”

In the meantime, the additionality requirement (or lack thereof) has led to competition and even ever-shifting qualifications at some companies, which has made some farmers wary of the markets overall. Many are also uneasy with companies such as Indigo Carbon, which require farmer data in exchange for contracts (neither ESMC or Nori do).

When Iowa soybean farmer Chris Gaesser first began talks with Indigo, he was told that just over 3,000 of his acres would qualify for payments. As experts criticized the company’s methodologies, the company changed the guidelines for what qualified as a “new practice,” and Gaesser’s number of eligible acres was whittled down to 1,400, then 800, then 200. At that point, he says he had little incentive to spend the time and energy to get the data necessary to secure the credits. (And, he adds, some of these companies’ services only have value because of the data farmers give to them.)

“There’s not a lot of excitement about carbon markets,” says Gaesser. “It’s such a new thing and the regulations change so quickly. Everybody and their dog outside of agriculture feels like trying to get into the carbon market to get that money,” he adds. His father and business partner, Ray Gaesser, added, “everybody up the line wants their 15–20 percent cut and there’s little left by the time it gets to the farmer.”

Given the confusion and frustration, Gaesser expects growers will simply wait to see which carbon market best succeeds—but that will likely delay any large-scale transition to regenerative practices.

Rethinking the Market

The first voluntary carbon market in the U.S.—the Chicago Climate Exchange, which ran from 2003 to 2010—failed to gain traction because demand cratered after the U.S. refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Nori’s Donnelly argues that the whole offset system to date hasn’t worked, even as she acknowledges that she is one of many who have been desperately trying to make them work for 15 years.

Donnelly has been looking to past environmental successes for inspiration. “We did get lead out of gas, we did get sulfur out of diesel fuel, and we did get ozone-depleting substances out of refrigerants,” she adds. But all those examples involved governments regulating markets and placing caps on the individual pollutants—something that the U.S. has been unwilling to do when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.

In lieu of a cap on emissions, Donnelly advocates for regulations that mandate all suppliers of energy and chemical products—including fertilizer makers—and building products report and reduce their virgin fossil carbon content and losses in their global supply chain, at the rate required to achieve net zero by 2050. “This approach is consistent with every successful pollution reduction and energy efficiency success story in our past,” she says.

A cap is necessary for the carbon market to benefit both the environment and farmers, advocates say, because it’s the only lasting way to limit emissions. “You don’t have to worry about additionality in a capped system,” says Trexler. “Without that, you have to worry about the environmental integrity of every ton of emissions.” Further, he questions whether there has ever been a societal problem that was solved without policy and regulation. “I can’t think of any,” he says.

And farmers aren’t going to shift their practices without a significant incentive. “Without a cap, there is little likelihood that the price will ever rise to a level that shifts farmer behavior,” says Lilliston.

As Trexler sees it, a carbon tax would be more effective at cutting emissions. “Why aren’t farmers being taxed for the loss of ecosystem services if they are letting soil carbon disappear?” he asks. A carbon tax would include the environmental cost of a company’s products made by fossil fuels—and thereby encourage companies to make operations more efficient. But carbon taxes have proven unpopular—leading in some cases to mass protests—especially when it’s applied to a commonly used commodity, such as fuel.

Spurred by public pressure and increasing evidence of the climate crisis’ impact on their bottom lines, an increasing number of corporations are committed to reducing their emissions and there is a growing fervor to make carbon offset markets work. “This is the only investment we can make that mitigates climate change and creates more productive soil—there is nothing else that is mitigation and adaptation at same time,” says Donnelly.

Despite the urgency, Reed is working slowly to build the ESMC market in an effort to ensure it has integrity. Not only do companies need to avoid the risks of greenwashing claims, she fears any “producers who get burned will not come back to the table very quickly. That’s a huge liability for all of us in this space.” For that reason, carbon markets are just one of many tools that should be employed to address climate change, says Reed.

“We’ve got to identify the value of the land besides just producing food and fiber,” says rancher Price. The carbon markets offer a way to do that. “It’s a great opportunity for agriculture. I hope we don’t miss it,” he says.

Ellis agrees. She argues that if we can figure out how to ensure that markets pay for carbon sequestration or even practices that improve water quality and wildlife habitat, it will give ranchers something to be proud of and an additional way to make money besides subdividing and selling their land. “Sometimes I feel like, as usual, us little guys are going to get left behind,” she says.

And yet keeping “the little guys” on the land is key, as land prices soar, hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland is lost each year in the U.S. to development, and the lure to sell the ranch may be stronger than ever. “We can’t get this ecosystem back once it’s developed,” she says.

This story is part of a series of articles on regenerative agriculture produced with support from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2021/07/27/as-carbon-markets-reward-new-efforts-will-regenerative-farming-pioneers-be-left-in-the-dirt/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2021/05/13/to-simplify-or-diversify-on-todays-farms-that-is-the-question/ Thu, 13 May 2021 08:00:59 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=41525 Currently, agriculture faces a triple threat from climate change, biodiversity loss, and global food insecurity. To better prepare for future shocks and stressors, a new study from researchers at University of California at Berkeley analyzed the impacts of two opposing trends in farming—simplification and diversification. All over the world, the dominant trend in agriculture has […]

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Modern agriculture has had a dramatic impact on the environment. Clearing forests and prairie led to the loss of biodiversity and habitat, as well as traditional knowledge and practices. The last 100 years of simplifying the food system has yielded fewer producers, higher yields, and increased profits. And it’s come at a cost—most notably, a lack of resilience.

Currently, agriculture faces a triple threat from climate change, biodiversity loss, and global food insecurity. To better prepare for future shocks and stressors, a new study from researchers at University of California at Berkeley analyzed the impacts of two opposing trends in farming—simplification and diversification.

All over the world, the dominant trend in agriculture has been to simplify—shifting production from natural, complex ecosystems to a more centralized control of homogenized fields. The result is a rapid decline of crop and livestock diversity, increased concentration of the global seed market, and privatized plant genetic resources.

Diversifying processes, on the other hand, capitalize on biodiversity and ecosystem services rather than capital-intensive technologies. These systems, the researchers write, “leverage ‘nature’s technologies’ … rather than capital-intensive technologies subject to privatization.”

The researchers compared how these two approaches fare when faced with five distinct agricultural challenges: foodborne pathogens, drought, marginal lands, labor availability and land access and tenure. They found that, in all cases, diversification leads to resilience in the face of the triple threat mentioned above.

The study’s lead author Margiana Petersen-Rockney, a graduate student at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, spoke to Civil Eats about the need to diversify farms, both ecologically and economically. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are the impacts of simplified agricultural systems?

Simplified systems—otherwise known as conventional or industrial agriculture—rely on a narrow range of high-yield crop and livestock varieties and on non-renewable, proprietary, synthetic inputs, such as propriety seeds or agrichemicals. It’s been very good at making a few firms a lot of money. It promises greater control, uniformity, and profit. But we find that these advantages often disappear or fade over time. Just one example—if you are planting a [crop] that has been bred or engineered to be drought resistant, it’s a great way to build adaptive capacity for drought. But what if you have flood? A lack of diversity makes the whole system vulnerable to problems.

The simplifying system also creates externalities that can exacerbate environmental harms and social inequalities. People who work in food and agriculture industries rely on public food assistance at rates 50 percent higher than those not in the food system. As a result, the people who feed us can’t feed their own families. Yet safety nets like [federal] crop insurance, supported by taxpayer funds, prop up this system.

How is the triple threat facing humanity different from the typical climate, ecological, socioeconomic, and political challenges that farmers have always faced?

Simplified agricultural systems are more vulnerable to climate change impacts, and that leaves markets vulnerable, too. In 2012, a drought in the Midwest caused corn yields to decrease by 25 percent. There was little genetic diversity because everyone planted the same variety of corn, and with little diversity in farming practices, some of which could have stored more soil moisture, the drought had a massive impact.

The regional drought ripped through international markets, causing a 50 percent spike in global corn prices and a subsequent increase in food insecurity. This “supply chain reaction” exacerbated problems that farmers were already facing—like unequal market access and income inequality, which are unevenly distributed across populations.

The bottom line is that farmworkers are doing the most dangerous work [in simplified systems] for the lowest pay—for example, working through catastrophic wildfire smoke or during a pandemic. We started this work before COVID-19, but the pandemic illustrates the fact that adaptive capacity in these systems is really brittle and narrow, not only to known threats but to new threats we haven’t even thought about before.

Can you offer some examples of diversified systems?

A classic example would be diversifying production practices on the farm to intentionally increase biodiversity. For example, adding cover crops can create a mulch that suppresses weed growth and increases soil moisture, and ultimately increases soil carbon when it decays. If a farmer adds livestock or alternative crops, they can diversify both ecologically and economically. For this to happen at scale beyond an individual farmer, we need more diverse markets.

Wouldn’t diversified systems involve more labor and more complex work?

If we just diversify farming practices—complex rotations, integrating livestock, silvopasture—that could add more labor on farmworkers. But there are potential benefits. Much of farm labor is seasonal, migrant work done largely by undocumented farmworkers. Our immigration policy for the last 100-plus years was structured to facilitate a constant stream of migrant, rights-less workers, whose labor subsidizes our agrifood system.

With diverse food systems, we could potentially offer year-round employment instead of the need to follow harvests around the country. If a farm is highly diversified, different tasks could be integrated throughout the year. We can’t just diversify on one axis alone, however. We need to also shift power to frontline workers, to be able to identify and address problems on the ground before they magnify. Farmworkers need to be acknowledged as handlers of knowledge and compensated for the professionals they are.

Was there anything surprising when you explored how simplified versus diversified systems respond to the 5 challenges you investigated?

While researching marginal land, we found some historical details about how governments, NGOs, and other large-scale actors labeled some lands as marginal in strategic ways to, for example, justify removing the people who were using that land. This isn’t just a historical phenomenon. We still see these narratives of “underutilized” or “degraded” land used around the world to garner development funding and international support for removing small scale subsistence farmers, who are deemed unproductive or even blamed for environmental degradation. Often these small-scale farmers are replaced by the most highly simplified kind of agriculture: plantations—whether it be palm oil, or rubber trees, or soybeans.

Even more surprising is that there is a lot of money to be made today by purchasing these “marginal” lands. Precisely because they’re not very productive, financial actors like investment firms and university endowments can buy this land cheaply, put infrastructure on it to make it productive in the short run (like expensive irrigation equipment), and then sell it for a handsome profit. These field practices are not only highly simplifying, but this land ownership structure consolidates farmland into the hands of a few and takes that land out of the hands of actual farmers. For example, Harvard University owns farmland all over the world and Bill Gates is the largest private farmland owner in the U.S.

What would it take to shift to broad and nimble (diversified) approaches rather than brittle and narrow (simplified) approaches?

First, trace externalities [the costs to the environment, public health, etc. not paid by the producer] back to their roots. What are the incentives we have in place currently to do the wrong thing, and how can we shift those so that farmers do the right thing?

We have almost nothing in the U.S. that is more socialized than our agrifood system. But it is structured to incentivize simplification, not diversification. For example, only a few crops qualify for [federal subsidized] crop insurance. And most farms don’t qualify for these programs if you want multiple crops or crops and livestock together. While it remains a fraction of commodity crop insurance, both in funding and utilization, a whole farm option for diversified farms does exist.

At the same time, not only does the federal government spend about as much for farm conservation as the entire EPA budget, but it spends public, taxpayer money on agricultural research, the vast majority of which supports further simplifying our farming systems (and creating externalities). Yet once that basic research is done, it’s very often privatized, and then the products are sold at high prices to farmers who often have little choice but to buy them. A great example is how a university researcher helped develop herbicide-resistant crops. In the Midwest, glyphosate or Roundup is paired with herbicide-resistant “Roundup Ready” soybean seed. Soon, almost all farmers planted them so that the soybeans that weren’t glyphosate-ready wouldn’t get killed by neighbors spraying the herbicide. Now, the vast majority of soybeans are one variety from one company [Bayer].

What are the three takeaways you hope policymakers get from the paper?

Crises produce moments of opportunity. Process matters. And diversifying agrifood systems gives us more options in the future.

Can advocating for diverse strategies help overcome the cultural divide?

Farmers and ranchers are skeptical of environmentalists or “urban elites” telling them what to do. Having grown up on a farm, “diversification” feels like a more culturally appropriate language that is more of a calling in rather than calling out.

The problem we run into in the U.S. is that farmers have been blamed for environmental problems. Assigning blame is not going to move us forward, but creating opportunities to invite farmers to create a new future will produce greater sustainability and equitability. I grew up on a farm. I saw again and again that these environmental problems, like climate change, are not so much just environmental problems or knowledge problems; they are really power problems.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2021/02/18/can-bridging-the-gap-between-landowners-and-farming-tenants-help-improve-soil-health/ Thu, 18 Feb 2021 09:00:18 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=40529 “I have never farmed in my life,” says Priest, who teaches at a boarding school in upstate New York. Traditionally, he tends to leave the decision-making up to the farmers. But recently, he’s been trying to find ways to encourage his renters to stop tilling their soil and plant cover crops—practices that he’s learned can […]

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In 2015, Joel Priest and his sister inherited 738 acres of northern Illinois land, making them fifth-generation landowners. Priest’s great-great-great grandfather acquired an initial parcel of land in the 1850s and it has been farmed by two different renting families for three and four generations, respectively, currently in a corn-soy rotation—an agreement forged by handshake in the 1940s.

“I have never farmed in my life,” says Priest, who teaches at a boarding school in upstate New York. Traditionally, he tends to leave the decision-making up to the farmers. But recently, he’s been trying to find ways to encourage his renters to stop tilling their soil and plant cover crops—practices that he’s learned can improve soil health and prevent erosion and runoff.

“My primary interest in doing this is to pass the land on to my sons and be able to say that there are fewer toxins, more earthworms, and more carbon sequestered than there was before,” says Priest. The biggest hurdle, he says, is simply trying to figure out how best to have the conversation.

As a non-operating landowner (NOL), Priest is in a tricky situation. He doesn’t want to force his renters to change their practices, and maintaining their positive, long-standing relationship is a primary concern.

Priest isn’t alone in facing this conundrum. NOLs are an elusive group, who often live hundreds to thousands of miles away from the farms they own. Current estimates suggest that they own 350 million acres—almost 40 percent—of U.S. farmland. The bulk have inherited the land they own and about 20 percent of them rent to a family member. And yet, just how much influence they are able to have over how the land is farmed is a murky question. And it’s a topic of increasing interest among researchers and policy analysts.

Farmers who use conservation practices that improve the health of soil, air, and water are far from a majority in the U.S According to the 2017 Ag Census, no-till practices were used on roughly one-third of the 24.3 million harvested crop acres and cover crops were used on only 900,000, or 3.7 percent, of those acres. One overarching question is whether that adoption is due to a lack of interest among landowners.

For example, could more incentive programs for conservation management that targeted landowners help reduce persistent nitrogen and phosphorous runoff in the Upper Mississippi river basin? A group of scientists, including Linda Prokopy, a natural resources social scientist at Purdue University, explored that question in a recent publication. Priest reached out to Prokopy’s team to discuss how to encourage conservation practices among renting farmers.

Other research teams are also eager for insights into NOLs. A 2020 survey conducted by the American Farmland Trust called into question long-standing assumptions that NOLs care about the financial bottom line more than the health of the land itself. The survey found clearly that NOLS support their renters’ use of conservation practices. And while most respondents said they trust the farmers they work with and want to continue renting to them, 50 percent or more of respondents in eight key farming states indicated that they would be willing to include lease provisions related to specific conservation practices, while nearly as many said that they would be willing to require their operator to “implement soil erosion practices to improve soil health.”

One hurdle to better understanding how rental agreements impact the way land is farmed is the fact that the landowner-renter relationship is often off-limits to researchers. “There’s a reticence in farm country to engage landowners in dialogue around conservation and climate resilience,” says survey co-author Gabrielle Roesch-McNally, who directs the Women of the Land program at American Farmland Trust.

But Roesch-McNally challenges the notion that the relationship between landowners and renters is off limits. “We don’t intend to get in between landowners and renters, but we also don’t need to treat it as a holy relationship that we can’t discuss,” she adds.

Roesch-McNally and Prokopy are among the small group of researchers starting conversations between landowners and renters to make sure each party has a similar understanding about the practices and can hear the other’s concerns. If anything, the insights they’ve gained so far suggest that the factors driving upticks in conservation practices on land owned by non-operators are both cultural and financial.

Bridging the Culture Gap

As researchers start to dig into the landowner-renter relationship, what emerges is an often-sizable cultural gap.

When Priest initially brought up cover crops and no-till with his renting farmers, he says the conversation ended swiftly. One farmer said cover crops had “created havoc” for another farmer he knew and both refer to no-till farming as “farming ugly.” But Priest feels that his lack of knowledge leaves him at a disadvantage when trying to effectively make the case for conservation practices.

This type of communication gap is common, says Peggy Petrzelka, a rural sociologist at Utah State University. “The agricultural knowledge that some have and some don’t have is a huge issue,” says Petrzelka.

And since half a million women own land they don’t farm, gender also complicates the communication gap.

A renter is often the landowner’s primary source of knowledge about farming practices and other land use options—whether it’s a conservation-related program incentive or a better deal on crop insurance. For example, while Priest says the farm he owns is enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), and receives payments for buffer strips, he had never heard of Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) or the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP)—two popular federal programs for commodity grain farmers. Now, he plans to use these programs as a way to start a conversation about, for example, testing cover crops or no-till on 40 acres of their farm property to learn what kind of financial support and equipment they would need to transition the rest of the farm.

Priest is eager for information that can help him make the case for these practices—as well as the realistic trade-offs in time and effort they would require of the farmers. Better yet, he says, he’d like to form a network of other NOLs with whom to share ideas.

But Roesch-McNally says only 30 percent of NOLs survey respondents wanted targeted resources to help them make decisions on conservation practices. “How do we reach out and develop materials that reach them, or does it reach them through farmers?” she asks.

At issue is that commodity farmers are relatively homogenous—they tend to be white men in their 60s who were brought up on the land. At the same time, landowners are diverse—in their proximity to the land they own, as well as in their values, beliefs, background, and economics. And so many of these are truly absentee, Prokopy says, meaning they bought the farmland as investment, live in another state, are disengaged, and may only think about it when filing taxes. Prokopy struggles to figure out interventions that will reach such a diverse audience.

“A testimonial from a widow in Iowa isn’t going to resonate with a Millennial investment banker in San Francisco,” she says.

As it is, voluntary policies that encourage transition to conservation management have, so far, had lackluster results. Both owners and renters need an adequate incentive to make a big change. For example, federal cover crop cost-share payments are roughly, on average, $50 per acre, but additional state level programs can boost that payment amount.

“Is that money driving adoption? The answer is no,” says Naveen Adusumilli, an extension economist at Louisiana State University. “It can’t because it does not take into account the additional time and money to adopt [the practices], as well as the risk,” he says. That price also assumes the farmer won’t run into any issues when implementing the practice—which is rarely the case. As Prokopy says, “Money is necessary, but not sufficient to get someone to adopt a practice.”

Priest echoes that statement. “We really see the [financial] incentives as a deal closer, not a deal opener,” he says. Making the transition to conservation practices is really more about capturing the long-term benefits and saving money by reducing inputs such as synthetic fertilizer, he says.

Making a Long-Term Investment

In some cases, it may be the farmers who have to convince their landlords to support their investment in soil health practices. Kris Swartz, a grain farmer and soil and water conservation district supervisor in Perrysburg, Ohio, farms rented land from multiple landlords, and he says he often has to explain the benefits of practices like filter strips—which help keep nutrients out of waterways—to them. And the transient nature of land rental can be a challenge.

In an interview for AFT in June 2020, Swartz discussed the importance of secure, long-term renter-landowner agreements when it comes to boosting adoption of soil health practices.

“Conservation practices don’t have an immediate payoff; sometimes they have a five- or 10- year window until they’re really going to be beneficial,” said Swartz. “If ground is changing every few years, it’s hard for a farmer to make an investment. And it’s hard for a landowner, too, if they’re changing people all the time. So, I think any kind of incentive or practice that could encourage more long-term relationships between farmers and landlords would benefit conservation.”

“What’s really helped me is that I have long-term relationships with all of them; we have a mutual trust. I treat every acre like it’s my own and they know that,” he added.

Of course, not all farmers have access to the technical training required to adopt conservation practices, and that lack of technical capacity is a big challenge, says Adusumilli. Focusing on a few big landowners—for example, Bill Gates, who now owns 242,000 acres and is the largest landowner in the U.S.—can arguably have a much greater impact.

“Engaging the landowner definitely has its perks,” says Adusumilli, but there are more small landowners who also have a role to play and require more help to make the transition. And it would arguably be better to find a way to ensure that the land would be farmed using conservation practices in perpetuity. “We do all these meetings and all these farmer visits, and the ratio of conservation practices to total cropland is less than 1 percent. How likely are these practices to stay in conservation?” he asks.

For this reason, researchers agree that formalizing long-term lease agreements—and writing conservation practices in to the agreement—holds promise. Adusumilli published a 2019 study demonstrated that short-term lease contracts do not contribute to investments in soil conservation.

Priest is motivated by a desire to help fight the climate crisis—as long as it doesn’t ruin the long-standing family connection to his renting farmers. He doesn’t plan to formalize the agreement anytime soon to avoid making them feel like the relationship is too transactional. “I just hope that the trust and mutual respect will also extend to the negotiations we ultimately want to have with them,” he adds.

“People want to keep the peace,” adds Petrzelka about the women landowners she interviewed.

And that’s where Roesch-McNally sees opportunities. “Can we move past the handshake and encourage more formal agreements around risk-sharing between both parties?” she asks. “I think that’s worth exploring.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2021/01/12/why-arent-usda-conservation-programs-paying-farmers-more-to-improve-their-soil/ https://civileats.com/2021/01/12/why-arent-usda-conservation-programs-paying-farmers-more-to-improve-their-soil/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2021 09:00:36 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=40021 While Rosmann is pleased that more farmers there are adopting cover crops to reduce erosion and runoff, it still only amounts to roughly 4 percent of Iowa farms. And he laments that the pace of change toward conservation practices is simply too slow given the region’s mounting water quality concerns. Part of the problem, he […]

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Ron Rosmann’s 700-acre certified organic grain and livestock farm in Shelby County, Iowa is an island in a sea of very large conventional soy or corn operations. Farmers in the area don’t typically pay a lot of attention to the health of their soil—which has, on occasion, eroded onto his property. Others in the area operate concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). It’s not uncommon, for example, for one of his neighbor’s cattle manure lagoons to overflow into a nearby creek.

While Rosmann is pleased that more farmers there are adopting cover crops to reduce erosion and runoff, it still only amounts to roughly 4 percent of Iowa farms. And he laments that the pace of change toward conservation practices is simply too slow given the region’s mounting water quality concerns.

Part of the problem, he says, is that federal Conservation programs, such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), don’t offer enough incentives to help farmers make a long-lasting transition to more sustainable practices. “We don’t have the policies and incentives aligned to do things differently,” he says.

A new study backs up Rosmann’s view. Researchers reviewed the farm projects that received EQIP funding between 2009 and 2018 and found that those with the greatest potential to improve soil and environmental health represented between 2 and 27 percent of the total dollars spent. Researchers looked at $7 billion in government spending over the course of the decade and found that soil-boosting practices represented a very small sliver of the pie: In fiscal year 2018, for instance, it represented less than 1 percent of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) total annual expenditures.

“It’s not as much money as you would think given the buzz and hype around soil health,” says study co-author Kate Tully, a researcher at the University of Maryland.

Beyond hype and buzz, however, many in the science and agriculture communities are pointing to soil health as key to helping farms navigate the coming decades. And, as the incoming Biden administration has pledged to make climate change mitigation a central facet of its agriculture agenda, some in the conservation world see a potential opening.

“The time is ripe to rethink and refocus all the working lands programs, and certainly EQIP at the top,” said Duane Hovorka, agricultural program director at the conservation group Izaak Walton League of America.

EQIP Program Strayed From Original Goals

EQIP, which has been around since 1996, is a cost-share program that was originally designed to deliver improved water quality, increase soil health, create wildlife habitat, and mitigate against drought and weather volatility. But as the authors of the new study found, it has often strayed from those goals in recent years.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, catalogued and ranked the projects funded by the EQIP program and singled out those that “have the potential to reduce erosion and soil disturbance and or increase agrobiodiversity.”

“Half the funding had no relation to soil health,” says study co-author Andrea Basche, a researcher at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. For example, EQIP supports only about 10 percent of the cover crops farmers plant, which as of 2017 was roughly 15 million acres, despite the fact that they have been shown to bring a range of soil and water quality benefits. (Some states, however, have made more direct support for cover crop adoption a priority.)

The study also found that some practices supported by EQIP are generally considered counterproductive to soil health. The biggest surprise to Tully was that EQIP funds practices such as deep tillage, for example, to reclaim toxic soils, but “deep tillage goes against everything this program is supposed to be doing,” she says. While it may bury toxic compounds, such as heavy metals, deep tillage often leads to significant erosion.

EQIP has generally been a popular program with farmers. Between 2009 and 2018, more than 384,000 farmers and ranchers received contracts to support conservation efforts on more than 115 million acres. In fiscal year 2018 alone, over $1.87 billion in financial and technical assistance supported at least 42,800 EQIP contracts covering more than 13.6 million acres.

But when you look at the top 10 practices—including water storage facilities, irrigation systems, fencing, or livestock pipelines—six were related to building or improving structures and facilities; not many were farm field practices supporting soil health, adds Tully.

“I came away thinking we could invest our dollars in a way that would have broader public benefits,” says Basche.

Program Now Pays for CAFO Cleanup

Tim Gibbons, communications director for the farm member organization Missouri Rural Crisis Center, pinpoints the 2002 Farm Bill as the moment when EQIP veered from its original conservation intent into something broader.

“EQIP started in 1996, [it was] put forth and championed by family farm and environmental protection groups,” says Gibbons. Initially, the program offered to split the cost of projects up to $50,000 [over a 5-year period] and was not initially open to CAFOs.

However, Hovorka explains that the 2002 Farm Bill eliminated the restriction on large CAFOs, raised payment caps to $450,000 over five years, and reserved 60 percent of EQIP funding for livestock practice, including waste management facilities. When CAFO waste lagoons scored poorly for EQIP funds, NRCS state offices started setting aside some of their EQIP money specifically for CAFO applications so they only competed against each other.

In 2018, federal EQIP funding going to livestock operations was reduced from 60 to 50 percent. But public dollars are still going to offset the waste management costs of industrial livestock operations—something Gibbons and others find troubling given the hidden environmental costs of CAFOs.

“Our tax dollars should not go to mitigate the negative environmental impacts that industrial factor farms are creating,” he says. Essentially, Tully says, CAFOs get paid not to pollute.

Missouri is home to roughly 100,000 family farms and 500 CAFOs, according to Gibbons. In recent years, he’s has served on the state technical committee for the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS) in Missouri and worked to limit the percentage of EQIP dollars going to CAFOs.

“We want to see the 50 percent of EQIP dollars meant for livestock operations to go to pasture grazing as opposed to waste management,” he says. The committee’s efforts are working, he says, reducing the amount of EQIP funding going to corporate, factory farm livestock waste projects in Missouri from 35 percent to 15 percent over the last few years.

As Gibbons sees it, independent producers are more likely to steward their land to be more resilient in the face of extreme weather. “A solution to climate change is having hundreds of thousands of family farmers getting paid a price to do the best conservation and to stay on their farms and pass down to the next generation,” says Gibbons.

“That the tension in that program,” says Hovorka. “We spend some EQIP money on really good practices and help farmers implement good conservation practices, but we also spend a fairly large chunk on practices that don’t give us natural resources benefits.”

For example, farmer Ron Rosmann did explore using EQIP dollars to put in a pond recently, in hopes of irrigating his crops as the climate changes. But the NRCS team estimated the potential cost at $75,000 to $110,000 to make a 3-acre pond with a dam to drain 280 acres. Rosmann wasn’t interested in a lake, and with that hefty of a price tag, it didn’t get funded. He says the NRCS approach is often inflexible, and projects often spiral in scope—with the result that a few big projects inevitably end up competing with each other for the available money. As a result, the money may not generate the biggest conservation bang for the buck.

A National Soil Health Initiative

Beyond meaningful updates to encourage broader adoption of soil health-building practices through EQIP and the Conservation Stewardship Program, Hovorka has been advocating for a National Soil Health Initiative. It would be partly a public outreach and education effort using existing programs, such as EQIP, to help farmers create a soil health plan that would, for example, stack no-till, cover crops, diversified crop rotations, and reduced chemical inputs.

“The best thing USDA could do for farmers and natural resources is focus working lands programs on soil health,” says Hovorka. “The neat thing about soil health is it gets broad bipartisan support.” Most importantly, he adds, farmers are starting to see the economic benefits of implementing soil building practices.

Kristopher Reynolds, Midwest regional director of the American Farmland Trust, says nothing will help farmers make long-lasting transitions to conservation practices like improving their own bottom line. But, he says, there is one missing ingredient—technical assistance. Quite frankly, he notes, state conservation districts as well as NRCS have reduced the number of technical staff able to help farmers navigate how best to do things like terminate a cover crop in the spring or manage glyphosate-resistant weeds without tillage.

“Climate change has reduced the number of suitable days for planting in the Midwest,” says Reynolds. “Couple that with more frequent, larger rainfall events in spring, and it becomes challenging,” As a result, farmers find it easier to till when it’s too wet—but that necessitates tilling again to take care of compaction caused by the spring tillage.

Conservation practices require additional management, and therefore we need structures and technical staff in place to help farmers or they won’t make the transition, says Reynolds.

At the same time, farmers desperately need to more broadly adopt soil conservation practices to rein in environmental problems, such as nitrogen pollution in waterways and the annual dead zone Gulf of Mexico. “Soil health is at the nexus of climate change, human health, water quality—a lot of wicked problems,” says Tully. Making sure that government spending addresses that nexus would offer more return on investment for the billions we spend every year, adds Basche.

Rosmann agrees. And he emphasizes the urgent need to make the NRCS programs more effective. “We need transformational change,” he says. “We gotta move faster and with more incentives.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2021/01/12/why-arent-usda-conservation-programs-paying-farmers-more-to-improve-their-soil/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2021/01/06/a-new-study-on-regenerative-grazing-complicates-climate-optimism/ https://civileats.com/2021/01/06/a-new-study-on-regenerative-grazing-complicates-climate-optimism/#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2021 09:00:16 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=39973 Comparing his black soil to the red soil only yards beyond the fence he shares with his neighbor, Harris said in a recent phone call: “They look like they came from two different planets.” Now, White Oak Pastures is at the center of a larger conversation about the climate impact of beef and the power […]

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At White Oak Pastures, an eastern Georgia-based sixth-generation farm, Will Harris “went rogue” and began to transition away from industrial cattle ranching 25 years ago. Since then, Harris has been rotating organic cattle, chickens, and pigs on 3,000 acres of pasture in an effort to improve land degraded by years of conventional cotton and peanut production.

Comparing his black soil to the red soil only yards beyond the fence he shares with his neighbor, Harris said in a recent phone call: “They look like they came from two different planets.”

Will Harris walks beside his regenerative beef

Now, White Oak Pastures is at the center of a larger conversation about the climate impact of beef and the power of regenerative grazing to store carbon in the soil.

In 2019, White Oak and General Mills, which buys the ranch’s beef for its Epic jerky line, published a life-cycle analysis by Quantis, a sustainability consulting group, which claimed the farm “offsets at least 100 percent of [its] grass-fed beef carbon emissions and as much as 85 percent of the farm’s total carbon emissions.”

Beef production is a significant source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and livestock is responsible for 14.5 percent of human-caused emissions globally, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). So, the promise of a practice that offsets that methane by storing carbon in the soil is tantalizing to many consumers and industry insiders.

White Oak Pastures promoted its “carbon negative footprint” in the wake of press reports questioning the validity of carbon neutral beef amid the regenerative agriculture boom. In recent years, awareness of regenerative practices have been picking up as several groups rush to create labels and certification schemes for farms that claim to be improving the soil and working to draw carbon out of the atmosphere. With so few quantitative studies yet conducted, however, the Quantis claims yielded a fair bit of criticism. But it hadn’t been peer reviewed—until now.

In November, a group of eight scientists published a comprehensive, peer-reviewed life cycle analysis on the research done at White Oak Pastures. The findings confirm that multi-species pasture rotations sequester enough carbon in soil to create a greenhouse gas footprint that is 66 percent lower than conventional, commodity production of beef. The catch is that the regenerative approach requires 2.5 times more land.

The peer-reviewed study found that multi-species pasture rotations reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 66 percent compared to conventional, commodity beef production. The catch is that the regenerative approach requires 2.5 times more land.

The difference, says study co-author Paige Stanley, occurred because the Quantis analysts applied the rate of carbon sequestration solely to beef, while this paper included nutrient inputs and emissions from all the animals in the system.

“It’s a hell of a lot of carbon,” says study co-author Jason Rowntree, a researcher at Michigan State University. “But when you combine all of the different proteins, the emission footprint is considerably lower, with a land tradeoff that must be addressed.”

Rowntree hopes to see the approaches used on operations like White Oak scaled up to improve more land, along with simultaneous work to reduce the overall footprint of beef production.

The Study Results

The new peer-reviewed study looks at the multi-species rotational grazing done on the ranch and found that White Oak’s approach reduced net greenhouse gas emissions of the grazing system by 80 percent. Regenerative practices helped sequester 2.29 megagrams of carbon per hectare annually. To put that into context, sequestering just 1 Mg of carbon per hectare each year on half the rangeland area in California would offset 42 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, roughly the annual emissions from energy use for the state’s commercial and residential sectors.

Still, a lingering debate—about the degree to which regenerative agriculture is a climate change solution, given the added land use—predictably flared up on social media once the new paper was published. The beef over beef production can get heated. Critics were quick to note that the study did not confirm net negative greenhouse gas emissions at White Oak Pastures.

Further, some suggested widespread adoption of regenerative agriculture could drive further deforestation to meet beef demand. For example, Richard Waite, a senior researcher at World Resources Institute (WRI), pointed out that converting cropland to grazing land will sequester soil carbon for a while, but the growing global demand for crops would limit the ability to realize conversion at the massive scales needed.

For Stanley and her colleagues, the bottom line is simple—the sequestration rate is meaningful, especially since grasslands play such an important role in storing carbon. In fact, new research finds that sustainable, optimized grazing and restoration of degraded pasture will be crucial to maintain the cooling effects of grassland carbon sinks.

“People will read [the study] and take the conclusion with them that fits whatever they already think—whether it be land sparing, land sharing, rewilding, half-Earthers,” says Stanley, a University of California at Berkeley Ph.D. student, highlighting some of the more vocal conservation and food production factions.

No one is denying the improvements shown across soil health metrics, adds Stanley. But people who view food production solely through a lens of feeding up to 10 billion people by 2050 tend to focus on the land area needed to do that, she says. But improving degraded land is also a critical need for future production. And beef raised using rotational grazing is more expensive than conventional commodity beef, and that fact could reduce over demand for it. “At its core, [the argument] is more a question of values rather than whether or not things improve under [the White Oak] model,” says Stanley.

The contention surrounding regenerative agriculture’s climate benefits is complex, multi-faceted, and only heightened given efforts to create market incentives around carbon. “Part of it is putting a dollar value on [the carbon sequestered],” says Rowntree.

“The ‘regenerative’ piece, specifically, is even more contentious because there have been some unscientific claims made about the benefits of regenerative ag,” says Stanley.

Steve Rosenzweig, a soil scientist at General Mills, which funded this research, says regenerative agriculture is the best way to meet the company’s goal of reducing greenhouse gases emissions by 30 percent by 2030. “We have to be producing food while building resilience and rebuilding the health of ecosystems. Just focusing on efficiencies or maximizing production doesn’t get us to resilience or adaptation,” he adds.

Beyond Carbon

What gets lost when the debate focuses solely on carbon, however, is that rebuilding degraded soils is crucial for future food production. “Regenerative agriculture is an unqualified success, but it’s not a silver bullet to every single problem we have,” says Jon Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown.

“Regenerative agriculture is an unqualified success, but it’s not a silver bullet to every single problem we have.”

Beyond carbon, it will be important to put regenerative agriculture research into context, including which lands can best be regenerated, what other benefits does regenerative practices yield beyond carbon, and perhaps most overlooked, how can regenerative agriculture help build resilience to climate change.

Rowntree says it’s most appropriate to implement regenerative models in areas where they can help food security and sovereignty without taking away from the bigger burden of feeding a growing population. He points out that regenerative grazing systems are phenomenal in marginal landscapes. “We’re not going to go into 250-bushel corn fields and do this,” he says.

Jeff Goodwin, conservation stewardship leader at the Noble Research Institute in Ardmore, Oklahoma, agrees. “What do you do with landscapes that aren’t suited for crops for human consumption?” he asks—answering that turning it into high-quality protein and new land-based carbon sinks is a tremendous opportunity for agriculture. Urvashi Rangan, co-chair at Funders for Regenerative Agriculture, a national initiative of funders and investors promoting regenerative agriculture, agrees. “Land is a resource. We use land. We should use it well,” she adds.

The focus on carbon is understandable. Agriculture is the only one of the carbon-emitting industries that can mitigate its own emissions, says Goodwin. Yet, land-based sinks currently soak up only 24 percent of atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions, according to Project Drawdown’s latest primer, “Farming our way out of the climate crisis.”

The White Oak study demonstrates that while agricultural lands may not function as giant sponges that soak up society’s carbon pollution, regenerative techniques are also a fantastic way to reduce nitrogen runoff, improve water quality, and create and improve habitat for biodiversity, says Foley. “The focus solely on carbon misses the big picture,” he adds.

“I agree that carbon is the elephant in the room, but there’s a whole herd of other animals on the prairie that matter, too,” says Goodwin. “We’re building more diversity on the planet—increasing wildlife and pollinator habitat—and that’s a good thing,” he adds. And, he says, there is a cascading dynamic of positive responses when organic matter is increased. “The value to a producer [in the form of greater water infiltration or healthy soil microbes] is much more than we could pay them for the carbon,” he notes.

White Oak Pasture’s Harris looks beyond what he calls “scientific quibbles” over the amount of carbon sequestered. To that end, this life cycle analysis doesn’t account for the other soil, water and microbial benefits regenerative agriculture provides, neither does it account for the negative impacts of conventional beef production. The calculations around conventional beef production system has, for example, never included the cost of antibiotic resistance, even though 80 percent of antibiotics go into animal production, says Rangan. For example, she points to the human and environmental health concerns that stem from managing the manure.

“Let’s imagine how food systems can do the most good for people and the planet with the least harm into the future.”

Waite, of WRI, says he would love to see the conversation evolve from “how do we make agriculture regenerative,” as if that’s the silver bullet, to “how can we feed a growing population while greatly reducing agricultural emissions and increasing land-based carbon sinks, and building resilience to climate change.” If we do that, he says, then regenerative practices clearly fit in to the picture, but aren’t the whole picture.

Maybe, says Foley, it’s time to focus on the shared common goals around the food system, which is complicated. “Let’s imagine how food systems can do the most good for people and the planet with the least harm into the future,” he says.

For Harris, the ability of rotational grazing to also retain water and prevent erosion is crystal clear—literally. Last week, he shot a video of the temporary pool created after rain washed through the region around his ranch. In the footage, water that had moved through White Oak Pastures runs clear, while that running off his neighbor’s property is muddied with eroded soil. “It’s not all about carbon; that’s just one component,” says Harris. “The benefits of our land management practices are way more complex than that.”

 

Correction: This post originally read that cattle was responsible for 14.5% of of human-caused emissions globally. In actuality, it’s all livestock.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2021/01/06/a-new-study-on-regenerative-grazing-complicates-climate-optimism/feed/ 7 https://civileats.com/2020/10/13/what-impacts-do-the-west-coast-wildfires-smoke-have-on-crops/ https://civileats.com/2020/10/13/what-impacts-do-the-west-coast-wildfires-smoke-have-on-crops/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2020 09:00:36 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=38658 On September 12, Iverson Family Farms posted ominous images on social media of their fields under a ruddy red sky, thick with a stagnant, dense haze—a stark contrast to the vibrant annual Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival, a well-known spring attraction in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. As the Beachie Creek and Riverside fires raged roughly 25 miles […]

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]]> On September 12, Iverson Family Farms posted ominous images on social media of their fields under a ruddy red sky, thick with a stagnant, dense haze—a stark contrast to the vibrant annual Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival, a well-known spring attraction in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. As the Beachie Creek and Riverside fires raged roughly 25 miles away, the farm was in Stage 3 evacuation for 10 surreal autumn days.

It’s a scene that has played out throughout the western U.S. as roughly 40 large fires, amplified and accelerated by climate change, burned in September. The coastal states were most heavily impacted: California, in particular, has endured an unprecedented span of fire over the last two months. As of today, California’s devastating Glass Fire has damaged, if not destroyed, nearly 30 wineries in Napa and Sonoma counties.

Ash has been raining down on farm fields for weeks. Farmers of most crops—from fruit to lettuce—have been able to wash it away with minimal impact to operations, says Christopher Valadez, President of the Grower-Shipper Association of Central California. Still, since farmers don’t necessarily have the labor to clean produce, consumers have been advised to take extra precautions and wash fruits and vegetables thoroughly before eating them.

Luckily, Iverson Family Farms, a diverse, third-generation operation growing grass seed, tulips, wine grapes, and hemp, did not experience direct fire damage. Beyond worries over community losses, “I was concerned with embers that could have drifted onto the farms and ignited fields and homes,” says Giavanna Accurso, director of research and development for Iverson Family Farms and FSoil, the family’s hemp oil processing facility.

As the smoke clears, however, many farms, including Iverson Family Farms, are taking steps to make sure no invisible damage occurred in high-value crops susceptible to smoke—notably cannabis and wine grapes. Unfortunately, answers won’t be swift in either case.

In grapes, smoke damage imparts a burnt, ashy, even medicinal taste to the resulting wine. When wood burns, it releases volatile compounds, called phenols, which can bind to grape sugars, only to be released during fermentation. Cannabis may also be similarly impacted by volatile compounds, and possibly other chemicals if buildings—and not just wildlands—burned nearby.

Wine Grape Quality in Question

The potential for widespread impact has left the labs that test grapes for smoke damage backlogged with requests, says California Farm Bureau Federation director of media relations, Dave Kranz. Tests that would typically take two to three days to process, are now taking several weeks, he says. A message on the website of California-based ETS Laboratories, one of the primary facilities able to test grapes, says they are unable to give customers a timeline to expect results.

One big difference this year is the fires occurred earlier in the season. During the October 2017 fires, only 10-15 percent of the crop was left on vines by the time the fires started, says Anita Oberholster, a viticulture specialist at University of California at Davis. “This year, the wildfires started when only 10 to 15 percent had been harvested; most grapes were still on the vine,” she adds.

“An estimate of the amount of smoke damage is really difficult,” says Oberholster. Glenn McGourty, a University of California viticulture advisor in Mendocino County, agrees. He says suspended particulates, which you can see in the atmosphere, don’t do much damage. It’s the volatile phenols, which are released in close proximity to the fire that can bind to the sugars in grapes to form compounds called glycosides. During fermentation, glycosides break apart, releasing the phenols that have a smoky flavor. In general, red wines, especially ones made with thin-skinned grapes like Pinot Noir, tend to be most affected. And that’s why it’s impossible to predict damage without testing.

Oberholster says that not every farm will necessarily be impacted. “Smoke exposure and risk is really complex,” she says. For example, only when smoke is really fresh is there a correlation between the density of smoke you see with the naked eye and actual exposure. And any breakdown of phenols in sunlight depends on atmospheric conditions. “We don’t know the half-life of [phenols], but there is some anecdotal evidence it could be 24 hours, maybe longer,” says Oberholster.

Oberholster advises growers to have their grapes tested if they experienced smoke at all, and especially if the wind blew fresh, dense smoke directly towards them. In the case of the current fire—the Glass Fire—raging in Napa and Sonoma, that could mean a lot of grapes.

Fires from the Glass Fire burn in a vineyard in St. Helena, California, on September 27, 2020.

“We are telling people to wait until as close to harvest as they can to test,” she says, for two reasons. With so many fire events, growers should only send grapes ready to be picked to avoid overloading laboratories with samples and unnecessary, additional costs. First, labs inundated with samples will slow the results and cost the grower more. It’s around $150-200 per sample to determine which grapes are impacted. And insurance requires that growers test every block of every variety they grow.

But despite the ongoing concern in the industry, and the fact that some wineries have already decided not to make a 2020 vintage, Oberholster cautions against condemning the entire crop.

“I don’t want people to look at fire maps and think everything is impacted and all wine from 2020 is going to be bad—because that’s not true,” she says. “Air quality and smoke exposure risk is not the same thing.”

McGourty agrees. “There will be plenty of places that make good wine this year,” he says.

But the testing may need an overhaul too. Currently, labs search for between two to seven marker compounds of damage, but there is evidence from Australia, which has been dealing with smoke-tainted grapes for 15 years, that there are up to 13 marker compounds of smoke damage, according to Oberholster.

The Impact on Cannabis

Cannabis, too, may have smoke damage—but, compared to wine grapes, there is far less research yet available on the impact of phenols. The Global Hemp Innovation Center at Oregon State University has just formed an industry collaborative to assess the smoke impacts on everything from smokable cannabis flowers to essential oils, such as CBD.

Given the sticky nature of cannabis flowers, traces of toxic chemicals in ash or smoke carry additional concerns. In Oregon’s Jackson County, home to the Rogue Valley’s 6,300 registered hemp acres, the Almeda Fire burned a number of manufactured homes, raising concerns about heavy metals—for chromium to arsenic in pressure-treated wood—that could be difficult to wash off.

West Coast wildfires turn the skies orange over the Iverson Family Farms hemp fields. (Photo courtesy of Iverson Family Farms)

In Oregon, 17 percent of grow sites statewide faced imminent danger from wildfires in late September, which is roughly 10 percent of Oregon’s outdoor cannabis acreage, according to hemp industry analysis group Hemp Benchmarks. Growers, especially those who are relatively new to the crop, have had a lot of questions. More than 350 people attended a September 23 virtual hemp field day, seeking answers.

The most pressing questions were: what amounts of contaminants may affect quality and safety of products, and are residues, such as heavy metal contamination, left behind on the plants, says Jeff Steiner, associate director of Oregon State University’s Global Hemp Innovation Center, which hosted the online event. “We just don’t have answers yet,” he says.

Steiner is overseeing the formation of the Smoke Effects Working Group, an industry-based stewardship group that will develop methods and collect samples from around the West to analyze for quality, heavy metal content, and the same phenols that can impact wine. Accurso is part of that group. She is particularly interested in compounds including dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and heavy metals, since she says “we don’t know what burned.” Steiner and the growers she works with are doing what they can to determine if the fires had any discernable impacts. “We want to be able to back up the quality and safety of our products with scientific data,” she says.

Steiner says in addition to short-term research efforts to assess this year’s crop, the industry group will also develop long-term research and science-based management plans over the next five years to respond to anticipated challenges from wildfires in the western U.S.

“It’s a strategy similar to the one adopted by the wine and grape industry five years ago,” he says. “This is not a new issue for agriculture,” he adds. Unfortunately, it appears it will be a more prevalent one.

Top photo courtesy of Iverson Family Farms.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2020/10/13/what-impacts-do-the-west-coast-wildfires-smoke-have-on-crops/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2020/10/01/does-overselling-regenerative-ags-climate-benefits-undercut-its-potential/ https://civileats.com/2020/10/01/does-overselling-regenerative-ags-climate-benefits-undercut-its-potential/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2020 09:00:46 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=38559 Regenerative agriculture is having a moment. A new Netflix documentary highlighting its potential to rebuild soil, Kiss the Ground, is drawing attention to the practice’s climate mitigation potential. Companies including General Mills, Target, McDonald’s, and Cargill are investing in regenerative agriculture. Presidential candidate Joe Biden has mentioned paying farmers to sequester carbon in his campaign […]

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]]> Regenerative agriculture is having a moment. A new Netflix documentary highlighting its potential to rebuild soil, Kiss the Ground, is drawing attention to the practice’s climate mitigation potential. Companies including General Mills, Target, McDonald’s, and Cargill are investing in regenerative agriculture. Presidential candidate Joe Biden has mentioned paying farmers to sequester carbon in his campaign language, and several U.S. senators have introduced a bill to help farmers generate carbon credits after adopting regenerative practices. And new public and private carbon markets (and one new ecosystem service market) are being formed to issue those credits.

As wildfires, extreme temperatures, droughts, floods, and other climate-fueled disasters plague much of the country, it’s easy to see why a solution that promises to draw carbon out of the atmosphere while simply farming differently has growing appeal.

And there’s good reason for all the optimism. Many experts agree that regenerative agriculture practices—including, for example, the use of cover crops, reduced or no tillage, and diversified crop rotations—hold great potential to rebuild dwindling organic matter, improve soil health, stave nutrient runoff that causes water pollution, and sustain biodiversity.

A new white paper from the Rodale Institute and the Carbon Underground—called Regenerative Agriculture and the Soil Carbon Solution—lays out these benefits in detail and aims to define the suite of practices that will rehabilitate ecosystems.

Robert Rodale, son of the Rodale Institute’s founder, is said to have coined the term “regenerative agriculture” in the 1970s, and the farm and research facility has long been a pioneer in organic practices and soil health. Now, the Institute is behind the new Regenerative Organic certification and label, which it launched with Dr. Bronner’s and Patagonia in 2018. Meanwhile, The Carbon Underground has assembled the Soil Carbon Index, which they hope will be an “outcome-based, verifiable standard designed to improve soil health and build soil carbon by encouraging the shift to regenerative agricultural practices.”

“With this white paper, Rodale Institute shows us how regenerative agriculture has the potential to repair that damage and actually reverse some of the threatening impacts of our climate crisis,” Tom Newmark, Chairman of The Carbon Underground, said in the press release for the paper.

The paper promises to bring the latest science to bear, but it makes an eye-popping, unsubstantiated claim. It says that regenerative practices, if adopted around the world, could sequester all annual carbon dioxide emissions. The document states: “Data from farming and grazing studies show the power of exemplary regenerative systems that, if achieved globally, would drawdown more than 100 percent of current annual CO2 emissions.”

Rodale soil scientist Yichao Rui confirms that the white paper authors based the extrapolations of carbon sequestration rates found in one study of a corn and wheat organic system based in the Mid-Atlantic and one study of a regenerative grazing system in the Midwest to the rest of the world—regardless of soil type, temperature, or precipitation regime. The report features a few other studies as evidence—such as agroforestry projects in Costa Rica, cover crops in the tropics, or organic amendments in olive orchards in the Mediterranean that have also recorded roughly twice the amount of carbon sequestered that Rodale used in the extrapolation.

“The 100 percent offset of greenhouse gas emissions is based on a thought experiment,” says Rui. “This is our perspective. I understand there will be questions. Not everyone will agree.”

Every soil scientist interviewed for this piece agreed that the benefits of regenerative agriculture are wide-ranging and many, including for climate change mitigation. But they also agreed the 100 percent claim was baseless.

“Achieving 100 percent of our annual carbon dioxide emissions is not feasible,” says Rattan Lal, director of Ohio State University’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Center, recent winner of the World Food Prize, and a supporter of Rodale’s previous work. “The scientific data doesn’t support these claims,” he says.

“Regenerative agriculture is a powerful drawdown, both to reduce emissions and add new carbon sinks . . . but no one thing can possibly fix climate change.”

Jon Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, agrees, and says assertions to this effect make it more difficult to set realistic expectations for climate mitigation strategies. “Regenerative agriculture is a powerful drawdown, both to reduce emissions and add new carbon sinks,” he says. But “preposterous claims that are easily debunked only undermine the message that regenerative agriculture is one of the few areas that can [potentially] solve around 10 percent of climate change.” If so, it would be on par with solar or wind energy, says Foley. “No one thing can possibly fix climate change.”

White papers, unlike scientific publications, are not peer-reviewed examinations of new data. “This white paper is not based on a study in which we transform or shift every single [farm] field around the world,” says Rui, which he notes is impossible.

But just how rooted their perspective is in existing facts is in question. And the experts we spoke to had several criticisms of the white paper. First, experts claim that the Institute ignores more careful analyses, like Lal’s and others, which suggest that regenerative agriculture can offset at most 10-15 percent of emissions. “When I tell people that we can offset up to 15 percent [using soil as a carbon sink], they tell me I’m overly optimistic,” says Lal.

And, instead of rigorously doing an analysis with real-world data, it appears that the white paper authors simply picked a couple of hand-selected sites and multiplied that by the entire land area on Earth, says Foley.

To that end, the carbon sequestration potential of different soils—and the fact that soil doesn’t store carbon permanently, but can hit a limit and even be reversed—are not taken into account. According to a recent peer-reviewed study of soil carbon storage in global ecosystems published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), for example, the fraction of carbon that is transferred belowground—where it can be stored longer-term—decreases with precipitation and varies significantly between croplands, savannas, and forest.

While degraded soils can accumulate carbon quickly, says Osvaldo Sala, a coauthor of the PNAS study and a soil scientist at Arizona State University, healthy ecosystems are full of invertebrates and microorganisms that recycle nutrients and consume organic matter, which emits carbon dioxide. “There’s a natural limit on the amount of carbon that a healthy ecosystem can hold,” says Sala.

Critics also say the Rodale white paper is not based on research that conducts a full life cycle analysis of net carbon accrued. Where does the carbon to build the soil organic matter come from? If from food waste or manure, the transportation to apply it should be subtracted from the amount of net carbon sequestered, says William Schlesinger, retired president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, a not-for-profit research organization in Millbrook, New York.

And, Schlesinger adds, soil doesn’t just store carbon. Other nutrients, including nitrogen and phosphorous are found in humus, the stable form of stored organic matter. “If we wanted to sequester all of fossil fuel emissions in the atmosphere in soil organic matter, it would take four times the nitrogen fertilizer already used today,” he calculates. And those applications would certainly come with global warming nitrous oxide emissions and nutrient runoff.

“Regenerative agriculture is like apple pie: It’s a warm and friendly concept that no one can be against.”

“These are sound questions,” agrees Rui. He hopes future research will address where the nutrients could come from and how long carbon sequestration could be sustained.

“Regenerative agriculture is like apple pie,” says Schlesinger. “It’s a warm and friendly concept that no one can be against, but saying it will balance [all] carbon dioxide emissions is out of the ballpark and poorly evaluated,“ he adds.

The consequences of overselling regenerative agriculture’s potential, however, are sobering. “My concern is that people may say if agriculture can do all that, why stop using fossil fuels?” says Lal.

Schlesinger agrees. “Promising what you can’t deliver will keep the nation, if not the world, on a fossil fuel diet,” he says. “To the extent that this puts off real effective action of fossil fuel emissions is a real disservice to [larger efforts] to mitigate climate change.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2020/10/01/does-overselling-regenerative-ags-climate-benefits-undercut-its-potential/feed/ 8 https://civileats.com/2020/09/22/new-soil-documentary-promises-a-powerful-solution-to-the-growing-effects-of-climate-change/ https://civileats.com/2020/09/22/new-soil-documentary-promises-a-powerful-solution-to-the-growing-effects-of-climate-change/#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2020 09:00:05 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=38336 This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. For many, the fires raging across the West have brought home not only the realities of climate change—but the urgent need to restore the land. For this reason, the filmmakers behind the new documentary, Kiss the Ground, […]

The post New Soil Documentary Promises a Powerful Solution to the Growing Effects of Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

For many, the fires raging across the West have brought home not only the realities of climate change—but the urgent need to restore the land. For this reason, the filmmakers behind the new documentary, Kiss the Ground, released globally on Netflix today, are hoping that the burgeoning movement to restore soil health will give their audience a reason to hope.

Narrated by actor Woody Harrelson, the film offers a timely overview of how regenerating crop and ranchlands is one of the best ways to clean waterways, halt desertification, and perhaps most important—draw carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the Earth, a crucial step towards reversing climate change.

Seven years in the making, the star-studded documentary from Big Picture Ranch filmmakers Josh and Rebecca Tickell, Kiss the Ground shines a light on scientists’ sobering projections—including that roughly two-thirds of the world is turning to desert, which could yield up to 1 billion refugees by 2050. But the take-home message is empowering rather than terrifying: The way we grow food can be an environmental solution instead of adding to the looming catastrophe.

The film is a piece of a multi-pronged effort to encourage farmers to transition to regenerative practices such as growing a diversity of plants, keeping roots in the soil at all times (i.e., growing cover crops between cash crops), composting, and grazing cattle on perennial forages.

The Kiss the Ground non-profit organization was co-founded by Los Angeles-based Finian Makepeace and Ryland Engelhart. Makepeace, a singer-songwriter, says learning that healthy soils can mitigate climate change in 2013 was life-altering.

“We decided to commit our lives to spreading the word that humanity can turn the corner,” Makepeace told Civil Eats. “Regenerating farmland offers an option to reverse the damage we’ve done.”

To that end, the organization has a variety of resources on their website. A Farmland Program aims to train 5,000 farmers to adopt regenerative practices by 2025 by offering mentorship, soil testing, and financial assistance. A Stewardship Program aims to educate and empower a team of regenerative agriculture advocates to spread the word. Since 2018, Makepeace and his colleagues have helped train over 2,500 soil advocates from over 25 countries.

Josh and Rebecca Tickell spoke to Civil Eats about their hopes for the film, the work they did to perfect its visual messaging, and the urgency of the current moment.

What spurred you to take on this topic?

The Tickell Family. (Photo credit: Fancy Free Photography)

Josh Tickell: We had already made three films on oil, and we were looking for something that was more exciting and easier to put into a movie format, yet still had an environmental focus. A couple of our friends—including Ryland Englehart—started talking to us about carbon sequestration. We weren’t convinced after watching a very dry scientific presentation on the topic, but the more we learned about how soil is a central piece of climate, water, and biodiversity, it became clear that we should do this.

What is the target audience and what do you want them to walk away with?

Rebecca Tickell: We want soil to go mainstream. We want to close the information gap and show people that soil offers an opportunity to drawdown atmospheric carbon emissions and reverse desertification. In addition to the original documentary, we’ve made two shorter versions of the film for two target demographics—school children and farmers. We want society to move from being paralyzed by inaction to empowered to help agriculture make this transition.

What kind of feedback have you gotten from farmers?

Rebecca: My dad, who was, until recently, a corn and soybean farmer in Ohio, loved the film. He did not use regenerative practices beyond rotating his crops. He, like many, stopped farming because it was no longer profitable. He was the fourth generation of farmers in our family. We may not agree politically on issues like climate change, but when we dig down, we agree that spraying chemicals on food affects human health. We are carrying on the family tradition here on a five-acre avocado and citrus hobby farm that uses regenerative practices.

Most farmers I’ve talked to want to improve their soil, but there are barriers that make it difficult. And they definitely get sick of being blamed for all of society’s environmental ills. How do we create a better system together?

Josh: We’ve essentially created a system that is more or less paying farmers to go out of business. That sounds crazy. Through the commodity crop insurance program, we’ve locked farmers into a cycle of demanding high yields for more or less three crops on soil that is degrading very rapidly. We know the inputs needed for those three crops are growing faster than the rate of increase for yield per acre. The only way to stay ahead in that game is to get bigger.

But there is another system; it will require risk and experimentation. Often times, it’s more attractive to slow boil to death in what is known rather than take a risk. It’s no fault of farmers; it’s human nature. We’ve become comfortable and complacent with systems that are killing American farms. We need farmers and consumers to pull on levers together to create a fulcrum able to change the system.

I interviewed Rattan Lal recently, and he has calculated that plants and soils could sequester up to 330 gigatons of carbon, effectively one-third of the legacy carbon in the atmosphere. Do you worry that regenerative agriculture’s potential impact may be oversold?

Josh: There are two dangers—oversimplifying the fact that fixing soil will fix the climate or not going forward with a solution that has so much potential. Dr. Lal is an extremely accomplished scientist, but other researchers we spoke to think even more sequestration is possible. Even if regenerative agriculture offers one-third of a solution, it’s still much better than anything else we’ve got. Let’s regenerate a billion acres and see where we end up. We’re going to err on the side of optimism.

What was the most powerful moment to film?

Rebecca: A magical moment was when we visited Doniga Markegard at Markegard Family Ranch in Half Moon Bay, California. Our children had milk squirted in their mouths and got to play in an amazing treehouse featured on HGTV. Unfortunately, fires in California burned down that treehouse. We have been witnessing the real-time effects of climate change—which makes the importance of each of the messages in our film that much stronger. It’s high stakes. We have images in the film of climate refugees. On a personal level, after this year’s record number of fires, I feel like we are all connected.

I liked how you used carbon bubbles to visually demonstrate soil emissions and carbon capture throughout the film. Can you describe some of the stylistic decisions you made?

Josh: The carbon bubbles were inspired by our partner on the film, the Center for Food Safety, which came up with that basic idea based on another film with Michael Pollan. Once we had that building block, we had to develop visual language to convey legacy carbon and what drawdown would look like. No one had drawn a reverse carbon curve before. We sat at environmentalist Paul Hawken’s kitchen table and, after a few hundred revisions, and consultation with dozens of soil scientists and farmers, we turned it into something people could understand.

What do you hope the film achieves?

Josh: Beyond the fact that more people understand that soil is awesome, we want viewers to feel empowered to take immediate action and feel confident that we can do something to tackle climate change. Ultimately, we hope to take regeneration into a global context, see a billion acres regenerated—and even achieve global cooling.

Any final thoughts?

Josh: When the U.S. entered the last dust bowl, the USDA sent their best soil scientists and archeologists to figure out how to have permanent agriculture. That was the mission. Walter Lowdermilk and colleagues traveled around the world to determine the factors that allowed cultures to persist. The result was a report called, “Conquest of the Land through 7,000 Years.” Essentially, there are two possibilities for civilization—to be here or not.

We’re currently at a turning point in a civilization-level conversation. The choices we make around soil and food in the next 10 to 20 years will determine the next thousand years of human civilization. Do we want a dry rocky desert or verdant biodiverse ecosystem that produces healthy humans? To achieve the latter, it’s time to get serious about soil.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2020/09/22/new-soil-documentary-promises-a-powerful-solution-to-the-growing-effects-of-climate-change/feed/ 4 https://civileats.com/2020/08/19/perennial-vegetables-are-a-solution-in-the-fight-against-hunger-and-climate-change/ https://civileats.com/2020/08/19/perennial-vegetables-are-a-solution-in-the-fight-against-hunger-and-climate-change/#comments Wed, 19 Aug 2020 09:00:17 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=37863 Marisha Auerbach’s home garden is an edible landscape. Archways of table and wine grapes shade the entry while tree kales, tree collards, and stinging nettles dot the pathway. Auerbach, a permaculture teacher at Oregon State University, and her partner, Zane Ingersoll, estimate roughly 80 percent of their diet comes from this 6,600-square-foot lot in Portland. […]

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]]>

Marisha Auerbach in her permaculture yard. (Photo by Virginia Gewin)

Marisha Auerbach’s home garden is an edible landscape. Archways of table and wine grapes shade the entry while tree kales, tree collards, and stinging nettles dot the pathway. Auerbach, a permaculture teacher at Oregon State University, and her partner, Zane Ingersoll, estimate roughly 80 percent of their diet comes from this 6,600-square-foot lot in Portland. About 60 percent of the garden is perennial plants, trees, and shrubs—meaning they grow all year long and don’t need to be replanted or reseeded the following year.

Perennial agriculture—including agroforestry, silvopasture, and the development of perennial row crops such as Kernza—has come to prominence in recent years as an important part of the fights against soil erosion and climate change. Not only do perennial plants develop longer, more stabilizing roots than annual crops, but they’ve also been shown to be key to sequestering carbon in the soil.

Now, a new study in the journal PLoS ONE is pointing to vegetables like the ones in Auerbach’s garden as another important addition to the list. The perennial vegetables most people are familiar with are artichokes or asparagus, but the study expands that list, providing a detailed nutritional analysis of 613 species and a full accounting of their potential to pull carbon from the atmosphere.

“Greater adoption of a wider array of perennial vegetables could help to address some of the central, interlocking issues of the 21st century: climate change, biodiversity, and nutrition,” wrote lead study author Eric Toensmeier, a lecturer at Yale University, a senior fellow at Project Drawdown, and author of the Carbon Farming Solution, in the report’s introduction.

“I hope to put some new crops in the limelight, specifically trees with edible leaves such as moringa and Nopales cactus, which turned out to be some of the most nutritious leaves,” says Toensmeier. Since “vegetable” is a nebulous term, the study defined it as woody plants, vines, and herbs that live three years or longer. Toensmeier and colleagues found 154 species that had superabundant nutrient levels; 23 of those were superabundant in four or more nutrients.

As the pandemic focuses greater attention on the sustainability and resiliency of food systems, this paper offers a “to-do” list of research questions for people who study non-traditional crops, says Courtney Leisner, a global change plant physiologist at Auburn University. It will prompt readers to ask: Where can these crops be grown? What percentage of the nutrients are bioavailable? How climate hardy are these crops? Perhaps the most immediate question is: “Where should we focus our resources next?” says Leisner, especially for farmers and scientists seeking nutritious, resilient crops, including ones that can grow in marginal soils.

Nutritional Benefits

Awareness of the potential of perennial vegetable crops—a common tenet of permaculture—has grown steadily in the greater Pacific Northwest region over the last 20 years, along with interest in home gardening, says Auerbach. And that interest exploded this year. She knew in January that it was going to be a big gardening year—then COVID-19 hit. Days before Portland shut down, Auerbach’s email blew up with inquiries from people eager for tree collards and other perennial vegetable starts with low-effort gardening and a high nutrient pay-off.

“Milkweed has eight times more vitamin C than oranges,” says Toensmeier. But the number one most nutritious food in our study was Gấc (botanical name: Momordica cochinchinensis), a bitter gourd native to Southeast Asia, he says. The second most nutritious perennial vegetable identified in the study—known as Chinese mahogany or “the beef and onion plant”—is a tree with tender new leaves that have a savory bouillon flavor, according to Toensmeier.

“We grow way more starch and sugar than we need, and not nearly enough fruits and veggies.”

“The botanical diversity is enormous, but the greater majority [of these foods] haven’t left their home countries,” says Toensmeier. And if they have, they haven’t made it to the U.S., he adds. While oniony leaves may be a hard sell for many Americans, Toensmeier says, he’d like to get more people eating mulberry leaves, which are rich in iron and zinc, and grow almost everywhere in the U.S. “There are so many cases where a plant on this list will have more than twice the amount of key nutrients of traditional vegetables you can buy at the store,” he says.

If we want to meet all of the vitamin and mineral needs around the world, we must dramatically increase vegetable and fruit production, adds Toensmeier. “We grow way more starch and sugar than we need, and not nearly enough fruits and veggies.”

The U.S. lags behind the rest of world when it comes to planting multi-year crops, says Toensmeier. But perennial vegetables are gaining traction in other countries. ECHO, an international agricultural development organization in Fort Myers, Florida, trains farmers to grow nutrient-rich crops—often those able to come back year after year—to fight malnutrition in Haiti, Thailand, and several African countries.

While they weren’t surprised that one of the crops they promote, chaya (Cnidoscolus aconitifolius), was also on Toensmeier’s top multi-nutrient species list, they appreciate the sweeping analysis of so many perennial vegetables that he provided. Not only will this paper serve as a database of go-to information, it will also help us fill in any remaining gaps in nutritional information, says Stacy Reader, a research associate at ECHO.

Still, encouraging communities to embrace new crops is a tricky business. Reader says ECHO sends seeds and cuttings from over 350 varieties to partner organizations and individuals working with smallholder farmers in the tropics to increase food security.

“Adoption [of a new species] goes over best when it’s needed by the community and promoted by farmers in the region,” says Reader.

In Latin America and Southeast Asia, where it is more common culturally for people to plant perennials in cropping systems, ECHO’s regional impact teams stressed nutrition while promoting leafy perennial greens. In East Africa, by contrast, adoption of a new food source, such as chaya, went best where farmers already knew how to process or consume a similar crop. “While these vegetables are very nutritious, they need to fit the cultural needs of people,” says Reader. “That can’t be overlooked.”

Further, while these healthy crops will come back each year, they often take an extra level of effort to be edible. For example, Toensmeier notes that Chinese mahogany, which resembles a sumac tree, needs to be pruned to promote production of an abundance of edible, tender new growth. At the other end of the spectrum, chaya, which tastes similar to Swiss chard, must typically be cooked for a few minutes to remove toxins from the leaves before it’s eaten.

ECHO promotes eating a diversity of greens, says Reader, which would also avoid the boom-bust cycle of hype around novel foods. Personally, she adds, “I think if we could learn to diversify diets instead of seek nutrition from one superfood, we’d be a lot happier and healthier.”

Benefits to the Environment

In addition to nutrition, Toensmeier and colleagues calculated the carbon sequestration potential of crops that do not have to be replanted each year. They estimate that increasing perennial vegetable acreage to 26 million hectares (from roughly 3.3 million hectares today) by 2050 could store an additional 280.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, roughly the same as cutting meat from American diets or eliminating the emissions of 60 million cars.

“We should take a more holistic view, focusing on highly nutritious crops that are resilient to shifting temperatures, those able to grow on marginal lands or as part of agroforestry.”

While that’s a sizable potential impact, farmers on the ground are often more interested in shorter-term benefits they can experience directly. In the case of agroforestry, Reader says, “farmers see the benefits of having trees on farms—chiefly, the soil stays in place,” she says. “The trend is for more perennials to being grown together with annuals, largely because most grow on small acreages, so there are no large swaths of land where mechanization is necessary.”

Although perennial vegetables may not become widely planted crops anytime soon, they could play a valuable role in making the food system more resilient. The goal is not to find a single “superfood” within the perennial vegetable list, says Leisner. Rather, she adds, “we should take a more holistic view focusing on highly nutritious crops that are resilient to shifting temperatures, those able to grow on marginal lands or as part of agroforestry.” Leisner adds that it puts a lot of emphasis on a small number of plant families, but that more research is needed into orphan crops—those species that receive little to no attention from researchers—to mitigate climate change and support our growing population.

Auerbach agrees. “While infrastructure for perennial crop research has grown over time, I would love to see an experiment station dedicated to perennial crops,” she says. “It’s time to get serious about climate change and designing our diets to increase resiliency, including the often-overlooked ecological functions of our food system.”

The post Perennial Vegetables Are a Solution in the Fight Against Hunger and Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

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