While agriculture is a major contributor to climate change, it can also play a significant role in mitigating the impacts—and we at Civil Eats make a concerted effort to focus on solutions in our coverage. So far this year, we have shared numerous stories of creative thinkers across the food system pursuing efforts to reduce damage, increase resilience, and adapt to the new and ever-changing realities.

We have covered the incorporation of hedgerows to sequester carbon in soil, an ultracross seed-breeding project to create climate-adapted plant varieties, and the adoption of care-centered politics, among many other efforts. Below are some of our most important climate solutions stories from 2023.

Can This Beef Cooperative Become ‘the West’s Largest Climate-Smart Ranching Program’?
In an industry dominated by a handful of large meatpacking companies, member-owned Country Natural Beef has plans to document its ranchers’ practices and encourage a shift toward more regenerative practices.

Op-ed: Some Regenerative Farms Are Weathering California’s Unprecedented Rainfall
In the face of intensifying weather patterns like the series of storms pounding the West, regenerative organic farms are demonstrating that the key to resilience is working with nature.

Comic: Adapting Corn for Tortillas—and New Markets—in the Pacific Northwest
In this illustrated report, we explore how the Organic Seed Alliance is working with local farmers, scientists, and chefs to adapt crops to new environments—and the changing climate.

An Ancient Grain Made New Again: How Sorghum Could Help U.S. Farms Adapt to Climate Change
Sorghum—popular among young, BIPOC, and under-resourced farmers—has extra long roots that allow it to withstand drought and sequester greenhouse gasses.

The Edges Matter: Hedgerows Are Bringing Life Back to Farms
Researchers have found that planting hedgerows helps farmers sequester carbon in the soil, manage pests, and provide habitat for pollinators and other wildlife.

Perennial Crops Boost Biodiversity Both On and Off Farms. Researchers Explain How.
Above and belowground, perennial crops including wheat, grasses, trees, and more provide habitat and nutrition to creatures that help make ecosystems whole.

Farmers March for Urgent Climate Action in DC
In this week’s Field Report, scenes from the Rally for Resilience, a push for “Product of USA” labeling on meat, new glyphosate research, and more.

Scientists Scramble to Help Bay Scallops Survive Climate Change
Researchers begin selective breeding and other initiatives in hopes of saving the East Coast’s last wild bay scallop fisheries.

These Farmers Recharged Groundwater by Catching Atmospheric Rivers
After years of drought and dozens of recent atmospheric rivers, Central California farmers have revamped an old practice: intentionally flooding fields for deep irrigation and restoration of underground aquifers.

A Radical Seed-Breeding Project Could Help Southern Farmers Adapt to Climate Change
The Utopian Seed Project is growing dozens of types of okra in one North Carolina field, creating genetic collisions that build new, resilient varieties. The group is working to adapt more food crops to the changing climate.

Climate Change Is Walloping US Farms. Can This Farm Bill Create Real Solutions?
Although it seems like everyone in D.C. is buzzing about a “climate farm bill,” some of the most impactful changes, including crop diversification and shifting diets from meat toward plants, are barely on the negotiating table.

Shell or High Water: Rebuilding Oyster Reefs Is a Climate Solution
Oyster reefs clean water, repair ecosystems, and help prevent flooding. But a lack of shells is forcing restoration projects across the country to seek out alternative structures.

Can Farming With Trees Save the Food System?
Unprecedented funding is flowing into a broad range of agroforestry practices, which can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and build farm resilience as the climate changes.

Bringing Oats Back to American Farms
Adding oats to a farm’s rotation can improve soil health and reduce fossil fuels, but the crop has all but disappeared in the U.S. Now, a nascent movement fueled by oat milk’s popularity may help reverse the trend.

Some Farmers Are Skipping Tomatoes and Eggplants. Their Reasons May Surprise You.
From climate risks to better work-life balance, a small but growing contingent of farmers is giving up summer crops to reap winter’s harvest.

How Focusing on Care Can Change Our Relationship to Food
Robert Gottlieb, author of “Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet,” discusses how the care economy has the potential to create critical food systems change and mitigate the climate crisis.

The USDA Plan to Better Measure Agriculture’s Impact on the Climate Crisis
In this week’s Field Report, news on the agency’s latest effort to invest in soil science and correct discrimination, plus reports on global hunger and pesticides’ impacts on birds.

Comic: To Fight Climate Change, This Research Farm Is Pioneering Regenerative Practices
In this illustrated report, we explore how the Maine-based Wolfe’s Neck Center is breaking new ground in soil health, soil monitoring, and other climate-smart technologies.

The post As the Climate Crisis Escalates, Here Are 18 Food and Ag Solutions appeared first on Civil Eats.

“This was the great Eastern Woodlands,” says Sauder. “It wants to be a forest here.”

Centuries ago, Sauder’s Anabaptist ancestors arrived and, instead of learning from and alongside the Native peoples who had already developed techniques to farm within the forest, took the land and cleared the trees to grow crops and graze livestock. Now, Sauder sees its next chapter as both practical action and penance.

“I do it for the sake of my children’s future and for the sins of my ancestors,” he says, of the 3,500 young hybrid willow, honey locust, mulberry, chestnut, and persimmon trees that are now maturing slowly in neat rows across 30 acres of pastures.

Sauder’s system—where his cows will soon graze among trees instead of in fully open pastures—is called silvopasture. And it’s one of several practices that fall under a broader agricultural approach called agroforestry, or farming with trees.

Farmers can plant trees and bushes in strips to prevent soil erosion and provide habitat for wildlife (windbreaks and hedgerows), along streams to stop nutrient pollution (riparian buffers), or between rows of corn (alley cropping). These practices are taking root all across the country.

In California, Rebekka and Nathanael Siemens graze sheep in their 2,000-tree almond orchard. On 18 acres in Wisconsin, the Midwest’s leading agroforestry nonprofit, the Savanna Institute, is growing chestnut, elderberry, black currant, and black walnut trees between rows of organic soybeans.

Whatever the approach, more abundant plant life that stays put year after year—i.e., perennials—lead to healthier ecosystems that support biodiversity and store carbon. Indigenous cultures around the world, including Native American tribes, have long practiced various forms of agroforestry. And, as researchers, policymakers, and governments look for effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build climate resilience on farms to secure the food supply, agroforestry is approaching a renaissance.

Funding Agroforestry as a Climate Solution

“Farmers are stewards of photosynthesis, one of our oldest and best technologies for getting carbon out of the atmosphere,” Keefe Keeley told policymakers, government officials, and CEOs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) biggest annual gathering this year.

Keeley, the executive director of the Savanna Institute, was invited to speak to highlight the USDA’s Climate-Smart Commodities program. The agency awarded $3.1 billion in two rounds of grants last fall, including $153 million to projects focused specifically on agroforestry. (Additional broader projects also include elements of agroforestry.)

The Savanna Institute is one of many organizations involved in a $60 million effort coordinated by The Nature Conservancy across 29 states. In the Southeast, Tuskegee University is leading two projects intended to help underserved farmers transition to agroforestry practices and to grow markets for their products. The Adirondack North Country Association will help women-owned farms measure the benefits of riparian buffers and cropland reforestation in New York, while Caribbean Regenerative Community Development will work with small coffee farms in Puerto Rico.

In recent months, the USDA started distributing funds from the Inflation Reduction Act designated for climate-smart agriculture—including agroforestry practices. Then, in late March, Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Senator Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) reintroduced the Agriculture Resilience Act. If included in the next farm bill, it would direct the USDA to establish three new regional agroforestry centers. As lawmakers prepare to write the 2023 Farm Bill, many are looking to continue to expand funding for climate-smart practices.

“When we did a pre-survey of farmers across the region, agroforestry was the No. 1 thing they were interested in doing. And the No. 1 practice they were interested in is silvopasture,” says Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, an organization that supports Mid-Atlantic farmers.

Pasa received a $50 million Climate-Smart Commodities grant to implement and expand agroforestry and other soil health practices on 2,000 small- and mid-size farms along the Eastern Seaboard, from Maine to South Carolina. Through a network of partner organizations, it will subsidize the cost of tree planting and offer technical support.

The Nature Conservancy’s project will tackle the same two challenges in additional regions. And covering the upfront cost is key, said Joe Fargione, the group’s North America science director. Fargione compared getting started in agroforestry to organic transition. Initially, farmers have to invest money and time into going organic, they often see lower yields as they work out the kinks, and it takes three years before they can charge more for their crops. With agroforestry, trees are expensive, other costs often arise in setting up the system, and farmers won’t see benefits to their bottom line until the trees mature, which takes a minimum of three years—and usually more like six to eight. “But one of the things that’s exciting about agroforestry is that . . . it’s profitable,” Fargione said.

The Need for Local Agroforestry Expertise

Still, on his own, Sauder didn’t have the cash to plant the trees until Austin Unruh made it possible.

Unruh is the founder of Trees for Graziers, and he and his team have now completed about 20 silvopasture installations in Lancaster County, with more in the works. Key to his success has been access to public and private funds directed at reducing nutrient runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. (Pennsylvania is behind on its goals to reduce Chesapeake Bay pollution and is counting on 90 percent of future reductions to come from farms.) Unruh finds the funding for farms like Fiddle Creek and then brings his deep expertise to help farmers develop their systems.

“There’s a lot of experimentation, a lot of farmers comparing notes, but very few agroforestry technical support people out there advising farmers,” said Pasa’s Smith-Brubaker.

Unruh is the exception, and his knowledge of the local climate and landscape is crucial. He knows exactly how much shade is good for cool-weather grasses that thrive in the Mid-Atlantic, but that calculation would be very different if he were helping a farmer plant trees between rows of corn in Illinois. “I would love to see every county have someone that can offer these kinds of technical services and consulting,” he said. “It’s something that needs to be done locally.”

And while the Climate-Smart Commodities projects will train more experts and get a lot of farms planting trees, Unruh said agroforestry will only reach its potential if support for the approach is sustained over time. In his state, for example, silvopasture isn’t eligible for funding through existing conservation programs. But demonstrating and measuring the impacts over the next five years should help, he said.

Smith-Brubaker agrees. “Alley cropping wasn’t approved before, but we were able to do these demonstration sites and then have NRCS [PA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service] agents come out, and now NRCS does fund alley cropping. We’re hoping the same will happen with silvopasture,” she said.

On its own, the acreage that will be affected by this new funding won’t be enough to make a huge dent in agricultural emissions, but Fargione says it will provide important data and tools that could spur future investment and growth, allowing it to scale up. The Nature Conservancy project, for example, will be measuring carbon stored in trees and soil on the farms while also working to develop an affordable measurement method. He said giving farms the tools to implement agroforestry practices and document the impacts will then allow food companies with net-zero commitments to buy from them.

Either way, says Unruh, “it’s a drop in the bucket compared to how big agroforestry should be and what the opportunities are.” Beyond dairies like Fiddle Creek, there are also pastured poultry and hog farms that Unruh sees as having even more potential. Those have barely been considered.

For now, spring is in full effect. Robins are flitting between grasses and still-thin branches speckled with buds. In about three weeks, Sauder says, the pastures will be ready for the cows. For the first time since planting, a canopy will start to provide shade for the animals. While it will be far from a forest, the farm will inch closer to its roots—and toward a resilient future.

Illustrations by Nhatt Nichols.

The post Can Farming With Trees Save the Food System? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Steeped in tea, processed into granules, or cooked down into a paste, the stevia plant’s sweetening potency is derived not from a lab, like sucralose or aspartame, but from a leaf. The plant’s feathery leaves contain 200 times the sweetness of sugar without the calories. As recently as a decade ago, when food and beverage giants such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Cargill, and other companies began using stevia in dozens of products in what is now a $500-million-a-year market, they had no legal obligation to ensure that members of the Guarani tribe, on whose territory that leaf was first found, would benefit.

The Guarani, Latin America’s largest Indigenous tribe, with territory ranging from eastern Brazil to the sub-tropical mountain ranges of Paraguay, have long held stevia to be a sacred plant. They smear it on boys’ bodies during their ceremonial passage into manhood, and brew it into yerba mate and other traditional drinks to soften their bitterness.

In 2017, supported by the Swiss NGO Public Eye, the Guarani organized protests against the commercialization of their sacred drink, denouncing “the multinationals that make profits based on their knowledge and their biodiversity,” and asked that Coca-Cola and other companies agree to their demands to share in the financial benefits. Their demands were ignored.

Now, five years later, neither the Guarani’s demands, nor the demands of other Indigenous peoples whose plant traditions have been extracted, have been met.

Starting this year, however, the era of untrammeled access to the world’s remaining genetic resources—that’s the term the UN uses for the Earth’s plants, animals, and micro-organisms—may be coming to an end. In one of the most significant developments at December’s global Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Montreal, 196 countries agreed to create a new Access and Benefit Sharing Fund to ensure that moving forward, those who develop commercial products derived from genetic resources will be compelled to ensure a fair and equitable sharing of “monetary and non-monetary benefits from the utilization of genetic resources.”

In other words, the governments of the world agreed to create a system whereby local farming and Indigenous communities would receive “benefits” from the genetic resources that they have stewarded and conserved for millennia, as well as the traditional knowledge that has often helped point westerners to their multiple characteristics.

The U.S. is not a signatory to the treaty behind December’s convention—it was signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, but never ratified by the Senate—but the U.S. did send an observer delegation to the Montreal conference, led by veteran State Department diplomat Monica Medina, who told a small gathering of journalists that she “wished” the U.S. was a member.

When it comes to food, these resources are becoming increasingly important as plants like stevia offer new flavors and textures, and, more broadly, scientists and farmers seek out more resilient seed varieties capable of withstanding extreme weather in the changing climate.

Global Impact of Equatorial Biodiversity

The search for climate–resilient seeds and plants leads to these centers of origin, where the wild relatives of our domesticated food crops have evolved over thousands of years to adapt to varying conditions. All food crops have wild relatives, botanic cousins that contain important survival skills lost through the process of domestication.

For example, the wild relatives of much of the wheat planted across the American Midwest is indigenous to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and other areas of the Mideast, where they’ve evolved over thousands of years to adapt to high temperatures. Agronomists have increasingly been turning to these varieties, which are essentially wild grass cousins of wheat, for their ability to withstand the hessian fruit fly, a pest that has been following the heat into the Midwest and attacking wheat fields.

Meanwhile, the small, fist-sized, wild relatives of apples from Central Asia contain genes that are more resistant to the wild swings in weather—most notably the increasingly mild winters and periodic droughts in apple-growing regions across the U.S. The origin center of corn in southern Mexico has long been key to the characteristics of resistance to fungi and pests in the U.S. corn belt, and is now understood to possess uniquely deep root structures enabling it to survive both flooding and drought.

The potato, a staple food for hundreds of millions of people, originates in the distant high altitudes of the Andes mountains, home to the Quechua Indians in Peru. Dozens of different colors and shapes are common throughout the Andes, each containing genes conveying what a recent study in the scientific journal Food and Energy Security summarized as “tolerance to salinity, drought, and temperature extremes.”

And there are other crops—including cabbage, turnips, and bok choy—that have plant scientists reaching as far as Pakistan and Tajikistan to find the wild relatives that can help the commercial varieties withstand extreme weather.

These are the plants at the very beginning of a crop’s long journey from the field to our tables. “The history of agricultural domestication is a history of evolutionary winners and losers,” says Colin Khoury, senior director of science and conservation at the San Diego Botanic Garden. Khoury has been tracking the loss of such varieties and is part of an effort to preserve them under the umbrella of Botanic Gardens Conservation International. “Some of those ‘losers’ may not be tasty or even edible, but some of them are the key to resilience,” he added.

One of the U.N.’s motives is to slow the rate of extinction of these wild relative species and thousands of other species in what the U.N. and others have called a biodiversity crisis on par with the climate crisis.

Colonialism, Biopiracy, and Biodiversity

When UN negotiators met in 2010 in Nagoya, Japan, at the ninth conference of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, they faced demands from developing countries to end what they termed rampant “biopiracy.” The Nagoya Protocol was the first official acknowledgment of the one-way trade in genetic resources; in response developed countries promised to find a way to provide financial compensation and/or other benefits to Indigenous people and local farming communities for the commercial exploitation of genetic resources, and even set up an Access and Benefits Sharing Fund to collect the money.

But it was not mandatory. Few companies paid in, and 12 years later it had collected and dispersed just $8 million, a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars the U.N. says is key to ensuring conservation and proper recognition of the origin.

Coming into Montreal, a coalition of high-biodiversity countries—led by Indonesia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Brazil—demanded that the UN add muscle, and money, to ensure that they would benefit from the treasure of abundant plant life growing within their national or tribal lands.

The rising interest by food and pharmaceutical companies in such resources has coincided with a marked increase in organizing by Indigenous communities globally, said Preston Hardison, chief negotiator at the convention for the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity—a global coalition of Indigenous NGOs, community leaders, and scholars. Hardison, a conservation biologist who worked for 20 years as a policy analyst for the Tulalip Tribes in northern Washington before his current position, has been to many CBD negotiating sessions over the past several decades.

“There have been major changes in the role of Indigenous communities at these and other UN negotiations,” he said. “In the ‘90s, on climate talks they’d be given a minute or two of intervention. But that has changed.”

The most notable change, he said, is the recognition, embedded in the new agreement, that Indigenous communities are often far more effective at preserving biodiversity, using traditional stewardship on lands they’ve lived in for centuries, than more top-down laws and policing have been.

The negotiations were, at times, fraught: The question of how to value genetic resources brings in a range of actors: governments, scientists, NGOs, and businesses. Scientists wanted to ensure that they could gain access to genetic resources even if they were not planning on developing them for commercial application. Business interests lobbied to keep payments as low as possible, but in general supported the initiative.

“Business would like clear rules,” said Daphne Yong D’Herve, director for knowledge solutions at the International Chamber of Commerce. “They don’t want to be accused of biopiracy.”

The African Union (A.U.) suggested that a surcharge of 1 percent of the retail value of any product made from genetic resources be charged at the point of sale. Pierre du Plessis, Namibia’s representative to the talks and a longtime negotiator for the A.U. on genetic resources, was adamant that this not be considered a “tax.” Instead, he said, “It would be a recompense for the centuries of colonial exploitation of African resources.”

Over two weeks of negotiations, no one got exactly what they wanted. But a key step was taken: For the first time, the UN agreed that access and benefit sharing was a fundamental goal essential to the “conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity”—the third goal among four that are the key ingredients of what’s now known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Working groups were created to determine how exactly the fund will work and, critically, what mechanisms will need to be put in place to make it enforceable. And it will all be presented and voted on at the next CBD convention in Turkey in 2024.

Now the hard part begins: Communities that may view so-called “genetic resources” as vital and familiar parts of living systems must engage with international food companies that reduce living organisms to a set of commercially viable traits—sweet, salty, heat-resistant, or drought tolerant.

The two worlds are vastly different. “The Guarani don’t make the separations that we do: ‘This is land, this is animal, this is plant.’ They’re all related to them,” says Miguel Lovera, a scientific adviser to the tribe, who advocates for Indigenous rights in Paraguay from his post at the Catholic University in the nation’s capital of Asuncion. Indeed, even the very notion of them being “wild” relatives is a very Western concept, since the Guarani and many other tribes have long relied on plants that grow uncultivated in their territory.

Also at issue is the question of how this sea change will impact scientists, who are interested in accessing as wide an array of genes as possible in order to digitally sequence the genetic characteristics of food and tastes, like stevia.

The new Access and Benefit Sharing Fund could potentially channel hundreds of millions of dollars toward much-needed conservation in developing countries, where land is often cleared to produce ingredients for the same large food companies. Yet it’s not clear how much the companies will be expected to pay, how the money will be distributed, how the fund will manage plants that can be found in more than one place, or even what defines “commercial exploitation.”

At a closing press briefing on December 20, Inger Andersen, the Executive Secretary of the UN Environment Program, declared a mixture of hope and caution to a small group of journalists. “Let us pause but one second to embrace the history we have made in Montreal,” he said. “And now let us get down to the business of delivering . . . for people and the planet.”

This is the first article in a two-part series; the second article will be published later this month.

The post After Centuries of Exploitation, Will Indigenous Communities in Biodiversity Hotspots Finally Get Their Due? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Executive director Jo Ann Baumgartner has been with WFA since 2001, and she’s a passionate advocate for what she and WFA call “bringing nature back to the farm.” Baumgartner spoke with us about the one of the group’s core efforts in recent years: building awareness about the value of birds on farms.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why focus on birds?

Jo Ann Baumgartner

We have a goal of [adding] a million nest boxes and perches on 10 percent of farmland in the U.S. Our audience is mainly growers, and so we want to show them where they can see the benefits, but we also want to educate them about the need for nature to be supported. There are so many species in decline and so many ways that farmers can help, because agriculture comprises almost 60 percent of the landscape [in the U.S.] when you count all the grazing lands, and it’s a huge footprint. With farmers’ help, we can do a lot to reduce the biodiversity crisis, and they can benefit from it.

Some readers may be more familiar with how birds can eat farmers’ crops than the ways they can interact with farmlands positively. How are you working to shift the narrative?

Well, a few years ago, we published this booklet called Supporting Beneficial Birds and Managing Best Birds [that detailed ways farmers can reduce their pest-control costs by hosting more songbirds during their nesting season]. And before that, most of the growers I talked to—even growers that were finding lots of creative ways to support biodiversity—the first thing they wanted to tell me was about how birds had wrecked something on their farm. But I don’t hear that so much anymore. There are a lot more people we need to reach, but growers are starting to learn that there are so many beneficial things that birds do related to pest control, and different kinds of birds offer different kinds of pest control.

It’s just like some people think all insects are bad. But really there are beneficial insects, and there are insects that can be harmful, but most of them are good. And with birds, there a few that are bad for farms some of the time.

It seems like both need to be kept in balance, and when they get out of balance is when it’s a real problem for farms?

Yes! We’ve collected around 120 avian pest-control studies and broken it down into different crops in different temperate climates; 90 percent of the studies showed that birds were important. And, not all researchers did the exact same study. Some of them were asking, “Is habitat nearby important?” Yes, it is: The more habitat you have, the more pest control benefits you get. And some asked, “Is it important to have nesting boxes?” And yes—you get more pest control benefits with nesting boxes.

Five percent of the studies showed that while birds were helpful, they also were harmful. So, for instance, in the spring, blackbirds eat all kinds of [harmful] insects when they’re feeding. But later in the year, they may potentially harm, say, a sunflower crop because they’re flocking birds. It’s really the big flocks of birds that can be a problem and there are very few species that do that.

There’s some research that looked at monoculture strawberries and then strawberries that were growing in more diverse farmscapes, and the researchers found that a diversity [of crops] supported a diverse community of birds, and that’s when you have more pest control coming from that community and less damage or less food-safety issues.

And the food safety issues really are coming from birds that are associated with concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where we’ve created a mess and they get into it. Birds go looking for spilt grain and get into the manure and then it’s not good for them to come onto your farm.

When we talk about this to growers, they inevitably tell me stories about how they’ve seen birds help. For example, we just had an event in Livingston, California, in the heart of the Central Valley ag region, where we had helped an almond grower put in a hedgerow and he told me he has seen crows clean off the mummy nuts [almonds that stay on the trees after they’re shaken, and often can carry insects and diseases that impact the following year’s crop].

Growers are paying attention, and I’ve heard lots of stories like that. Farmers, especially the ones who are already managing for diversity, are really curious about birds, and some of them are putting in lots of nest boxes. There’s a grower at Spring Mountain Vineyards in Napa who has 800 nest boxes in their vineyards. Most growers don’t do that, but a lot of vineyards are putting in nest boxes, because there are some really great studies about how they increase bluebird presence in vineyards tenfold.

When the researcher put out experimental prey, bluebirds ate almost three times as many insects near nest boxes versus far away from the boxes. And it’s not just bluebirds that use these boxes, there are other really good insectivorous birds that use them—like tree swallows, which are aerial foragers, meaning they’re cruising around in the air and catching moths, flies, and flying insects. There’s chickadees, titmice, and ash-throated flycatchers, violet-green swallows, and a couple of different kinds of wrens and nuthatches.

I’ve read that the drought has greatly impacted migration, as many of the wetlands and bodies of water where migrating birds used to stop and refuel have been drying up in recent years. Are some birds looking to farms to fill that gap?

I’ve heard that, too, and those birds aren’t really helping with pest control on farms. Some farmers are working with conservationists to flood some of their lands when they can, but that tends to attract waterfowl and shorebirds and the raptors that eat them.

But water is important and lots of birds are stopping at farms. Maybe they’re just coming through and need some food and cover or maybe they are going to stop and nest. We created a chart and an assessment tool to help farmers (and others) find the best native plants to attract beneficial birds and identify other opportunities, like where you might put in hedgerows, change other management practices, or add flowers or pastures as habitat for birds.

You’ve talked about making the case for more birds on farms to growers. Are there other folks who you’re trying to convince, particularly at the policy level?

It’s super important for policy makers to understand that birds are in decline, and we need to do everything we can to support them. And while we’ve been talking about all of their benefits, they also have intrinsic value.

A barn owl sits on a fencepost overlooking a farm. (Photo credit: Sue Cro)

Rachel Carson talked about how if we’re not careful we might wake up to a silent spring. And years ago, when the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was implemented in 1918, there was a whole bunch of pushback from industry. But it turned out that the Supreme Court said, “Look, birds are really beneficial and we can’t ignore that fact. We have to support them.” And back in the 1880s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy.

So we have known how important birds are for pest control for all these years. And now there’s a resurgence. I see it in my own backyard, because over the years, I’ve put in lots of native habitat, and more and more birds show up and it’s just lovely to see them and know that you’re supporting them. Everybody can do this, not just farmers.

The post Once Scorned, Birds Are Returning to Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.

These above-ground benefits to hedgerows are easy to spot. But a few years ago, McNamara watched as a soil scientist dug into the dirt surrounding them. She scooped up rich, dark, compacted soil, mycelial strands tangled within. “I think we were in the middle of summer and the soil, even the topsoil, was moist,” he recalls. It was a memorable sight in drought-riddled California.

That scientist, Jessica Chiartas, was studying the soil around hedgerows. She selected a couple dozen farms in the Sacramento Valley, an area with plenty of well-established hedgerows thanks to a campaign initiated more than 20 years ago that sought to bring native vegetation back to local farms.

Chiartas’ study, published in late 2022, found that no matter the soil type, be it loam or clay, the soil below hedgerows stored significantly more carbon than the soil in the adjacent agricultural fields. While most of that carbon remained on the surface layer, an increase in soil carbon was detected down to the depth of 1 meter—where it’s more likely to remain. In fact, the study concludes that installing hedgerows on 50 to 80 percent of California’s farmland would capture so much carbon, it would help the state to reach up to 12 percent of its ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals.

California farmers, who are contending with drought, flooding, and a long list of pests that can ruin fruits, nuts, and vegetables haven’t fully embraced planting native vegetation adjacent to fields. But as the state encourages and incentivizes climate-friendly agriculture practices, they might just start.

Hedgerows are straightforward strips of shrubs or trees roughly 15 feet wide, but they highlight nature’s complex work, says Chiartas. At the surface of the soil around them, “you have a buildup of litter: leaves, stems, dead insects, feces, whatever organic materials are deposited,” she explains. When it rains, the organic matter dissolves and moves deeper into the soil profile. That “litter layer” also protects soil temperature and moisture, creating a stable, thriving soil food web that pulls organic materials deeper into the ground. “We’re not fighting biology,” she says. “It’s efficient.”

Recognizing that, the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offers a program to farmers nationwide that provides technical assistance and some funding for hedgerow planting, and Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation has also focused on the expansion of pollinator habitat, including hedgerows. Individual states including Minnesota and Iowa have also encouraged the planting of native vegetation in the form of prairie strips.

Chiartas jokes that she’d like to start a campaign to “re-hedge California.” With millions of agricultural acres, she sees potential in otherwise long stretches of empty perimeter. “All these field edges are bare right now,” Chiartas says, adding that because hedgerows stay in place, the carbon benefits would last well into the future. “It’s a proxy for the potential of agroforestry,” she says. “We need shade in California. Not just for carbon sequestration but for farm laborers.”

During her research, growers told Chiartas farmworkers often gravitate toward the rows of native plants, including California redbud, Manzanita, or Blue Elderberry trees for a break. And she, along with others who prioritize conservation, applaud a farm system that can expand its scope beyond merely growing food to creating space for all living things.

A Woody History

In the U.S., efforts to introduce natural vegetation to agricultural land took a “huge hit,” Earnshaw says, in 2006, the year a serious E. coli outbreak was linked to fresh spinach grown in California’s central coast region. The outbreak sickened more than 200 people and caused three deaths.

“Since then, there has been tons of pressure on growers to do everything they can to keep wildlife off of their fields,” explains Daniel Karp, an associate professor at U.C. Davis in the Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology. “So, that’s meant killing all kinds of wildlife—putting out snap traps and rodenticides along field edges to kill off rodents.” It also often meant removing hedgerows.

Although a USDA investigation wasn’t able to definitively determine how E. coli wound up in bags of baby spinach, the outbreak strain was linked to specific fields where river water, cattle feces, and wild-pig feces all contained the bacteria. A grass-fed cattle operation was located on the ranch, less than a mile from the spinach field.

In the five years following the outbreak, a study found that 13 percent of the plants and trees growing along rivers in one of California’s leading produce-growing regions were eliminated out of fear that they would provide habitat for wildlife carrying pathogens. And a few years later, Karp says, a survey of California produce growers found that 40 percent were still removing habitat even a decade later.

Karp says it’s an understandable, albeit misguided, practice. A 2015 study co-authored by Karp found that, contrary to popular assumptions, the clearing of vegetation has been associated with increased prevalence of foodborne pathogens over time. “Shrubs, grasses, and trees (are) a well-known filter for nutrients and pathogens,” says Karp. “So, you might be able to prevent [pathogens] from getting onto your farm field by having those buffers.”

Karp’s research has also found that smaller, more diverse operations tend to attract species of birds that are less likely to carry foodborne pathogens, unlike monoculture operations that are more likely to have flocking birds that can deposit potentially harmful bacteria on produce.

Karp says many growers he speaks with acknowledge the benefits of hedgerows or riparian habitat, but companies who buy fresh produce often won’t engage with growers who have incorporated plants and wildlife into their operations.

This, says Chiartas, has led to a “scorched earth” mentality for those who grow produce that’s consumed raw. Karp notes, however, that the Food Safety Modernization Act signed into law in 2011 does not advise removing habitat. “The leverage point is definitely going to be big industry buyers and their auditors, and to really convince these folks that the science doesn’t support this idea that habitat removal is effective,” says Karp.

That Bustle in Your Hedgerow? Biodiversity.

Years later, she delights in walking past the various flowering plants. Doves and white-tailed kites sing. Come fall, her coyote bush hums with bees, flies, and other insects. Research shows native vegetation attract critters that can help devour pests harmful to crops. For example, a recent study showed that walnut orchards with hedgerows or riparian edges had more avian predators, like the white-breasted nuthatch and woodpeckers, gobbling up harmful codling moths, than orchards with only weeds growing. The more natural, woody vegetation, the more moth consumption occurred.

Long says that while many farmers have resisted planting hedgerows on their land out of fear the trees and shrubs would only draw harmful pests, studies have shown the opposite to be true. Several years ago, she and other researchers collected bugs in hedgerows during growing seasons over two years and found that 78 percent of the insects were beneficial, while only 22 percent were considered pests. “Hedgerows do bring in more natural enemies like ladybugs and parasitoid wasps that do move into adjacent crops,” she says. Her research has also shown that farmers who have hedgerows don’t have to spray as many insecticides as those farmers who have no habitat around their farm.

Insect biodiversity can also encourage more effective pollination in orchards, Long says, because more wild bees throw honeybees off their vertical, methodical paths. “The honeybee will kind of forget what it’s doing, and it will cross over rows; you get better pollination that way.”

Though establishing hedgerows can cost thousands of dollars, and, at least in the first few years, requires a dedicated water source (a big deal in parched California), Long’s research has found that once the habitat is established, the pollination and pest control that’s provided result in a return on investment that lasts between seven to 16 years.

The Importance of Incentives

Judith Redmond is one several founders of Full Belly Farm, 50 miles northwest of Sacramento; she and her co-founders have been using regenerative, organic farming practices for nearly 40 years. She’d like HSP to push hedgerows as a more attractive option, particularly in terms of carbon sequestration, even though planting them can be more labor intensive in the short-term than applying compost. “Compost has to be trucked around. It might not be as beneficial as hedgerows or cover crops,” she says.

Still, the HSP grants have enticed conventional and organic growers like Don Cameron, vice president and general manager of Terranova Ranch, a large, mostly conventional ag operation outside of Fresno that grows processing tomatoes, carrots, onions, nuts, and other crops, planted a half-mile hedgerow three years ago with an HSP grant.

Cameron has since noticed the presence of wild pollinators, as well as “hummingbirds all year,” he says, and around the hedgerows there’s stability in his otherwise sandy soil. “What we’ve found where we’ve done it is that we have no erosion,” he says. “There’s a lot of erosion without habitat established.”

Since receiving the grant, he’s worked with NRCS and other organizations to plant about two more miles of hedgerows. And he plans to put in another seven miles with funding help from the large companies he sells his produce to, including Nestlé. “We’re seeing major food companies wanting to promote increased sustainability on farms,” he says.

Cameron is well-known in California, particularly for his work around on-farm water recharge. He says that in a stretch of the San Joaquin Valley that is often dusty and void of natural vegetation, his hedgerows have gained attention. Other growers have taken notice and they’re curious about the more than 20 plant varieties that bloom around his crops.

If it works, this type of farmer-to-farmer education may help the state achieve Chiartas’ goal of re-hedging California and pulling more carbon into the soil at the same time. For now, though, Cameron can’t ignore the simple pleasure that comes from simply growing a wider array of plants. Hedgerows are “aesthetically pleasing,” he says. “I like that.”

The post The Edges Matter: Hedgerows Are Bringing Life Back to Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2023/01/11/kristin-ohlson-sweet-in-tooth-and-claw-cooperation-collaboration-nature/ Wed, 11 Jan 2023 09:00:46 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=50155 In Sweet In Tooth And Claw, author Kristin Ohlson explores cooperative relationships found in nature, from the evolution of the multicellular creatures that form the building blocks of all life to relationships between co-evolving plants and insects and their intersection with humans. Ohlson is an Oregon-based writer whose last book, The Soil Will Save Us, […]

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Much thinking about the natural world is shaped by neo-Darwinism, an assumed struggle for survival on a planet where humans prevail over other species. But what if humans are not simply the apex predator, selfishly driven to devour the environment, destroy habitats, and dominate other creatures? What if they are instead the ultimate cooperators, ensconced in a system of mutually beneficial relationships, wielders of a unique power to uplift the natural world?

In Sweet In Tooth And Claw, author Kristin Ohlson explores cooperative relationships found in nature, from the evolution of the multicellular creatures that form the building blocks of all life to relationships between co-evolving plants and insects and their intersection with humans.

Ohlson is an Oregon-based writer whose last book, The Soil Will Save Us, became a bestseller that popularized the notion of improved soil management as a climate solution. She later appeared in the similarly themed, award-winning documentary Kiss the Ground. With Sweet In Tooth and Claw, she challenges the notion that humans are meant to dominate and control their  environmental, and invites readers to reimagine them as key collaborators instead.

With expansive thinking and in relatable prose, she tours mutualistic experiments like a Nevada rangeland reinvigorated by beavers and a Mexican coffee plantation shaded by bird habitat, explaining research that makes a case for more such invention. Civil Eats recently sat down with Ohlson to discuss the book, and what she learned is possible when people see themselves as integral parts of the ecosystems in which they live.

There’s a great passage in your book about humanity’s narrative of itself. It’s about how metaphors of constant struggle and greed have become a dark lens that cause people see humans as the apex predator of the planet, and life as “a zero-sum game in which a benefit for one is a loss for another.” Are we the apex predator?

We have the ability to be the apex predator. I was just reading another author the other day who made the point that other creatures, especially big fauna, exist because we let them. We could so easily wipe them out. But if we unleash that power—and we certainly do way too often—it leaves us with a world in which the biology around us just dies off bit by bit. We are biological creatures. We’re not something that came out of a box on a factory shelf. If we did survive in a world where all the rest of the biology was denuded, I don’t think it would be the world we want.

Your book posits that humans are part of mutualistic relationships that sustain species through cooperation. Can you explain what a mutualism is?

A mutualism is a mutually beneficial relationship among two or more species. One that most people encounter every day, at least the one that we’re aware of, is that between pollinators and plants. But mutualisms go on constantly in every ecosystem. Scientists will say probably every living thing on earth engages in a mutualism—they can’t say all because they haven’t tested every single one. But I think it’s probably fair to say that there is no organism that doesn’t have some kind of mutualism going.

“We have the ability to be the apex predator. We could so easily wipe [other creatures] out. But if we unleash that power—and we certainly do way too often—it leaves us with a world in which the biology around us just dies off bit by bit. . . . I don’t think it would be the world we want.”

We have thousands, millions, of mutualisms with all those things that live in us and on us. Everything around us is engaged with everything else constantly, both in ways that we’re aware of, like with bees and flowers, and in ways that we’re not aware of, like what’s happening underground with the roots of plants and how they interact with fungi and bacteria and protozoa and small animals in the ground. It’s going on constantly right underneath our feet.

Can you give some examples of mutualistic relationships that humans have?

Well, there’s everything that lives in our gut—bacteria. And also things that live on our skin. And—this is somewhat different—but humans also have mutualistic relationships with each other. That’s what a city is. A city is a vast expanse of people doing different things that help other people survive.

It makes a big difference if we carry this idea around in our heads that all life is competition and conflict instead of held together by cooperation from the basic cells up. All the cells that we are composed of, those single-celled organisms, came into existence about 3.8 billion years ago. They sort of floated around in this world until around 1.8 billion years ago, when a new kind of cell formed. Then one swallowed the other, and it created a more internally complex organism. It’s called a eukaryote.

All humans, all animals, all plants, all fungi are made of these eukaryotic cells. They have the internal complexity that form relationships with other cells. That act of cooperation and connection is at the basis of all multicellular life. I think that’s a big deal.

How long have scientists known about mutualisms?

The first one that I know of would be in 1886. That was the Dutch microbiologists Martinus Beijerinck. He found that on the roots of certain plants, nodules formed that bacteria live inside and they are fixing atmospheric nitrogen. Basically, they are turning it into fertilizer.

If we were to take what’s been learned about mutualisms and redevelop policy around it, how would agriculture be different?

I think things really are changing a lot. Some of the things that the Biden Administration is considering is exciting stuff. At least the ideas are floating around. But we really could take these ideas and go with them.

If we did, you would never drive down a highway and see miles and miles of bare soil that sits out there for six months a year waiting to be planned for spring. It damages the life in the soil. You would always see a winter cover crop over that.

And what some of the most innovative farmers are now doing is having a couple of crops in the same field or having a cover crop that is also a market crop. They’re using their animals in those fields. All of that would look so much different. Visually, it would be a completely different look.

I’m always fascinated when I’m flying someplace and look down and see the dramatic engineering of the landscape because of modern agriculture. When you see those circles, it’s because there’s an irrigation pivot in the middle. If farmers were using cover crops, they would need so much less water because they wouldn’t lose so much of it to evaporation. We wouldn’t see naked soil like that anymore.

Can you talk about an example of innovation that’s more mutualistic?

One coffee plantation and the farm in Costa Rica is an example of how incredible a place can be when maximizing production is not the only goal. The goal of that coffee plantation is both to raise coffee and also to have habitat that birds flourish in.

“What some of the most innovative farmers are now doing is having a couple of crops in the same field or having a cover crop that is also a market crop. They’re using their animals in those fields. All of that [makes agriculture] look so much different.”

Coffee is an understory plant. That’s how it was first discovered in Africa. For years and years, it was grown in the shade. Then, because of the threat of rust, which is a fungal pest, the U.S. and some of the big agricultural companies pushed coffee growers to grow coffee in a monoculture in the bright sun and lose the services of all those other plants. This way, they would lose the shading services and the services of insects that would live in more varied plantations. And instead, they would have to deploy a lot of chemicals and lot more water. But the idea was that they wouldn’t get rust as easily. I don’t think that has proven to be true.

On the plantation that I visited, scientists are documenting all the relationships among all the different insects and fungi and things that live in that varied plantation. There are not only many varieties of shade trees that coffee grow under and around, but all these other trees that owners planted there to try to feed birds. People who aren’t planting in that way have to take care of those pests some way. There, the birds are taking care of it. And the really intricate dynamics, even between different fungal species, also take care of pests.

Did you talk with producers and growers about the barriers to engaging in this type of system? What is it that stops people from farming this way?

There are a bunch of things that stop people from ranching or raising crops or having orchards in a regenerative way. One of the main things is one of the most surprising things: It’s what their neighbors think.

A regenerative farm looks “messy.” There’s all this stuff growing between market crop, and they’re not spraying their edges to kill off weeds. If they’re really smart—and they are really smart—they’re letting stands of wildflowers grow so that birds and insects come in. And it doesn’t have that neat-as-a-pin look.

In these small farming communities, not only do their neighbors talk, but their bankers talk, their landowners talk. An awful lot of farmers are renting land from landowners who live out of town or maybe live in town and don’t understand why their farm looks so messy. That’s really a big thing—the expectation of what it’s supposed to look like.

It’s very difficult, given our farm policy, for farmers to be creative and not just do the cookie-cutter approach to farming that suggests heavy tillage, heavy chemical use, and high-tech seed use. They’re all getting loans at the beginning of every farming season, and it’s hard to convince a banker to support you if you are doing something that’s different and creative. It’s hard to get crop insurance if you’re doing something different and creative. And bankers don’t want to give loans to people who aren’t getting crop insurance.

“It’s very difficult, given our farm policy, for farmers to be creative and not just do the cookie-cutter approach to farming that suggests heavy tillage, heavy chemical use, and high-tech seed use. . . . It’s hard to convince a banker to support you if you are doing something that’s different and creative.”

Also, most of our ag education system is following that industrial-ag paradigm of heavy tillage, heavy chemical use, and high-tech seed use. For farmers who want to do it differently, where is the lesson plan? Where are the examples? Examples proliferate in YouTube videos—it’s not that it doesn’t exist anywhere—but it pales in comparison. The teaching and support for people doing regenerative agriculture is just a fraction of the support and education of people doing it the industrial way.

Regenerative ag is not a concept that the USDA has always embraced. In fact, there was a period where they were kind of against it. Can you give us some background on that? And is it changing? 

We can all be so hidebound. Nobody wants to change, especially when you’re part of a huge bureaucracy. And I think especially when big government agencies like the USDA have to answer to politicians who answer to big funders. There was a lot of foot-dragging in the USDA and there still is, I imagine, around such questions as GMOs and chemicals in farming.

But it really is changing. When my soil book first came out [in 2014], one of the first people I heard from was a guy who was in the media department for the Natural Resources Conservation Service. They had this whole movement around soil, a huge push. They were really trying to convince farmers around the country to stop tilling and to use cover crops. And I think they probably would have loved to have told them not to use chemicals or to use fewer of them, but that was a tougher thing to get away with given the bureaucracy.

Scientist Jonathan Lundgren was operating within that bureaucracy at that time, working with soy and corn. He is an entomologist so he is really interested in finding natural ways that farmers could fight against the pests that plague crops. A lot of his research was showing that these miracle chemicals that the chemical companies were trying to sell to farmers, that would take care of this pest and that pest, they weren’t really helping at all. That’s when he really had his difficulties with the USDA and left.

Can you talk a little more about Jonathan Lundgren’s efforts to support new ways of farming?

He’s doing a lot of science, a lot of study, comparing regenerative farms and conventional farms and seeing really who is doing better. That one paper that he published right as I was writing this book compared conventional farms to regenerative farms and looked to see who is doing better. And it was the regenerative farms.

Their yields were not as high, but they weren’t spending tons of money on chemicals. And they were able to stack enterprises. So they had crops going, and when those crops were done, their animals would come through and eat the residue. This meant they had meat to sell from the same piece of land that another farmer would only be able to sell his corn or his soy from.

What was your takeaway after learning all of this?

If we have this idea that everything is competition and conflict, and that’s our guiding metaphor for what life is like, then we’re really missing the bigger part of the story, which is that life has been formed and is held together by these cooperative relationships, these mutualisms.

So when we look at a city—I had my window broken out yesterday. If we have this view of the world that everything is competition and conflict, well there’s just another sign of it. But if we have the view that really cities are these vast cooperative structures, but then stuff screws up every now and then, it’s a different view. It’s more fixable; it’s more workable. We are less likely to throw up our hands in despair if we think of it as we’re one of the most cooperative species that’s ever been.

Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari is among those who’ve said that humans are massively cooperative, and that is why we’re so deadly. We can organize ourselves around great causes. And sometimes the great cause is a really terrible one, like the Nazis.

But on the other hand, we can make the case that we can organize this very cooperative species around another great cause, which is repairing our relationship with the rest of nature. What excites me is that when people do figure out how we have been causing damage, and how we can pull back that damage, the rest of nature responds so quickly. Things regenerate in really powerful and unexpected ways.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/11/03/with-new-federal-funding-has-agroforestrys-moment-arrived/ https://civileats.com/2022/11/03/with-new-federal-funding-has-agroforestrys-moment-arrived/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2022 08:00:13 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=49057 “There is a windfall of federal money entering the agroforestry sector,” Meghan Giroux told Mongabay. The director of Vermont-based agroforestry consultancy Interlace Commons, she is currently implementing a program to boost regional training capacity toward helping farms implement this sustainable farming technique–which blends annual crops and livestock with perennial shrubs and trees in a carbon-sequestering system […]

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Recent months have delivered a harvest of agroforestry funding news in the U.S., just as the season’s remaining crops ripened. The announcement of $60 million in support from the Department of Agriculture (USDA) in particular has stoked enthusiasm for this sustainable agriculture technique that also sequesters carbon and boosts biodiversity.

“This funding will catalyze significant private investments into the industry and increase farmers’ incomes while simultaneously expanding carbon sequestration, soil health, biodiversity, and water quality.”

“There is a windfall of federal money entering the agroforestry sector,” Meghan Giroux told Mongabay. The director of Vermont-based agroforestry consultancy Interlace Commons, she is currently implementing a program to boost regional training capacity toward helping farms implement this sustainable farming technique–which blends annual crops and livestock with perennial shrubs and trees in a carbon-sequestering system that’s also more resilient to droughts and floods–while keeping her eye on the sizable new opportunities coming from the federal government.

That federal funding comes as interest in agroforestry is growing rapidly in the U.S. alongside the need to rapidly adopt more climate-positive types of agriculture: Though Giroux’s current project is funded by a private foundation, people like her see a myriad of funding opportunities and even more enthusiasm among people seeking training and support to implement it.

Will U.S. commodity agriculture start looking more like this? Planting crops like corn and soybeans between alleys of trees or shrubs that produce fruits or nuts also increases carbon sequestration and resilience to heat, drought, and heavy rainfall. (Photo credit: NAC/CC BY 2.0)

Lindsay Allen of Buckland, Massachusetts, is a good example. Her Fern Hill Farm is one of many currently receiving support from Interlace Commons to implement an agroforestry system where annual crops will be grown among rows of closely planted nut and berry cultivars.

Lindsay Allen plans to implement an agroforestry system on her farm with support from Interlace Commons. (Photo credit: Erik Hoffner/Mongabay)

“I’ve been farming for 12 years, but it’s not been agroforestry-focused, so to have the advice of someone like Meghan is excellent,” Allen told Mongabay between helping customers at her busy farmer’s market booth in neighboring Ashfield.

Many other farmers like her stand to gain from the USDA’s mid-September unveiling of the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities (CSC) program, investing up to $2.8 billion in 70 projects. One of these 70 is a $60 million project to advance agroforestry, and is administered by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), which will distribute funds to local and regional for-profit and nonprofit training and support partners–from Alabama to Maine, Minnesota to Hawaii and Texas–37 states in all.

One of the partners in their “Expanding Agroforestry Production and Markets” program to advance agroforestry systems for nut, fruit, and grass-fed beef production is Wisconsin-based Savanna Institute.

“We are honored and grateful to be among this incredible group of organizations and businesses who are committed to mitigating climate change,” said Keefe Keeley, director of the nonprofit which is a leading agroforestry training and research provider in the Midwest on techniques like alley cropping of hazelnuts.

Agroforestry sequesters two to five tons of carbon per acre per year, TNC estimates. TNC’s Joe Fargione adds that the level of adoption expected from this project would generate carbon sequestration of 1-2.5 percent of 2020 U.S. emissions from all sources, and over 20 years, the project could help farmers develop 80 million acres of high-density agroforestry, mitigating 3-6 percent of the country’s 2020 emissions.

For-profits including Propagate Ventures, which helps farms transition from conventional crops to agroforestry while turning a profit, are also part of the mix on the project.

“This funding will catalyze significant private investments into the industry and increase farmers’ incomes while simultaneously expanding carbon sequestration, soil health, biodiversity, and water quality,” said Audrey Epp Schmidt, Propagate’s director of strategic partnerships. And it comes at the same moment that the firm announced its own funding news: the successful raising of $10 million in private capital to support its work helping farms transition their acreage to agroforestry.

Only about 1.5 percent of U.S. agriculture is classified as agroforestry, according to a recent analysis by USDA’s National Agroforestry Center (NAC), so technical assistance and farmer outreach efforts like the TNC-administered project–which is forecast to bring 30,000 acres under that umbrella in the next five years–would boost its scaling up across the country.

“There are still many bottlenecks to overcome to advance temperate agroforestry in the Northeast, but as always, it’s the small farms that are leading the way.”

NAC has fresh leadership for that scaling effort, too. Anne Marsh was recently appointed as its new director.

“The National Agroforestry Center will continue to support USDA agencies that have technical and financial assistance programs for farmers. That support comes in the form of new research on benefits, costs, and implementation considerations that can be incorporated into programs to make connections to agroforestry opportunities more visible,” Marsh told Mongabay by email. “The Center will also develop new decision-making tools for technical support staff and farmers, and provide training to USDA staff and a growing number of non-federal partners to increase the delivery of agroforestry-related services.”

That emphasis on further training of USDA staff to train farmers will be welcomed by the agroforestry community, whose many adherents have generally not waited for government training or support to expand, but have instead plunged into it independently.

Nutwood Farm established a still-maturing 2-acre hazelnut alley cropping system on a 7-acre former Christmas tree farm in Cummington, Massachusetts–via a mixture of crowd-funding, a small Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) grant, plus great personal effort–and is a good example.

“We’re small, but we want to show it’s possible,” Nutwood co-owner Seva Water told Mongabay during a recent harvest party, where volunteers working among the hazelnut alleys–between which sheep will eventually be grazed, making it a mixed alley cropping and silvopasture site–helped bring in 900 pounds of fresh nuts, which will yield about 200 pounds of kernels when dried.

Would training still be useful to growers like her? “Technical assistance is needed at all parts of the value chain, especially for the harvesting and processing of key perennial crops like hazelnuts,” Water said. “There are still many bottlenecks to overcome to advance temperate agroforestry in the Northeast, but as always, it’s the small farms that are leading the way.”

Biodiversity benefits from agroforestry systems too, from bats to bugs and birds, here a songbird nest is perched in one of the hazelnut bushes at Nutwood Farm. (Photo credit: Erik Hoffner/Mongabay)

Because local USDA office staffers generally don’t offer such technical agroforestry training, that gap is something that programs like Interlace Agroforestry aim to close. Until then, aspiring agroforesters can start their search at the NAC’s training resources page or the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), which plays a role, too, by offering webinars for landowners, and several agroforestry practices are listed among the NRCS’s Climate-Smart Mitigation Activities for 2022.

While the millions in funding from the CSC is at the center of this current surge in interest, the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act also contains climate provisions that could provide indirect support for agroforestry, since its funding will likely support existing USDA programs that come under the climate-smart agriculture banner.

As technical assistance capacity continues to expand via these public and private programs, can aspiring growers gain the knowledge and support they need to get going, now? Interlace’s Megan Giroux thinks so.

Until technical assistance can provide harvesting equipment for agroforestry crops like hazelnuts, picking happens by hand at Nutwood Farm. Volunteers Alexandra Tinari and Finnegan Torrey join farm co-owner Kalyan Water (right) in bringing in the 2022 harvest. (Photo credit: Erik Hoffner/Mongabay)

“After 30-plus years of work on agroforestry in the United States, the sector’s moment has arrived. It’s a blessing and a curse because on the one hand, our sector has never seen this level of commitment to agroforestry,” Giroux said. “On the other, we are still woefully unprepared, without enough service providers appropriately equipped to train farmers in the modern forms of agroforestry.”

The coming months and years, then, will be crucial to harness this new commitment and enhance training to increase agroforestry’s implementation across the U.S., toward greater climate resilience of the nation’s agriculture.

This article originally appeared in Mongabay, and is reprinted with permission.

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