04/04/2023
Here's a little intro I wrote to the Climate Farmer Stories show that is launching this spring all over the .
Climate change threatens food security. Some farmers are growing solutions.
“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937
It’s been nearly a century since the Dust Bowl, when Congress established the Soil Conservation Service, acknowledging that “the wastage of soil and moisture resources on farm, grazing, and forest lands...is a menace to the national welfare.” But farms continue to mine the earth’s topsoil. Fields in the midwestern U.S. have lost, on average, 2mm of soil per year since Euro-American settlement—or 57.6 billion metric tons of topsoil. The main culprits are plowing and, in recent decades, agrochemicals. At this rate of soil loss, America’s bread basket may have fewer than 60 harvests left.
Wait a minute, you’re thinking, I thought this was about climate change.
Let me back up a bit. Cast your mind back to grade school science, when you learned that soil is made up of sand, clay and organic matter (living and dead plants and creatures). You’ll also recall the phrase “carbon is the building block of life.” There’s a lot of carbon in soil. I mean A LOT. The earth’s soils contain about 2,500 gigatons of carbon—that’s more than three times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. (Do you see where we’re going with this?)
Starting in the 1960s, farmers started being sold on a parcel of farming practices involving heavy use of chemical fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and big machines. The “green revolution” increased cereal crop yields and made certain companies a lot of money, but it came with heavy social and environmental costs. The ecological and health impacts have been far-ranging and profound, from fertilizer run-off triggering toxic algae blooms, to carcinogenic chemicals like glyphosate (Roundup) appearing in breast milk.
And then there’s climate pollution. Agrochemicals have a large carbon footprint. For example, synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are created from the fossil fuel methane, and when they break down they release another potent greenhouse gas: nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere. The manufacture, shipping and application of these chemicals add to their carbon price as well.
They also happen to kill soil.
It may seem counter-intuitive that farmers would put chemicals that kill soil on their fields, but that’s the logic of industrial agriculture. Kill the weeds and bugs with one set of chemicals, and then feed the plants with another.
There’s a whole other way of thinking about things, of course. I used to think about plants in my garden like drinking straws in a glass: they suck nutrients and water out of the soil. You add compost and minerals and water back in. You can’t put too many plants in too close together, or they’ll suck it all up faster than the gardener can replenish it. I wasn’t using chemicals, but basically, my thinking was similar to the megafarm with the crop duster. But if you ask any one of these climate farmers they’ll tell you that notion is bananas.
Ask Stephen Leslie of Cedar Mountain Farm in Hartland, and he’d tell you to look at the incredible abundance of life in a forest. No chemicals, no plowing, no weeding, no thinning, and yet there’s not an inch of bare soil to be found—it’s all full of living things.
Ask Nando Jaramillo of Moon and Stars in South Royalton, and he’ll tell you how companion crops can feed each other, something Indigenous farmers in the Americas have known for millenia.
The thing scientists are beginning to map out about soil is that it’s not just a substrate for growing. It’s ALIVE. And healthy soil can sustain an astonishing amount of plant and animal life all while building more soil, and storing more carbon.
The secret? (Step back into that grade school classroom once more—sorry.) Photosynthesis. We all learned that plants use the sun’s energy to pull CO2 out of the air and turn it into the sugars they need to grow. What we now know is that plants actually secrete lots of that sweet carbon into the soil through their roots—30-40%!—to feed billions of microbes. In exchange, these organisms mine and deliver specific nutrients and minerals that plants require. They exude sticky substances that glue soil particles together in a sponge-like structure that can better hold on to water and air, making it ideal for supporting life, and resistant to drought and flooding. Soil aggregates also help lock up carbon.
This process is true for pasture land too. In fact, perennial pasture and hayfields offer an even greater opportunity for long term soil-carbon storage, making pasture-raised livestock an important tool for fighting climate change. From the moment hay fields emerge from the snow in spring to the last glimpse of sun in winter, they are drawing that carbon down out of the air, turning it into food, and salting some of it away underground.
In a recent report, scientists with the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that “soil carbon sequestration in croplands and grasslands” worldwide could store as much as 8.6 billion tons of CO2 annually—an amount equivalent to roughly 1.5 times the United States’ annual emissions.” Because our agricultural lands are so depleted of carbon, they could continue to draw down the greenhouse gas for decades before reaching saturation, making farmland a serious asset in our scramble to reduce atmospheric carbon.
That is, if we let it be. Soil needs to be minimally disturbed and maximally covered with living plants and creatures to perform its magic. Which requires rethinking the 1960s model of agriculture we’ve been using—before it lands us in another Dust Bowl.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the climate farmers!
-- Anderson
Live now at BALE (Building a Local Economy) in South Royalton VT and at the Vermont Statehouse and online here:
The Climate Farmer Stories Project is an art-driven celebration of the farmers in Anagram’s Vermont/New Hampshire foodshed who are digging in on the climate crisis, using their farms to draw down carbon, cool the climate, and build food security. In partnership with Vital Communities, with funding...
