A new report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds industrial agriculture has helped keep greenhouse gas emissions at bay – kind of.

Study co-author Steven Davis of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology touts the study’s estimate that since 1961 higher yields per acre have avoided the release of nearly 600 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

“That’s about 20 years of fossil fuel burning at present rates. Our results dispel the notion that industrial agricultural with its petrochemicals are inherently worse for the climate than a more ‘old-fashioned’ way of doing things.

The researchers found that although the various inputs to modern farms require more energy and greenhouse gas emissions per unit of food output than did the lower-input methods of the past, crop yields have increased by 135%, reducing the amount of cropland needed to produce the same amount of food. Without these advances, the conversion of vast natural areas to agriculture would have caused much more greenhouse gas emissions—the equivalent of nearly 600 billion tons of CO2 since 1961.

As Davis explains, land conversion is the big culprit:

Converting a forest or some scrubland to an agricultural area causes a lot of natural carbon in that ecosystem to be oxidized and lost to the atmosphere. What our study shows is that these indirect impacts from converting land to agriculture outweigh the direct emissions that come from the modern, intensive style of agriculture.

We may have gotten ourselves into a predicament. Abundant fossil fuels have enabled both population growth and increased food production. Now fossil fuel production has begun to sputter at the same time soil fertility is beginning to succumb to years of assault by chemicals and synthetic fertilizers. And the population bubble has inflated to enormous proportions, and is still growing.

Industrial agriculture enabled the population bubble to inflate. Now all these billions of people go about their mission of pursuing economic growth, emitting greenhouse gases in the process – especially in the rich countries. The argument that industrial agriculture helped keep greenhouse emissions at bay only makes sense if we ignore the totality of industrial system within which industrial agriculture is embedded.

The focus of public and policy debate about the climate change impact of food has mostly been on transport.  “Food miles” has become shorthand for thinking about the climate change impact of food. But food system related emissions  result not only from the transport of food. Emissions also result from the conversion of land for farming, the process of farming itself, the energy used in food processing and retail, and from food waste.

A new report from Britain titled Local food and climate change – the role of community food enterprises looks at all stages of the supply chain. Using a life cycle analysis, the report takes into account emissions impacts at all stages, from agricultural production (and its associated inputs) through to processing, packing, transport, retailing, home storage and preparation, and final disposal. Its conclusion: carefully designed local food networks can reduce greenhouse gas emissions in every part of the food chain.

Farming itself is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture is a major source of methane, which is many times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (methane is 25 times more potent than CO2 over a 100 year time horizon but 72 times as potent over 20 years); and nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that agriculture is responsible for 13.5% of emissions worldwide. If the connection between deforestation and agriculture is taken into account, farming’s contribution to causing climate change rises considerably. In Latin America, for example, about 70% of previously forested land in the Amazon is used as pasture, and feed crops cover a large part of the reminder. Deforestation is responsible for just under 18% of emissions around the world.

Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture arise both from the process of farming itself and from the production of inputs such as fertilizers, fuel for machinery, energy for heating and materials, and animal feed. The process by which fertilizer is produced is both energy intensive (generating carbon dioxide) and results in the production of the powerful greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Emissions arise from land use change as soils are disturbed, vegetation destroyed and forests cut down. Farming practices are closely intertwined with the use of external inputs. Conserving soil carbon through methods such as conservation agriculture, organic farming, integrated nutrient management, cover cropping, agroforestry and the use of biochar not only reduces emissions from the soil but also conserves soil nutrients and reduces the need for fertilizers.

The emissions impacts of raising livestock, both direct (livestock raised on recently converted land) and indirect (the raising of crops such as soybeans and corn for animal feed) are significant: in Britain, meat and dairy consumption is responsible for 58% of food-related emissions; and globally, livestock are estimated to account for 70% of agricultural land use (30% of the Earth’s land surface) and more than half of the greenhouse gas emissions attributable to agriculture.

In assessing emissions from the food transportation system, how close food is produced to its point of consumption proves to be far from the only factor. Route planning, loading, the timing of deliveries compared with traffic and vehicle efficiency are all factors in road freight emissions. And reducing emissions from transport is not just about reducing the distance that food travels between the supplier and the retailer – transport between the retailer and the customer is even more important. It is no use reducing emissions associated with transporting food from the farm to retail, only for the good work to be undone by longer or more frequent shopping trips by car.

Emissions reductions from more efficient transport can be undone by higher emissions from storage, packaging and processing of food products. The best way to reduce emissions from food processing is to reduce the extent to which food is processed at all. But this takes thought – if processing reduces the need for later cooking or refrigeration, or uses food that would otherwise go to waste, it is unlikely that eliminating processing in favor of fresh produce would reduce overall greenhouse gases. Refrigeration is a big culprit, contributing to climate change both because of the energy used to operate the equipment and because of the impact of refrigerant gases, which are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. And the interactions among refrigeration, packaging, food transport, food product innovations and various socio-economic developments have helped create cultural norms and practices that are highly energy-dependent. For example, take out-of-season consumption of fruits and vegetables. It may be less greenhouse gas-intensive to ship fruit and vegetables from Mexico or South America during the winter than to produce them locally in heated greenhouses. Similarly, emissions associated with storing apples for many months or keeping foods frozen can more than make up for the transport emissions saved by not bringing them from around the world. People have gotten used to having most foods to be available throughout the year. Slashing emissions from our food systems requires that we once again learn to live with seasonal variations.

If greenhouse gas emissions from the food system are to be reduced significantly, we will need to change the balance of the food we eat. A lower impact diet is seasonal, largely based on food that comes from plants, and can include some meat and dairy products grown to high environmental standards. Eating less – in particular, less factory-farmed meat and poultry – would be an effective way to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions.  And, as a bonus, we would be healthier for it.

In the United States, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of honeybee colonies have failed to survive the winter.

As an article in the U.K. Guardian explains, if honeybees are in terminal collapse the world could be on the brink of biological disaster:

The decline of the country’s estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

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The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Scientists believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies.

Losses in some commercial honeybee operations are running at 50% or greater. Continued losses of this magnitude are not economically sustainable for commercial beekeepers.

The Guardian article includes a litany of the catastrophic consequences of honeybee colony collapse:

Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfalfa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.

In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature’s natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.

What if we could achieve all of the following:

• A more humane livestock system
• Healthier and tastier meat and dairy products
• Less E. coli food poisoning
• Elimination of feedlots
• Better manure management
• Increased groundwater recharge
• More fertile soil and more nutritious forages
• More diverse and healthier ecosystems
• Enormous savings in energy
• Reduced use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides
• Reduced flooding and soil erosion

And, to top it off:

• A dramatic reduction in global warming gases.

Richard Manning in an article in Mother Earth News titled The Amazing Benefits of Grass-fed Meat argues that we can have all this. And not just for niche markets – we can scale it up. We can convert half of the 150 million acres used to grow corn and soy ?to permanent pasture and not lose one ounce of meat production.

Tastier, more humane meat – and less global warming. Industrial farming relies on huge amounts of chemical fertilizers that produce emissions contributing to global warming. Nitrogen fertilizer reacts with oxygen to form nitrous oxide (N₂O), which has become the third most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and methane.  N₂O has a global warming potential 296 times larger than an equal mass of carbon dioxide and also contributes to stratospheric ozone depletion.  In corn and soy production, tilling adds oxygen which promotes oxidation. Tillage also releases carbon dioxide, along with methane and nitrous oxide. While a growing corn field sucks up a lot of carbon dioxide, the carbon is soon released as the disced down stalks and leaves decay. All tillage systems have been found to be net contributors to global warming, with the worst offenders being the annual crops corn, soybeans and wheat farmed with conventional methods. Conversely, fields of perennial crops pull both methane and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in the soil. Manning points to evidence that perennial grasslands can, under certain conditions, be even better at sequestering carbon than forests.

Manning calculates that if we converted half the U.S. corn and soy acres to pasture, we might cut carbon emissions by roughly 144 trillion pounds. That’s not even counting the reduced use of fossil fuels that would also result.

An additional benefit from the reduction of industrial corn and soybean farming not mentioned by Manning would be a reduction of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the use of chemical fertilizers upstream in the Mississippi basin.

So what’s stopping us? Redesigning our food system would require shifting, slashing, or eliminating massive federal subsidies for corn and soybean production – subsidies that end up in the pockets of the agribusiness conglomerates or the wealthy. The “health care” debate, which resulted in further entrenching the parasitic insurance industry, shows how likely that is to happen. Brian Riedl, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, calls farm subsidies “America’s largest corporate welfare program.”

Congress justifies agribusiness subsidies as keeping America’s food supply cheap and abundant. No matter that the food’s killing us while bankrupting the health care system and destroying global ecosystems.

The planet is beset with a number of unprecedented crises that, as Dennis Meadows points out, are symptomatic of an underlying problem: exponential physical growth in a finite world.

At Countercurrents.org, Helena Norberg-Hodge makes a compelling case that “going local” – shifting economic activity back into the hands of local businesses instead of concentrating it in fewer and fewer mega-corporations – may be the single most effective thing we can do to begin to tackle the problem.

Norberg-Hodge points to food as a clear example of the multi-layered benefits of localization.  Local food systems can help reinvigorate entire rural economies and have social and environmental benefits:

• While globalized agriculture demands monocultural production of cash crops, a food system oriented towards local and regional markets gives farmers incentives to diversify.
• Diversity creates many niches on the farm for wild plant and animal species.
• Diversified farms can get by without heavy machinery or heavy doses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
• Most of the money spent on food goes to the farmer, not corporate middlemen.
• Small diversified farms employ more people per acre than large monocultures. Wages paid to farm workers benefit local economies and communities far more than money paid for heavy equipment and the fuel to run it: the latter is almost immediately siphoned off to equipment manufacturers and oil companies, while wages paid to workers are spent locally.
• Local food systems provide better food security.
• Small-scale, diversified farms have a higher total output per unit of land than large-scale monocultures.

Agribusiness interests dominate at the state, national, and international levels. For example, the Agribusiness Council is upfront about its aspirations for dominance of the global food system:

The Agribusiness Council (ABC) is a private, nonprofit/tax-exempt, membership organization dedicated to strengthening U.S. agro-industrial competitiveness through programs which highlight international trade and development potentials as well as broad issues which encompass several individual agribusiness sectors and require a “food systems” approach. Examples of such issues are commercialization of new technology/crops, environmental impacts, human resource development, trade and investment policy, natural resource management, and rural development.

touts its incestuous relationship with  the U.S. government:

Initiated under Federal government auspices by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, The Agribusiness Council was formed by a group of business, academic, foundation and government leaders in order to facilitate American agribusiness participation in agricultural trade and development programs with developing countries – and represent private-sector agriculture interests to Federal government decision-makers.

and makes no bones about its objectives:

As an organization with international linkages, The Agribusiness Council seeks to strengthen the U.S. agricultural sector’s international outreach through stimulating private enterprise trade and investment solutions in Third World agro-industrial development.

Agribusiness interests may be too entrenched and government too corrupt to change. But we can change. We have the power to opt out of the global food system and to begin to grow local food systems, from the ground up.

New research shows that modern farming – the kind practiced on nearly all farmland in the United States and touted around the world as the “green revolution” – destroys soil carbon. Synthetic nitrogen contributes to climate change and undermines long-term soil productivity because synthetic nitrogen breaks down organic matter faster than plant residue creates it.

In papers published in 2007 and 2009 University of Illinois researchers Richard Mulvaney, Saeed Khan, and Tim Ellsworth argue that the net effect of synthetic nitrogen use is to reduce soil’s organic matter content. They hypothesize that nitrogen fertilizer stimulates soil microbes, which then feast on organic matter. Over time, the impact of this enhanced microbial appetite outweighs the benefits of the additional crop residue left behind as a result of increased fertilization.

Tom Philpot summarizes their findings in a post at Grist:

And their analysis gets more alarming. Synthetic nitrogen use, they argue, creates a kind of treadmill effect. As organic matter dissipates, soil’s ability to store organic nitrogen declines. A large amount of nitrogen then leeches away, fouling ground water in the form of nitrates, and entering the atmosphere as nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas with some 300 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide. In turn, with its ability to store organic nitrogen compromised, only one thing can help heavily fertilized farmland keep cranking out monster yields: more additions of synthetic N.

The loss of organic matter has other ill effects, the researchers say. Injured soil becomes prone to compaction, which makes it vulnerable to runoff and erosion and limits the growth of stabilizing plant roots. Worse yet, soil has a harder time holding water, making it ever more reliant on irrigation. As water becomes scarcer, this consequence of widespread synthetic N use will become more and more challenging.

In short, “the soil is bleeding,” Mulvaney told me in an interview.

The idea that synthetic fertilizers destroy soil health is not new. Philpot quotes from the book The Soil and Health by British agronomist Sir Albert Howard, a touchstone of organic farming first published in 1947:

The use of artificial manure, particularly [synthetic nitrogen] … does untold harm. The presence of additional combined nitrogen in an easily assimilable form stimulates the growth of fungi and other organisms which, in the search for organic matter needed for energy and for building up microbial tissue, use up first the reserve of soil hummus and then the more resistant organic matter which cements soil particles.

A recent report by UNEP and the UN Conference on Trade and Development is consistent with the researchers’ results, finding that in Africa yields had more than doubled where organic, or near-organic practices had been used, with yields jumping 128% in east Africa. The study found that organic practices outperformed traditional methods and chemical-intensive conventional farming and produced environmental benefits such as improved soil fertility, better retention of water and resistance to drought.

Compared to any other human activity, land use and agriculture are the greatest emitters of greenhouse gasses.

You heard that right. More than the emissions from all the world’s passenger cars, trucks, trains and planes, or the emissions from all electricity generation or manufacturing. Of the three most important man-made greenhouse gasses — carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation, methane emissions from animals and rice fields, and nitrous oxide emissions from heavily fertilized fields  — account for 30% of the total.

Jonathan Foley points out at Yale Environment 360 that since the last ice age, nothing has been more disruptive to the planet’s ecosystems than agriculture. Continued population growth is pushing global agricultural systems to their very limits. He asks:

Already, we have cleared or converted more than 35 percent of the earth’s ice-free land surface for agriculture, whether for croplands, pastures or rangelands. . . What will happen to our remaining ecosystems, including tropical rainforests, if we need to double or triple world agricultural production, while simultaneously coping with climate change?

We’re already exploiting Earth’s water resources in an unsustainable manner, drawing on fossil aquifers and draining rivers before they reach the sea. The use of industrial fertilizers and other chemicals has more than doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus compounds in the environment and fundamentally upset the chemistry of the entire planet. How can Earth cope with future demands from increasing population and agricultural consumption?

Unfortunately, Foley’s answer is pretty feeble. First, acknowledge we have a problem. Then, “find ways to simultaneously increase production of our agricultural systems while greatly reducing their environmental impacts” – what he calls a “greener agricultural revolution.”

What Foley can’t admit is, we don’t have a “problem” that can be solved with yet another technofix. We’re in a predicament, from which there’s no solution, no easy way out. The best we can hope for is to face our predicament squarely, with as much courage and grace as we can muster.

The American Midwest will suffer the most from climate change, according to a new analysis of U.S. climate projections from The Nature Conservancy.

Temperatures in the worst-hit U.S. states could be up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than present-day levels by the year 2100. Kansas, Nebraska and other Great Plains states would be the hardest-hit by climbing temperatures. But temperatures everywhere in the U.S. could rise by 3 degrees Fahrenheit or more.

In the agricultural states of the Great Plains, rising temperatures will cause shifts in the optimal zones for growing certain crops; milder winters and earlier springs will exacerbate outbreaks of insect pests; and water sources will become taxed as aquifers are depleted and soil moisture declines.

Another study by North Carolina State University agricultural and resource economists Dr. Michael Roberts and Dr. Wolfram Schlenker, published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, predicts that U.S. crop yields could decrease by 30 to 46 percent over the next century under the most benign global warming scenarios and by a devastating 63 to 82 percent under the most rapid global warming scenarios.

The study shows that when temperature levels go over 29 degrees Celsius (84.2 degrees Fahrenheit) for corn, 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) for soybeans and 32 degrees Celsius (89.6 degrees Fahrenheit) for cotton, yields fall steeply.

Co-author Roberts says:

While crop yields depend on a variety of factors, extreme heat is the best predictor of yields . . . this study shows that temperature extremes are not good.

While the study examined only U.S. crop yields under warming scenarios, the implications are ominous for the entire world.

Here’s the abstract:

The United States produces 41% of the world’s corn and 38% of the world’s soybeans. These crops comprise two of the four largest sources of caloric energy produced and are thus critical for world food supply. We pair a panel of county-level yields for these two crops, plus cotton (a warmer-weather crop), with a new fine-scale weather dataset that incorporates the whole distribution of temperatures within each day and across all days in the growing season. We find that yields increase with temperature up to 29° C for corn, 30° C for soybeans, and 32° C for cotton but that temperatures above these thresholds are very harmful. The slope of the decline above the optimum is significantly steeper than the incline below it. The same nonlinear and asymmetric relationship is found when we isolate either time-series or cross-sectional variations in temperatures and yields. This suggests limited historical adaptation of seed varieties or management practices to warmer temperatures because the cross-section includes farmers’ adaptations to warmer climates and the time-series does not. Holding current growing regions fixed, area-weighted average yields are predicted to decrease by 30-46% before the end of the century under the slowest (B1) warming scenario and decrease by 63-82% under the most rapid warming scenario (A1FI) under the Hadley III model.

Despite 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization, genetic engineering has failed to significantly increase U.S. crop yields.

That’s the conclusion Doug Gurian-Sherman reaches in the report Failure to Yield, released in March 2009. Sherman is a senior scientist in the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) Food and Environment Program.

Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

This report is the first to evaluate in detail the overall, or aggregate, yield effect of GE after more than 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization
in the United States. Based on that record, we conclude that GE has done little to increase overall crop yields.

The biotech industry and others have trumpeted GM crops as key to feeding the world’s future population, to the exclusion of other approaches. Huge investments have been made in research on GE versions of major crops, while organic and other agro-ecological methods have not attracted similar investment. The results have proven underwhelming:

The two primary GE food and feed crops are corn and soybeans. GE soybeans are now grown on over 90 percent of soybean acres, and GE corn makes up about 63 percent of the U.S. corn crop. Within these categories, the three most common GE crops are: (1) corn containing transgenes (genes transferred from another organism using genetic engineering) from Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) bacteria that confer resistance to several kinds of insects; (2) corn containing transgenes for herbicide tolerance; and (3) soybeans that contain a transgene for herbicide tolerance. Now that these transgenic crops have been grown in the United States for more than a decade, there is a wealth of data on yield under real-world conditions. Thus a close examination of numerous studies of corn and soybean crop yields since the early 1990s gives us a good gauge of how well GE crops are living up to their promise for increasing those yields.

Bottom line: They are largely failing to do so. GE soybeans have not increased yields, and GE corn has increased yield only marginally on a crop-wide basis. Overall, corn and soybean yields have risen substantially over the last 15 years, but largely not as result of the GE traits. Most of the gains are due to traditional breeding or improvement of other agricultural practices.

Industrial methods of agriculture have imposed tremendous costs on our environment. Agriculture contributes more heat-trapping gases than does transportation, and it is a major source of pollution that has led to large and spreading “dead zones” devoid of fish and shellfish (themselves important food sources) in the Gulf of Mexico and other waterways.

The report finds that organic and low-external-input methods (which use reduced amounts of fertilizer and pesticides compared to typical industrial crop production) generally produce yields comparable to those of conventional methods for growing corn or soybeans. Also, more extensive crop rotations, using a larger number of crops and longer rotations than current ecologically unsound corn-soybean rotations, can reduce losses from insects and other pests. Conventional breeding methods, especially those using modern genomic approaches (often called marker-assisted selection and distinct from GE), have proven to have the potential to increase both intrinsic and operational yield.

Among the recommendations the report makes is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, state and local agricultural agencies, and public and private universities should redirect substantial
funding, research, and incentives toward approaches that are proven and show more promise than genetic engineering for improving crop yields, especially intrinsic crop yields, and for providing other societal benefits. These approaches include modern methods of conventional plant breeding as well as organic and other sophisticated low-input farming practices.

Oxfam asks in a statement commenting on the report:

With this review in hand UCS rightly questions why GE technology receives such privileged attention over other approaches.

A new California Department of Water Resources survey indicates snow water content is 61% of normal for the date, statewide. The results prompted Director Lester Snow to warn:

“We may be at the start of the worst California drought in modern history. It’s imperative for Californians to conserve water immediately at home and in their businesses.”

DWR’s early estimate is that it will only be able to deliver 15% of requested State Water Project water this year to the Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley, Central Coast and Southern California.

December through January tend to be the wettest months but thus far the Sierra has only received one third of its expected annual snowfall.

Elissa Lynn, a meteorologist with the state, said the prospective drought can’t be attributed to but is consistent with global warming:

A third of normal is devastating.  January is the biggest month for precipitation in the Sierra. Climate change does indicate the possibility of more frequent droughts, but it’s hard to tell over a short time span.

Some farmers are leaving fields unplanted based on expected lack of water. The state’s largest irrigation district, Westlands Water in the major farming counties of Fresno and Kings, told growers on Wednesday to brace for zero water supply this year.

UPDATE: Secretary of Energy Steven Chu says California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming. Chu says up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.

“I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen. We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California. I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going, either.