Agriculture and climate change

Could agriculture be both the cause and the cure of climate change?

“To preserve our planet, scientists tell us we must reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere..” (source: 350.org) What caused elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 in the first place? The reason most often cited is the burning of fossil fuels. But agriculture may be a greater factor.

Topsoil stores carbon. When topsoil is lost, carbon is released into the atmosphere. The world has lost a lot of topsoil through both farming and desertification.

A solution to climate change may therefore be a concerted effort to build topsoil. Allan Savory believes that the way to reverse desertification and build topsoil is with intensive planned grazing, as he explains in this recent TED talk:

How to green the desert and reverse climate change

A key point is that soil health cannot be maintained with crop farming alone. Livestock farming is also required. Lots of livestock according to Allan Savory. The importance of livestock for soil health is also a theme of the book that Paul Harlow gave to members of the old Vermont Agricultural Development Board around the end of 2011: Folks, This Ain’t Normal by Joel Salatin.

Creating topsoil through intensive planned grazing has many advantages. Allan Savory discusses some of them in his TED talk: it helps to fight hunger, poverty, violence, social breakdown and war. It helps to improve water supplies and water quality. It does not require large capital investments. It does not require “fast” government (a plus in my book).

Creating topsoil has one other advantage. It will appeal even to climate change skeptics. The physicist Freeman Dyson is a prominent climate change skeptic. He wrote that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated” in this paper published in 2007:

Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society

But he also wrote in that paper:

To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil… I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology. No computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land.

In 2009 the New York Times Magazine published a long and fascinating article about Freeman Dyson: The Civil Heretic.

If both Allan Savory and Freeman Dyson are in favor of building topsoil, what are we waiting for??

I highly recommend Allan Savory’s TED talk above. For more information about his work, here are some articles I found:

Using Primeval Methods to Fight Modern Abuses of Agricultural Lands
Roving Herds of Grazing Climate Helpers

GMO/GE Labeling

There was an interesting article on the front page of the New York Times today:

Major Grocer to Label Foods With Gene-Modified Content

Whole Foods will require labeling of all GMO/GE foods sold in its stores by 2018.

This is consistent with the Slow Government way of thinking. Absent an overwhelming food safety issue, food labeling issues should be left to negotiations between buyers and sellers. Let the marketplace work. Keep the government out of it.

As an aside, here is an interesting observation about two hot-button issues: climate change and GMO/GE foods. Earlier I blogged about Mark Lynas. Mr. Lynas is a strong proponent of taking action to fight climate change. He is also a strong proponent of GMO/GE foods. “To vilify GMOs is to be as anti-science as climate-change deniers, he says.” (source) John Mackey is the co-founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods. “He is one of the most influential advocates in the movement for organic food.” (source) He is himself a vegan. Based on those facts and his company’s announcement yesterday about labeling GMO/GE foods, it would be hard to say that he is a proponent of GMO/GE foods. Yet on climate change he had this to say earlier this year: “I haven’t been outspoken about global warming… I guess my position on it is that I don’t think that’s that big a deal.” (source)

The usual position of the left is to believe that both climate change and GMO/GE foods present huge risks to society, while the usual position of the right is to question that belief on both issues. Mark Lynas and John Mackey do not fit the mold of either left or right, and furthermore, they hold opposite positions from each other. Is there no consistency in the world??

People are complicated. Just because you know someone’s position on one issue doesn’t mean that you can always predict their position on another issue. None of us are perfectly consistent. It may be that perfect consistency is neither possible nor desirable.