Has Regenerative Agriculture's time arrived?

 In The Social dilemma, a documentary featured on Netflix, a group of young tech-savvy veterans of the social media world lay out their concerns about the undesirable influences exerted by social media giants on individual lives and on society writ large.  It’s a long and complicated story, but it comes down to this: These companies: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and others, consider your web presence, if you have one, almost entirely in terms of its capacity to draw “eyeballs”. They don’t make it their business to care about content per se. Ultimately, they’re selling ad space based on viewership.

A thought that occurred to me in the midst of my morose ruminations about social media: they might just be useful in telling us indirectly about the salience of a particular topic or person in society.  It goes without saying, of course, that having a high level of visibility on social media is not a figure of merit except in some narrow sense.  With that rather ill-formed thought in mind, I googled “regenerative agriculture”.  It took less than a second for Google to come up with 19,800,000 results.  Wow, I thought, that’s an impressive number!  Then I searched for links to Lady Gaga, whose music I often like, and came up with 210,000,000 results. Actually, the comparative results made me feel pretty good.  As a serious, non-entertainment topic, regenerative ag is doing pretty well. I feel a measure of confidence that regenerative agriculture is becoming a thing in the social universe. So what is it?

In the 1980s the Rodale Institute began using the term ‘regenerative agriculture’ in their publications and formed the Regenerative Agriculture Association. No one can give a definition that will leave everyone happy, but this one, borrowed from Wikipedia, should serve:

Regenerative agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that seeks to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of the farm by placing a heavy premium on soil health with attention also paid to water management, fertilizer use, and more.

The consequences of a century of reliance on industrial methods of farming have been devastating to the soils of America’s great plains. It all began when the U.S. passed the Homestead Acts of 1862 to encourage agricultural development of the Great Plains. A settler could claim ownership of up to 160 acres of land, provided that he lived on it for a period of five years and cultivated it. People had no idea how to farm the virgin plains as they became settled. As tractors and farm machinery became available, they did all the wrong things -- careless of maintaining the soil, deep-plowing the grasslands with abandon.  In the 1930s, droughts in the plains set up the conditions for the Dust Bowl, dust storms that proved to be the greatest single ecological disaster the nation has known. Unfortunately, the lessons of the Dust Bowl were not well learned.  A recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focusing on land details how the forced conversion of natural landscapes in the interests of increasing crop yields has worked havoc across the globe. 

 We don’t have many years left to halt soil degradation and to restore desertified land, to restore natural landscapes. The way back to restored, productive soil is at the same time a pathway toward lowering the concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Regenerative agricultural practices involve no-till management of the soil, discontinuance of pesticides, herbicides and industrially produced fertilizers. Soils are kept with something planted year-round. Cover crops include legumes such as vetch, clover, radishes and peas, and annual grains such as winter rye. These cover crops are managed so that they protect the soil from erosion and build a soil rich with root systems that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Regenerative agriculture is in effect, a restoration project, an obeisance to nature. Cash crops, such as corn or soybeans, are sown into soil that maintains its cover crops. You can learn about all this by watching the beautiful and inspiring film, Kiss the Ground. You’ll learn about regenerative agriculture from people like Gabe Brown, in my book a star right up there with Lady Gaga.

You can’t but wonder after watching Kiss the Ground why there hasn’t been a massive shift to regenerative ag practices.  One clue is that Gabe makes a point of not accepting money from the government. That might seem surprising, given that federal subsidies for agriculture are plentiful; on the order of $30 BILLION dollars annually.  A big fraction of that money goes into the pockets of large-scale farming operations and into the coffers of the big ag companies. All of that fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides, genetically modified seed varieties, and cash price support money, just for starters, has produced an enormous lobby invested in keeping the party going.  In 2019 the government spent $22 BILLION on farm aid related to the trade wars.  Farmers were getting checks that seemed to come out of the blue.

Remember all the fierce debates in Congress and in the public back in 2008 when the government bailed out the auto industry? I’m mystified why we don’t hear loud objections to the much larger recent subsidies to agriculture, much paid out by the USDA without the agency even going through Congress.  Agriculture seems to be built on one subsidy after another.  Many large landowners, already rich off federal money, wondered why they were getting unexpected checks.  Those billions might have been spent on other urgent social programs, instead of mollifying the farm block over potential losses resulting from President Trump’s trade wars. What a wasted opportunity!  What farmers do with their land has a huge impact on water quality, wildlife, and climate change. The USDA could have mounted effective programs that pay farmers to improve the environment, restoration of wetlands, and switching to regenerative methods of farming.

The saying goes that the present is but the child of the past. Let’s take a step back and ask why so much corn is grown across America’s heartland. An article written by Jonathan Foley in 2013 is still relevant today.  Foley points out that only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, mainly for high-fructose corn syrup.  A big portion is fed to animals, which we then slaughter and eat.  The fraction of available food calories in feed corn that ends up in the meat and dairy we humans eat is really small. Perhaps the largest single market for corn is a conversion into ethanol. The notion of all the plowing, planting, discing, fertilizing, irrigating, harvesting, storing, and transporting, then converting the corn into alcohol in an energy-intensive, inefficient process, only to burn it in a car engine, never did make sense. It’s now just a way to dispose of the huge excesses of corn produced by farmers who want to get in on free money the government is handing out. It’s no surprise then that in 2019 total corn production in the U.S. increased by 17.5%.   By the way, the folks converting the corn that no one can use into ethanol that can’t rationally be justified as a fuel also receive subsidies for that work since it makes no sense economically. 

What will it take to really change things? Maybe, just maybe, newly elected President Biden will do the right thing and appoint Representative Marcia Fudge as Secretary of Agriculture. She’s shown that she’s ready and able to turn USDA into an effective and socially conscious tool for reform of American agriculture.

Let’s return briefly to Google search. Near the top of the list of the 19.8 million results of the search for “regenerative agriculture” are organizations of all sorts involved in one way or another with agriculture.  Bayer, a corporation at the top of the list, manufactures weedkillers, pesticides and the like. Another, the French company Danone, sells prebiotic yogurts such as Activa, and dairy-free drinks such as soy milk. They must have found their way onto the list via some sort of google algorithm magic.  Neither company has much investment in regenerative ag, though Danone has a few stories to tell. They hardly offset its sorry record as one of the top ten producers globally of packaged water, a global blight in its own right.  I’m left wondering about how profit works its way into decisions about how things pop up in searches. 

The fact that many corporations are feeling their way into regenerative practices, if only by loose association, in an effort to look good could be taken as a sign of progress, I suppose. But those serious about the promise of regenerative agriculture as a suite of disruptive technologies, with the power to improve agriculture’s environmental impact and make a significant contribution to lowering the rate of increase of greenhouse gases, know that the journey is just beginning, and the road ahead will be rough. 

But we needn’t focus only on big ag in our search for promising change. In my next blog, I’ll write about regenerative ag at local levels. That will be more fun and it’s actually quite important.

 

 

Making change is the work of many hands

The large figure below is a product of the Prairie Rivers Network,  an organization of Illinois citizens founded in 1967 to block the plans of the Army Corp of Engineers to build an ill-advised reservoir near Decatur, Illinois. Over years of advocating for environmental causes the organization grew and became part of the Coalition of American Rivers, dedicated to resisting other Corps of Engineers projects throughout the Midwest. Under the leadership of John Marlin, the first paid Executive Director (1973-1983), the Coalition drew people from varied political and social backgrounds to protect rivers from federal water projects that threatened most of the nation’s rivers in the 1960s and ’70s.

Their figure is loaded with information that calls us to pay attention. Let’s start with the statement about nutrient pollution.  Illinois, like all the other midwest prairie states, is heavily into industrial agriculture. Corn and soybean crops dominate the landscape. Which of the crops dominates in a given year is determined by many factors; predominantly weather, market forces, the trade wars, government subsidies, crop insurance.  In any given year, most of the available land is planted in one of the two crops. The processes of plowing, planting, irrigating, fertilizing and keeping the bugs and weeds under control result in enormous runoffs, that flow into small streams, then flow into larger ones, eventually empty into the big rivers and thence into the Gulf of Mexico. That water, further enriched with the runoffs from animal feedlots, is seriously polluted. All along its long journey It infiltrates local aquifers and surface sources for municipal water systems, kills wildlife and--year by year--depletes the originally rich, loamy soil of its organic matter. When it arrives in the Gulf, it creates a huge nutrient-rich dead zone.

Very little of the corn and soybean grown on those Illinois fields goes directly into the food chain. A lot of it goes to feed animals that are converting it into manure and methane gas,  and another large fraction is converted into bioethanol, a transportation fuel. The entire system could not be more cleverly designed to convert enormous quantities of fossil fuels into greenhouse gases, notably  carbon dioxide and methane.  If we were to set out to poison the planet, we’d build something like present-day industrial agriculture as a prime element. 

 Agriculture is estimated to produce somewhere around 14 to 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally. That makes it the single largest contributor to global warming.  Even more concerning is the fact that nations around the world seem to be eagerly looking to emulate US agricultural practices. We have a  great challenge before us: to feed a growing global population. It's become evident, though, that we’re going about it in the wrong ways.  Fortunately, there are solutions to the problem.  One of them is indicated at the top right of the figure. Regenerative agriculture practices can reverse the path we’re on. The problem is, what society should do as a matter of great urgency  isn’t consistent with the business plans of corporate agriculture. It will take a lot of hard politicking and good government to make progress in shifting from the wasteful, poisonous farming methods of today to no-till farming, use of cover crops, and more thoughtful management of water systems. 

Cover crops are a big factor in making the system work.  As the large figure at the top shows, there is movement; in Illinois, more than 700,000 acres devoted to corn and soybeans are utilizing cover crops.  Ah, but it’s going too slowly!  We need to get to about 18 million acres. Data from an Illinois EPA analysis indicates that at the current rate of adoption, we’re 200 to 500 years away from where we need to be. Time is running out!  Similar states of affairs are found in the other midwestern states, even in the face of wonderful examples of what can be achieved using regenerative agriculture.  Gabe Brown’s Youtube video talk on his experiences in North Dakota provides an inspiring example of how effective regenerative agriculture can be.  

Five years ago, as part of the Paris Accords, a $100 billion multilateral Green Climate Fund was established within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The United States committed $3 billion to the initial creation but has to date paid in only $1 billion.  With the Trump administration moving to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, there is no prospect that the US will pay any of its shortfall, let alone contribute more funds to the cash-strapped fund. These monies are intended to assist with climate adaptation in poor countries.  The goal for the Green Climate Fund was $100 billion per year.  At this point, commitments are falling far short of what was promised. Still, nations are responding, and one can hope that over time the urgency of the situation will impress itself.  

It will take a great deal of hard work and determination to buck the established ways of doing things, and brilliant new science and engineering to create a way forward.  Here are two examples of promising new technologies that could play a role:

• The company Indigo Ag was founded to develop technologies around using microbes living within a plant to help plants protect themselves from insects, disease, and drought. That description does not do justice, however, to the range of the company's activities, which stretch across virtually all aspects of the agricultural enterprise. They are off to a fast start and have operations running in many parts of the globe.  The CNBC interview with CEO David Perry gives an idea of the breadth of their vision.  They are moving toward a radical disruption of modern agricultural practices for producing the major grains that feed the world.

• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced additional support for a project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign entitled Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE). A key aim of the RIPE project is to provide farmers, particularly those in some of the world’s poorest countries, with seed that will yield substantially more without requiring more inputs. Scientists working in RIPE take advantage of a long history of scientific research, coupled with the latest discoveries in plant biology, to tweak photosynthesis to produce improvements. According to the project director, Professor Stephen Long, seen here with co-Director Donald Ort,
  

  

  “Our models predict that by combining several strategies we could achieve a 50 percent yield increase, which will go a long way to meeting the demands of this century.”  The RIPE project has a long way to go before it can be transferred to food crops, tested for safety and widely deployed on a global scale.  The scientists are all too well aware that they are racing against the increasing effects of climate change. Government needs to increase its support of this and other promising research efforts.  

It's inspiring to see that there's a kind of two-pronged system at work. The Prairie Rivers Network advocates at the local level for sustainable agricultural practices, lobbying legislators, educating in the school systems and in the public sphere generally about what is at stake, and what individuals can do to build support for effective legislation. Those folks are living in the same community as the researchers at the University of Illinois engaged in world-class research with the aim of finding technological solutions.  And the people at Indigo Ag are engaged in developing commercially successful answers that will be applicable globally.

So what can you and I do?  We can read and learn; use the Internet to ask questions and find answers; find the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of state and federal legislators and make calls; lobby regulatory agencies when we see examples of counter-productive cancellation or relaxation of effective rules ( In this regards, try following Huffpost Agriculture for a daily feed that can be interesting and surprising).  What we mustn't do is give up, or get too busy with other things.