Agriculture and climate change

Distinguished panel tells packed room of environmental journalists that the way we grow our food matters to a heating planet.

By Dan Sullivan

A top USDA climate-change scientist, a university professor specializing in agriculture in developing countries, and the farm director at the Rodale institute agreed: How we reward farmers to produce our food across the planet will have great bearing on our ability to dial down the mercury and deal with other coming consequences of global warming.

These specialists comprised the “Climate Change and Agriculture” panel, moderated by National Geographic Executive Editor Dennis Dimick, as part of a recent Society of Environmental Journalists conference that brought together environmental writers, educators, policymakers, industry leaders and special-interest groups from around the nation and globe, included Nobel Prize winner and International Panel on Climate Change chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, who delivered the conference keynote address.

Dimick, who holds two agriculture degrees and helped mint his magazine’s recent (September 2008) soil issue “Where Food Begins,” opened the discussion by reminding the panel and audience that farming accounts for more than 70 percent of all human water use. Remarkably, he said, agriculture has not been a main focus of discussion where climate change is concerned.

Agriculture is, however, a principal player and faces myriad challenges—production and transportation issues among them. These include:

• A world population heading toward 9 billion.
• A growing middle class in India, China and other developing nations driving up the demand for meat (and thus channeling more grain production to feed animals instead of humans).
• Rampant deforestation taking place to accommodate food demand as well as a new demand for biofuels.

Dimick then rattled off a host of recent weather anomalies—including devastating drought in Australia and significant loss of snow pack in the U.S.—pointing to a pattern of extremes and an increase in severe short-term weather events. “Climate science will tell us we are seeing dry areas getting drier and wet areas getting wetter,” he said.

Poor will suffer most

Theo Dillaha, professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech and program director for the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM), underscored Dimick’s pronouncement that these extreme weather events and shifting climate patterns are likely to hit the world’s poorest hardest.

“For the past four years my research has focused on the potential impacts of climate change on agriculture in developing countries, and in my opinion that is where the greatest risk to humanity lies,” Dillaha offered in his opening remarks.

Columbian farmers pipe water on suspended lines across a mountain valley to survive increasingly droughty conditions.

Focusing on crops that do well under extreme conditions could be a critical lynchpin to facing down global warming from a food-production standpoint.

~ William Hohenstein

Dillaha said his own beliefs and research were supported by a recent report from the United Nations Interdepartmental Working Group on Climate Change, which concluded that:

• Globally, aggregated impacts are small (-1.5 percent to +2.6 percent) in terms of predicted changes in GDP from agriculture.
• The agricultural GDP in most developed countries would likely benefit from climate change.
• With the exception of Latin America, developing countries would face a decrease of GDP from agriculture due to climate change. Asia (-4 percent for high-emission scenarios) and Africa (-2 percent to -9 percent for three out of four generally accepted global climate models) would generally be negatively affected.
• North America could gain in all scenarios, as could the former USSR, from climate-induced changes in production conditions. Western Europe, though, would lose in all scenarios.

Dillaha stressed that these climate trends apply to regions as a whole and that within these regions there are many nuances and microclimates. In order to illustrate his points, he then zeroed in on a couple of developing countries where he has conducted research, including the Altiplano of South America, a high plain (11,000 to 15,000 feet) stretching across parts of Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Bolivia and including Lake Titicaca.

Climate change real, now

“Research that we are sponsoring suggests that climate change is occurring in the Altiplano and seriously impacting the traditional agricultural systems of the indigenous Indians of the region,” Dillaha said.

Principal crops in the Altiplano are potatoes, quinoa (a tiny-seeded food crop), maize and fava beans. Deleterious effects of climate change in the region include:

Temperature:

• A projected 1.50°C to 20°C increase in mean temperature by 2030 (and a 40°C to 50°C increase by end of century)
• Significant melting of mountain glaciers used for irrigation and potable water
• More erratic frost dates, which would threaten newly planted crops as well as harvests.

Precipitation:

• Possible small decrease from September to November
• Significant increase December to April
• More precipitation concentrated in fewer rain days
• Reduction in planting of early season crops (such as fava beans and quinoa) due to early season rainfall uncertainty.

Projected changes in extremes:

• Temperature extremes consistent with warmer temperatures (increases in warm nights, heat waves, extreme temperatures and decrease in frost days)
• More precipitation in fewer rainy days (increases in dry days and heavy precipitation).

As a result of these changes and challenges, Dillaha warned, new cropping systems must be developed to be compatible with new temperature, precipitation and frost realities.

Fielding a question from the audience, Dillaha said genetically engineered crops would most certainly play a part in the future of agriculture in developing countries. “The U.S. is probably the biggest supporter of this technology, and it’s going to happen,” he said.

Later, Dillaha called for a shift of government subsidy dollars from commodity to conservation-support programs, with the caveat that follow-through and enforcement would be necessary to make those programs work.

Climate-change hitting U.S., too

“Why does the USDA have a climate-change office?” William Hohenstein, director of the USDA’s Global Climate Change Program, asked rhetorically. “We’re on the receiving end of climate change,” he said, elaborating that global warming exerts a significant impact upon both agriculture and forestry.

“We’re a significant part of the problem,” Hohenstein told the gathered group of journalists. “It turns out we can be a significant part of the solution.”

Hohenstein summarized a 2008 USDA report that detailed current and projected impacts of climate change on agriculture. These included water-table issues, northward migration of crop pests, shifting growing seasons and temperatures as well as precipitation variances (and related crop stress), shifting pollinator populations, livestock responses and projected plant yield responses in a higher CO₂ environment.

“We wanted to release a report that the entire scientific community would stand behind,” Hohenstein said. In meeting that goal, he said, the USDA sought out a variety of authors and topics, and subjected the report [see resource box] to a highly transparent public review process in which the authors were required to respond to raised questions, comments and concerns formally and in writing.

Hohestein underscored Dillaha’s assertions that regional traditional crop responses to temperature fluctuations and the availability of water resources—including those traditionally “banked” in dwindling snow packs—were going to be significant issues moving forward. He also suggested that focusing on crops that do well under extreme conditions could be a critical lynchpin to facing down global warming from a food-production standpoint.

Hohenstein said the next move is to use the findings of the report to define research priorities. Overarching conclusions of that report include that:

• Climate changes—temperature increases, increasing CO₂ levels and altered patterns of precipitation—are already affecting U.S. water resources, agriculture and land resources.
• Climate change will continue to have significant effects on these resources over the next few decades and beyond.
• Climate change on ecosystems will affect the services those ecosystems provide, such as cleaning water and removing carbon from the atmosphere. We do not yet possess sufficient understanding to project the timing, magnitude or consequences of many of these effects.
• Existing monitoring systems, while useful for many purposes, are not optimized for detecting the impacts of climate change on ecosystems.

Organic solutions for a broken food system

“It’s become painfully clear over the past few weeks that our banking system is broken, and I think it will become equally clear that our food system is broken,” said Rodale Institute Farm Director Jeff Moyer, at the October 2008 event. The Institute is a nonprofit education, farmer training and research facility, and has been conducting side-by-side comparison trials of organic and conventional farming systems for nearly three decades.

Photo from the University of Nebraska Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension. Research at the Institute has shown that organic yields hold up to conventional ones—and even surpass them in times of extreme weather conditions such as drought or excessive moisture. ~Jeff Moyer

Moyer, who also chairs the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board this year, said conventional wisdom has been assuring American farmers they were on the right path by producing food and fiber—and now fuel in the form of corn-based ethanol—as cheaply as possible. But there have been myriad hidden costs that are becoming increasingly evident, he said, costs that more consumers are beginning to consider every time they make a purchase—even in a recession.

“We need to start asking farmers to do what we want them to do, and then to support that with dollars,” Moyer said “We can’t just say ‘start farming organically.’”

Moyer said that while there has been a lot of focus on how climate change might affect agriculture “I think it’s important to understand that agriculture can impact climate change, as well.”

The Rodale Institute, he said, has been working to connect the dots between agriculture and climate change and to help farmers make the necessary changes to become more environmentally responsible while maintaining yields. Research at the Institute has, Moyer said, shown that organic yields hold up to conventional ones—and even surpass them in times of extreme weather conditions such as drought or excessive moisture.

But in an age of global warming, he said, yield is not the most significant issue. “How we produce food is the critical issue,” he said.

In the Rodale organic research trials, Moyer said, “We are able to sequester three times as much carbon,” compared to conventional no-till systems, when utilizing cover crops, crop rotations and the application of compost. “We are changing the soil’s ability to support life, to sequester carbon and, ultimately, to feed us.”

Farming organically with a focus on long-term biological interactions actually turns soil into a carbon sink, or reservoir, while conventional farming with chemicals has the opposite effect of releasing carbon into the atmosphere, Moyer told the packed room. Organic management also changes the structure of the soil, improving its ability to store water and deliver nutrients to plants over time as soil carbon levels continue to increase. Moyer called for more research into this arena, especially by industry and land grant universities, as critical to a sustainable future for humankind.

Moyer then said the Institute’s no-till organic system takes about 70 percent of the energy input requirements out of conventional food production. “That’s a pretty large chunk,” he said, adding that in contemporary non-organic farming systems there are not only significant chemical (petroleum-based) inputs, but there is also a large amount of embodied energy involved in getting a crop in the ground and harvested.

“We’re making a move toward more environmentally friendly farming systems,” he said. “Farmland can be taking carbon out of the air and store it in a very stable form.”

Besides new research, Moyer called for a major paradigm shift in federal farm-policy incentives. “We need to start rewarding farmers for the [ecological] services they provide,” he said, “not just for growing commodities.” The way the system is rigged now, Moyer said, farmers are encouraged to produce quantity over quality and as a consequence “We have farmers producing product they’re not proud of.”

“We need to think of a food system based on biology, not chemistry,” he said, “one designed to feed us—and it will feed us if we treat it right…We need a roadmap for getting farmers from where they are to where they need to be.”

Throughout its 60-year history, the Institute has oriented its research and outreach toward farmers, Moyer said. The group’s expanded focus shows consumers just how the food choices they make impact not only their health but the health of the planet. “People are removed from food on the production side, and we want to re-engage them.”

Dan Sullivan is a professional writer experienced in sustainability issues, including editing and writing roles for Organic Gardening and the Rodale Institute.