Summary: In addition to cutting fossil fuel use and decreasing climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases, a shift to organic farming and ranching dramatically increases the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil, enabling organic farms and ranches to maintain high production even during periods of drought or heavy rain.

IPCC projections and models used to discuss climate change in the
future tense: something we could head off. No more. As we’ve noticed,
climate change discussions have switched tenses — glaciers

will melt has become glaciers

are melting. Agriculture

will be stressed has become agriculture

is stressed.

There’s a corollary. Talk of climate change

prevention has become talk of

mitigation and

adaptation.

For cities, that means flood walls. For farms, it means a transition to
agro-ecological farming methods, ways of farming that harmonize with
natural processes rather than relying on external,
artificial-or-chemical inputs, or genetic engineering, to increase
yields.

That transition will have many benefits.

The first is that it will actually prevent climate change. Organic
farming — one way of carrying out agro-ecological farming — has been
shown to increase carbon sequestration in soil relative to non-organic methods. Furthermore, extensive research, most recently
by agronomist David Pimentel of Cornell, has shown that transitioning
to organic and local farming could cut energy inputs into the U.S. food
system by 50 percent.

“United States agriculture is driven almost entirely by
these non-renewable energy sources. Each person in the country on a per
capita consumption basis requires approximately 2,000 liters per year
in oil equivalents to supply his/her total food, which accounts for
about 19 percent of the total national energy use,” Pimentel said.

In addition to cutting fossil fuel use and decreasing carbon
emissions, a shift to organic farming and the resultant increases in
carbon sequestration will make agriculture more resilient and more
resistant to onrushing anthropogenic climate change.

Resistance and resilience are technical terms: as ecologist Alison Power observes,
resistance is a system’s ability to not be affected by a
“perturbation,” such as a sudden drought or hurricane. Resilience is
the measure of the agricultural system’s ability to respond to a
“perturbation” that does affect it—in other words, how quickly it
returns to its former level of functioning, or how close to its former
level of functioning it can get to.

There is strong evidence that organic-farming systems, which are
usually a mix of diverse-plant communities—the furthest thing from the
plains of monocultures that are the mainstay of American
agriculture—are both more resistant and more resilient than other types
of planting systems.

For example, a study
carried out in Central America after Hurricane Mitch hit in 1998 showed
that hillside farms, where many poor farmers are forced to work the
land, that used practices such as agro-forestry, inter-cropping, or the
planting of cover crops like the “velvet bean,” were far less damaged
than those that did not.

The study covered over 300 communities and 24 regions in Nicaragua,
Honduras, and Guatemala, and showed that well-diversified plots had
less soil erosion, more topsoil, greater moisture levels in the soil,
and lower economic losses, by percentages of 20 to 40 percent, than
their conventionally-farming neighbors.

Similarly, a survey of organic-agricultural programs in East Africa
showed that organic agricultural systems reduced soil erosion,
increased soil-moisture retention, and enabled better flood-control,
lengthening the growing season and increasing resilience to natural
fluctuations in the temperature—fluctuations that will increase in
magnitude as climate change accelerates.

More generally, agro-ecology’s reliance on diverse crops, liberally
inter-mixed with one another, prevents pest and pathogen infestations
from reaching critically destructive masses—pest infestations and
pathogen outbreaks are projected to worsen with climate-change, and
such occurrences are more intense in monoculture plots.

Drought is also less likely to desiccate a farm with increased soil
quality and increased moisture retention, relative to a conventional
farm. Such droughts are another “event” likely to increase in frequency
and severity as climate change worsens.

There’s another benefit to switching to agro-ecology, but the
benefit is more systemic: under pretty conservative assumptions,
switching from conventional agriculture to organic agriculture in
developing countries boosts productivity massively. That doesn’t help a
lone farmer whose crop is destroyed by a localized disaster, but it
does enable his country to provide him with the resources needed to
re-build and re-plant his farm, and feed himself while doing so.

This brings up the last point. As Holt-Gimenez and development expert Raj Patel observe in Food Rebellions:

“It is important to realize that the vulnerability of
people to climate disasters is socially produced: that is, pushing the
world’s farmers to precarious farming conditions is the result of
decisions taken in the market, in government, and in the global
institutions. … We can decide to build resilience, equity, and
sustainability into our agricultural systems.”

That is, resilience and resistance are “socially produced” too: If
the market pushes farmers to precarious farming locations, and climate
change from human activity makes their existence yet more precarious,
human political institutions can help them transition to
agro-ecological farming, through loans, capital grants, or technical
assistance.

If farmers from the under-developed world can do it, why not here?