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A coalition of environmental, agriculture and justice groups is attempting to drum up opposition to legislation that aims to help farmers store carbon in the soil, a practice that’s become a key piece of the Biden administration’s strategy on climate change.
Total organic fresh produce sales for the first quarter of 2021 saw a continuation of last year’s growth, increasing by 9.3 percent from the same period in 2020 and topping $2.2 billion for the quarter, maintaining a trend established in March of last year, with elevated sales across the entire supermarket.
In 1980, the American Farm Bureau Federation, currently the largest agricultural lobbying group and third-largest insurance company in the country, called for the Environmental Protection Agency to be abolished. They’ve sued it regularly ever since. The Farm Bureau lobbied against the Kyoto Protocol, the Clean Power Plan, the Waters of the United States rule, and cap and trade like they were existential threats.
Carbon footprint labels cause people to choose meat products with 25% lower climate impact, according to a study of hypothetical purchasing decisions conducted in Sweden. The study lends support to an emerging strategy of carbon labeling in grocery stores—but suggests such labels have to be carefully designed in order to reach those who might rather not think about the environmental impact of their food.
Sustainable, local, organic food grown on small farms has a tremendous amount to offer. Unlike chemical-intensive industrial-scale agriculture, it regenerates rural communities; it doesn’t pollute rivers and groundwater or create dead zones; it can save coral reefs; it doesn’t encroach on rainforests; it preserves soil and it can restore the climate (IAASTD, 2009). Why do all governments not promote it?
One pioneering California school district now distributes 23,000 boxes of organic food weekly throughout the district. “Between November and January, millions of pounds of organic produce were able to be sourced,” Jellison says. “And not only the produce but proteins and whole grains.”
Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., is a physicist and activist who works tirelessly to defend the environment and protect biodiversity from multinational corporations. Her life's work has culminated in the creation of seed banks that may one day save future generations' food sovereignty, but how she got there is a fascinating story, chronicled in the documentary "The Seeds of Vandana Shiva."
On March 22, 2021, The Del Mar Garden Club of Southern California held an informational session called “Fighting Climate Change with Plants”. As a person who is extremely concerned about the looming apocalyptic events due to climate chaos, but not extremely well informed about what we can do to prevent them, I signed up.
I quickly realized that the presentation was not going in the direction that I had hoped, meaning extolling the innate virtues of plants that have the ability to sequester carbon if we just let Mother Nature do her job. No. Featured speaker Joanne Chory, a plant geneticist from the Salk Institute, based in San Diego, CA shared how she and her team were genetically engineering plants to have bigger roots, longer roots, and roots that sequester more carbon by manipulating the gene that makes suberin to make more suberin and therefore hold more carbon, and then put those genes into crop plants. They were going to start with Sorghum. (I will talk about why that is interesting later.) She showed slides depicting what would be manipulated and how the roots were in fact growing longer in preliminary trials. I actually considered that it might be a good idea. For about a second.
Alexandre Family Farm wants to show that regenerative organic can be done at scale here in the U.S.—and that too with dairy. “Cows are not the cause of climate change. It’s the way we’ve farmed. But we’re here to show you that it can be done right,” says Blake Alexandre cofounder of the California-based family operation.
Around 68 percent of the world’s agricultural lands (eight billion acres as compared to four billion acres of croplands) are used for grazing. The majority of these landscapes are unsuitable for cropping. They are home to over a billion people who are dependent on the livestock that graze on them for their living. These landscapes are often some of most degraded lands on the planet due to deforestation and inappropriate grazing practices.
The good news is that there are a range of grazing systems that are proven to regenerate these ecosystems, increasing ground covers, biodiversity, soil organic matter, water holding capacity, and production outcomes.
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