ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN
A Climate Solution is in the Soil
With the worsening crises in public health, biodiversity, and global warming, the future can look bleak. Fortunately, there’s a solution: regenerative food, farming, and land use.
Regenerative agriculture, when scaled up and combined with reforestation and other regenerative land use practices, has the potential to generate a net decrease in atmospheric carbon. How? By allowing photosynthesis to do its job. Carbon drawn from the atmosphere by living plants helps build soil organic matter. When soil organic matter is disturbed or destroyed, the carbon is released back into the atmosphere where it contributes to global warming. Regenerative farming practices help preserve and build soil organic matter, so the carbon drawn down through photosynthesis remains sequestered in the soil.
If regenerative practices are implemented on enough land, we’ll reach zero net emissions by 2030 and begin to reverse global warming. Transitioning to regenerative agriculture will also produce healthier food, build soil fertility, restore depleted groundwater, and build local resilience and food security. Regenerative agriculture is a way forward to restore the health of people and the planet.
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What will we eat in the future? What was once an rhetorical musing has now become the critical question of our time as scientists grapple with tricky questions about life—and larders—in a climate-changing world.
Agriculture is both a key contributor to climate change and one of the sectors most vulnerable to those changes. Read More
Last week, Organic Consumers Association (OCA), joined Regeneration International (an organization we helped co-found and continue to support) and the Sunrise Movement to officially launch the national coalition of U.S. Farmers & Ranchers for a Green New Deal.
Five members of Congress joined us in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., to call for a Green New Deal for farmers and ranchers.
Earlier in the day, we delivered a letter to every member of Congress, signed by more than 500 individual farms, and 50 organizations representing more than 10,000 farmers and ranchers, asking Congress to support the Green New Deal Resolution.
Representatives of the Women, Food & Agriculture Network, Indiana Farmers Union and American Sustainable Business Council joined in the press conference, which was covered by multiple media outlets, including Politico, The Hill, Civil Eats and FERN AgInsider.
Why is a consumer and environmental advocacy group like OCA so invested in this new coalition of farmers and ranchers—?
Because we’re facing a food crisis. A soil crisis. A water crisis. And a climate crisis. And there’s just no way we solve these interconnected issues without “linking arms” and working together.
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A new study confirms what most scientists already know, and what proponents of industrial agribusiness either don’t get, or won’t admit: Nature abhors a monoculture.
The study suggests that by restoring biodiversity, we can vastly enhance the soil’s potential to store carbon.
That’s good news for the climate. And there are co-benefits: healthier, more resilient soil and plants, not to mention wildlife habitats.
Scientists have long believed that soil aggregates—clusters of soil particles—were the principal locations for stable carbon storage. These clusters develop when tiny particles of soil clump together.
Mycorrhiza—the microscopic fungi which live in healthy soils—produce sticky compounds that help “glue” these clusters together helping to stabilize and protect the carbon particles inside them.
Now, a recent study out of the Michigan State University (MSU) Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, suggests that this soil clustering is most efficient when soil has a healthy “pore structure.” And the key to a healthy pore structure is plant biodiversity.
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RECOMMENDED BOOKS
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This book tackles an increasingly crucial question: What can we do about the seemingly intractable challenges confronting all of humanity today, including climate change, global hunger, water scarcity, environmental stress, and economic instability? The quick answers are: Build topsoil. Fix creeks. Eat meat from pasture-raised animals. -
In Soil Not Oil, Vandana Shiva explains that a world beyond dependence on fossil fuels and globalization is both possible and necessary. Condemning industrial agriculture as a recipe for ecological and economic disaster, Shiva champions the small, independent farm: their greater productivity, their greater potential for social justice as they put more resources into the hands of the poor, and the biodiversity that is inherent to the traditional farming practiced in small-scale agriculture. -
In The Soil Will Save Us, journalist and bestselling author Kristin Ohlson makes an elegantly argued, passionate case for "our great green hope"—a way in which we can not only heal the land but also turn atmospheric carbon into beneficial soil carbon—and potentially reverse global warming. -
The climate change challenge is real, and it is here now. To enjoy the sustained production of food, fiber and fuel well into the 21st century, we must begin now to make changes that will enhance the adaptive capacity and resilience of North American agriculture. The rich knowledge base presented in Resilient Agriculture is poised to serve as the cornerstone of an evolving, climate-ready food system. -
Two Percent Solutions for the Planet profiles fifty innovative practices that soak up carbon dioxide in soils, reduce energy use, sustainably intensify food production, and increase water quality. The “two percent” refers to: the amount of new carbon in the soil needed to reap a wide variety of ecological and economic benefits; the percentage of the nation’s population who are farmers and ranchers; and the low financial cost (in terms of GDP) needed to get this work done. -
Around the globe most people get their calories from “annual” agriculture — plants that grow fast for one season, produce lots of seeds, then die. Every single human society that has relied on annual crops for staple foods has collapsed. Restoration Agriculture explains how we can have all of the benefits of natural, perennial ecosystems and create agricultural systems that imitate nature in form and function while still providing for our food, building, fuel and many other needs — in your own backyard, farm or ranch. -
In Cows Save the Planet, journalist Judith D. Schwartz looks at soil as a crucible for our many overlapping environmental, economic, and social crises. Schwartz reveals that for many of these problems—climate change, desertification, biodiversity loss, droughts, floods, wildfires, rural poverty, malnutrition, and obesity—there are positive, alternative scenarios to the degradation and devastation we face. In each case, our ability to turn these crises into opportunities depends on how we treat the soil.
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