Farming for the future
And though the grasses become dormant in the hot midsummer, they make up for the hiatus by growing more in the warmer spring and fall. (Animals seem to be enjoying the balmy weather, too. Voles are flocking to the warmed plots, and a wild turkey once built her nest beneath a heat lamp. “We worried we were going to have what we called the ‘turkey effect,’” says Henry. “If we get too many animals moving in because of the extra heat, it could skew our results. We could be reporting that by 2050 we’ll see one turkey per square metre.”)
But the plot is not reliably productive. It showed explosive growth during wet 2008, but no significant increase in even wetter 2009 or dry 2007. “Maybe some of this early data is just a blip,” Henry explains. “It may be we only see a big growth effect every other year. At this stage, we just don’t know.”
This boom-bust cycle hints at one of the major problems farmers will face: climate change ushers in a world of what scientists call “non-linear” change. Given a little extra heat, the environment still acts in a linear fashion, proceeding from A to B to C. But add too much heat, cross that threshold Henry was talking about, and suddenly things go from A to E, or maybe Z. The relatively predictable world slips away, which is bound to be particularly disorienting to farmers. I think I know my own land, but within decades, and maybe just years, climate change could make it as unfamiliar to me as Henry’s field in London.
The change comes as the greater heat in the atmosphere shifts rain patterns and promotes evaporation. “Very likely, we’re going to have some serious moisture constraints,” says Barry Smit, a University of Guelph geography professor, Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Change and a member, with Pearson, on the expert panel. An oddity of global warming is that it produces a planet that has some wetter areas, even while drought-prone areas expand. Regions closer to the equator, as well as those relying on glacier-fed rivers (such as southern Alberta) or irrigation from diminishing aquifers, will really feel the moisture deficit – and that impact will continue all the way to the produce aisle.
“When people are buying strawberries and lettuce from California, what they’re really doing is importing water,” Pearson says. Reduce the water, and the fruit either becomes very expensive, or non-existent.
Biochar
Using “biochar” is an ancient soil-building technique from the Amazon that could help today’s farmers do their part toward curbing climate change. Biochar is a fine-grained charcoal-like material that seems to help soils retain nutrients and moisture.
Nursery crop specialist Jennifer Llewellyn, who works for the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, is experimenting with adding a mix of wood ash and char (both waste products of a wood-fired power generation plant in northern Ontario) to the typical blend of peat, aged tree bark fibre and compost used as a soil-less medium in Ontario nurseries. She hopes that the char will produce a growing medium with improved nutrient-holding capacity, without the need for as many artificial fertilizers. “Fertilizer prices have gone up 50 percent to 100 percent during the past few years, so if we can reduce fertilizer inputs, that helps growers control their costs,” she says.
For scientists seeking ways to fight global warming, biochar could be a win-win solution. As crops grow, they turn atmospheric carbon into plant tissue. If the waste products from crops – such as rice hulls or peanut shells – can be heated, turned into biochar, and worked into the soil, that carbon stays in the ground and out of the air for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. And if biochar helps land become more productive, it offers another major benefit. Amazonian farmers, for example, were likely using the technique long before Europeans ventured into the rainforest, and many of the early plots in the Amazon are still productive.
The question is whether a local solution to poor soils can be expanded into a global answer to climate change. Char may not benefit all soils. And, to be an effective storehouse of carbon, char has to be safe and stable. If soil microbes evolve to consume the billions of tonnes of char deposited in the ground, and release it into the atmosphere, the entire effort could backfire.
Still, using biochar is one of the more practical and inexpensive methods of sequestering carbon. A recent report from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation suggests that a global potential exists for using biochar to store carbon “at the billion-tonne scale” annually within 30 years.
Ray Ford
“Today’s children, when they’re older, will tell their children about the days when they could go to the supermarket and buy exotic fruit. They’ll look back in 30 years and say ‘I remember when …’”
There is no quick technical fix to the water problem. “People think an easy answer is to capture water in reservoirs,” Pearson says. But he cites Ontario research showing evaporation increases by 30 percent for every 1.5 C rise in temperature. The result: “We lose more water from evaporation from reservoirs than is actually consumed for drinking.”
Drought will be one end on a spectrum of increasingly extreme weather. We are probably already getting a taste of more variable winters, where dramatic thaws are followed by deep freezes. When a late December windstorm knocked out power to some 230,000 Hydro One customers across southern Ontario in late December 2008, it stripped the insulating blanket of snow off the strawberry plants at Maurice Schlosser’s farm south of Lake Nipissing. About half the plants were killed by the chill that followed, with the result that fewer local strawberries were available for jam and shortcake last summer.
“One thing I’ve noticed,” says Schlosser, “is that the snow will come and go during winters now. When I was a kid, that didn’t seem to happen. You’d have a thaw, but you wouldn’t lose all the snow, it would just take the banks and drifts down. Now you’re losing all the snow two or three times during the winter, and the ground is bare.”
And if the weather is less “normal,” our farm output will be, too. “We have a just-in-time food system, and that works great if you have a predictable climate,” Henry says. “But if you’re having really wet years, really dry years, it’s not what you see on average that’s the problem, it’s the variability. That variability disrupts how we like to operate.”
My farm entered uncharted territory during the past two summers, when near-constant showers delayed our hay harvest and spoiled our winter fodder. As the saying goes, “you’ve got to make hay when the sun shines,” because dry, sunny weather locks up the proteins and sugars in mown grass and clover, allowing them to be baled and stored for winter. But in 2008, sunshine was a rare commodity. Rain fell on 57 of the 92 days in June, July and August. This past July was even more freakish, with rain on 25 of 31 days.
When hay gets wet, moulds consume the nutrients you are trying to harvest. If you wait out the rain, delaying the harvest until the grass matures, the hay is high in fibre but low in protein. Either way, the forage has the nutritional value of Melba Toast: great for weight loss, disastrous for an ewe carrying twins. During lambing season, the result is sleepless nights spent urging milk into weak lambs or ransacking the freezer for frozen colostrum because an old ewe has no milk for her newborns. Some ewes gave birth to lambs too weak to survive, or produced healthy lambs but had no milk to feed them. Those hard-luck cases were the minority, of course, but despite extra rations of grain and mineral, the rest of the flock didn’t thrive like it would in a “normal year.”
What farmers can do
Quick, which country is the world’s third largest producer of greenhouse gases? It’s not the United States or China, they’re the top two. The third biggest emitter is Indonesia, pumping out the equivalent of three billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year – almost 85 percent of that from cutting down rainforest, clearing land and burning peatlands. (Ironically, one of the factors fuelling the destruction is the demand for palm oil to use as biofuel.)
In the process, the Indonesian archipelago demonstrates how unconstrained logging and clearing of land for crops can be major contributors to global warming, says a new report from environmental think tank Worldwatch Institute. Almost a third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from our efforts to grow food and fibre, and produce lumber and pulp, in the process damaging the landscape and degrading the lands we farm. “Yet, so far, land-based or ‘terrestrial’ carbon has been largely ignored in climate mitigation initiatives,” Sara Scherr and Sajal Sthapit write in their report, Mitigating Climate Change Through Food and Land Use. “This has grave implications not only for the success of global efforts to head off dangerous climate change, but also for the future of the planet as we know it.”
The good news is that the five billion hectares of the earth’s surface currently used for farming provide tremendous scope to fight climate change. According to Scherr and Sthapit’s report, “Food is something the public understands. By focusing on food systems, climate action will become more real to people.”
Here are five ways farmers can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions:
➞ Keep more carbon in the soil (and out of the air): A basic building block of living material, carbon is present in the soil as plants, insects, microbes and animals, both living and dead. While carbon-rich organic matter makes up only 1 to 6 percent of most soils, it helps the earth retain nutrients, air and water.
Getting more carbon into the ground not only makes the land more fertile, but also keeps carbon out of the atmosphere where it can wreak havoc. Farmers can help by adding compost and manure to the land, using crops such as soybeans and clovers that can supply some of their own nitrogen, and growing and then ploughing under “green manure” crops, such as red clover. Reducing tillage also prevents carbon from being oxidized when organic matter is exposed to the air, and planting trees helps remove carbon from the atmosphere. Finally, there’s biochar, the new darling of greenhouse gas mitigation (see “Biochar” on page 32).
➞ Plant perennial crops: If major crops could grow every year without having to be replanted, farmers would cut their fuel and fertilizer bills. At the same time, extensive perennial root systems would put more carbon into the ground and keep the land covered, preventing erosion. Fruit trees, berries and hay and pasture are examples of current perennial crops, and scientists are working on perennial rice, wheat and sunflowers. The problem? Perennials do not typically produce as much seed as annuals (one variety that has been bred has only about 70 percent of the yield of conventional wheats).
➞ Raise livestock that is lighter on the land: Feeding and housing animals produces about 14.5 percent of human-related greenhouse gas emissions. Just one cow and her calf can emit enough gas – mostly methane – to equal the emissions produced by a car driven for 13,000 kilometres.
Beyond keeping fewer animals, farmers can employ rotational grazing: letting animals eat the pasture, removing them to let the grass grow, and then repeating the process. This makes for better feed, less erosion, more productive grass and more carbon storage. Other measures farmers can take include giving animals a vaccine that alters the organisms that live inside their rumen (part of the stomach) so they release less methane – something only in a research phase – and processing surplus manure to capture methanerich “biogas.” Burning that gas to produce electricity will reduce the methane’s greenhouse gas impact.
➞ Maintain natural areas: Earth has a large carbon reservoir in its four billion hectares of forest and five billion hectares of grassland. (A hectare of mature forest in southeast Australia holds over 2,300 tonnes of carbon dioxide.) If farmers keep the natural areas they own intact, those areas can continue storing carbon. But convincing people to limit the use of their land will also require economic incentives, such as tax breaks and direct payments, or higher prices for products harvested under certification programs, such as the one the Forest Stewardship Council operates.
➞ Restore degraded watershed and rangelands: Re-greening ranges and watersheds reduces erosion, helps hold moisture in the plants and trees of the watershed, stores carbon and makes degraded land more productive for residents and wildlife. While large-scale restoration projects (including efforts in China, India and parts of Africa) have been run by governments and development agencies, Ontario farmers can do their part through programs such as the Canada- Ontario Farm Stewardship Program and, in Norfolk County, the Alternative Land Use Services, which pays farmers to plant trees, restore wetlands and native tallgrass prairie, and promote habitat for pollinators.
R.F.
It was a heartbreaking reminder that this business is dependent on nature and based on biology. If the climate will not cooperate, sometimes the only option is to produce less. And this, I think, is how the system runs down: not so much with a bang, but with a series of whimpers. More variable weather, more freezes and thaws, more seasons that shift from flood to drought will mean more variable food output, more volatile prices and less convenience for shoppers raised to expect that shelves are always full.
The situation is apt to be more dire in the developing world, where farmers lack the technology and resources (including crop insurance) on which their Canadian counterparts rely. But if warming goes past a global average of 2 C, we all will feel the impact of spreading deserts and destructive changes in weather patterns. “We might make a large part of the planet uninhabitable, principally through the loss of water,” Pearson says. “If you look at areas where water stress is already helping to induce conflict, including the Middle East, you have no reason for optimism.”
As owners and stewards of millions of hectares, however, farmers can play at least as great a role in fighting climate change as their urban cousins. Some of the answers are straightforward: more efficient irrigation, and ways to grow food with fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Another approach, “no-till” cultivation, means farmers no longer have to work the soil before planting. Instead of ploughing the earth, farmers use special seed drills that bite through last year’s crop residues and sow the next crop beneath the soil surface, a method that requires fewer passes over the same ground and burns less fuel than tilling. No-till growers typically rely on artificial fertilizers and pesticides, so it is not a climate-change panacea, but leaving the soil undisturbed helps keep carbon (in the form of old roots, dead and living insects, and the decayed leaves and plants that form humus) in the ground instead of promoting its escape into the atmosphere.
What consumers can do
In a world where food is fuel – something that comes in a can or box for quick consumption – Nick Saul did a revolutionary thing: he dug up the earth at his Toronto home and planted a garden.
“After years of talking and talking about food issues, I finally planted a garden,” says the executive director of the city’s Stop Community Food Centre. The environmental benefits are obvious: the tomatoes, beans and cucumbers from his 2.4 by 3.0 metre plot arrive on the table emissions free. But growing food led to a host of subtle and more far-reaching impacts. Saul’s children saw first-hand how people depend on air, soil, sun and water. The family cooked and ate together. The plot even became a neighbourhood conversation starter, as fastidious veteran gardeners dropped by to offer advice to the man they jokingly called the “sloppy farmer.”
Growing carrots may seem too meagre a response to climate change, but individual and community action could be the most effective way to make a difference in the face of government inertia. “We’ve really lost our way, forgotten how to grow and cook for ourselves,” Saul says. If we can regain those skills, food will become more than fuel. “Food is a way to nourish ourselves, but it’s also a way to connect with others, and with our cultures and background. And it can help heal our planet if we produce it properly.”
Here are some suggestions, borrowed from Saul and Food- Share executive director Debbie Field, for promoting climate-friendly food production and creating a more resilient food system.
➞ Buy food, preferably ogranic, that’s grown close to home and is in season. Exercise “pressure at the till” by asking where the food comes from and how it was grown. Make links with farmers through farmers’ markets and farm-gate sales. Don’t be afraid to buy imported foods, especially things we can’t grow here, but look for “fair-trade” products that ensure that foreign growers receive fair compensation.
➞ Eat more home-cooked meals. Prepare food from scratch, eat and appreciate it as a family, and, if possible, grow some of your own produce. Learn to preserve food so that you can store surpluses. Learning how to alter menus to fit seasons, find home-cooked alternatives to commercially prepared meals, maintain a pantry of basics and adapt the grocery list to changes in food availability will be crucial skills for coping with the effects of climate change on future agricultural production.
➞ If you grow food, share what you don’t need (as well as tips about preparing and preserving the produce) with others, or donate it to your local food bank or food network. The Stop, for example, runs a program called YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) that links people who have lawns or potential garden space they’re not using with apartment dwellers who want to grow their own food.
➞ Try to eat 10 servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day. It’s good for you, diversifies your diet, stretches your culinary know-how and prepares you for a world where meat will be a more expensive commodity (due to the amount of grain and water conventionally raised livestock use). As a bonus, you’re promoting demand for local fruit and veggies and encouraging growers to maintain their operations and upgrade storage facilities.
R.F.
Soils, like oceans, can store enormous quantities of carbon. Farmers can enhance the process by reducing tillage, limiting erosion, rotating animals through pastures and planting more trees. A 2004 University of Guelph study estimated that if every Ontario sheep farmer converted just one hectare of pasture into “silvopasture” – a combination of trees and pasture – it would compensate for the carbon released by the province’s entire sheep farming sector.
But a truly resilient food system relies on more than just the professionals. Pearson recalls growing up in England during the postwar years when urban families cultivated their own garden allotments. “Maybe in the future,” he muses, “people, instead of going to the camp or cottage on the weekend, will go to their allotment for a couple of hours and pull weeds.”
I smile at the idea. On my route home I will do battle with cottage traffic. It’s hard to imagine all those minivans, SUVs and sleek dark coupes speeding north filled with people hell-bent on gardening. Yet working with plants and soil offers more than just another source of food, valuable though that is. As we get dirt on our palms and watch plants wither or thrive, we see the connection between our actions and their consequences – the link between the health of the earth and its climate and our own fate.
After I leave Henry’s field, the western sky darkens and the wind, already gusty, becomes increasingly violent. By evening, up to a dozen tornadoes will roll across the southern half of the province, destroying homes and barns, levelling orchards and crops, and killing a child.
forex robot on Thu, 17th Dec 2009 8:29 pm
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