6 Agricultural Impacts on Global Warming

"No credible or effective agreement to address the challenges of climate change can ignore agriculture," says a statement signed by over 60 agricultural scientists last week.

Their statement, aimed at getting climate negotiators to pay attention to the agricultural sector during next month's Copenhagen meetings, focuses mainly on the devastating consequences global warming will have for farming and by extension on the world's food supply.

What is less frequently discussed is agriculture's impact on the climate. And that is no small subject. A recent article in Treehugger lists six powerful ways that agriculture can and does benefit and harm our environment.

Not coincidentally, all the positive impacts are from sustainable, organic farming systems, and industrialized farming contributes a lot of negative mojo. While all agriculture requires using land that could be used for something more eco-friendly, like growing forests, organic agriculture makes a less negative trade-in for paradise.

On the positive side, (a) well-tended soil sequesters carbon, (b) investing in sustainable agriculture is a more effective way of curbing emissions than implementing carbon caps on power plants, and (c) local food systems reduce the number of miles food travels from farm to plate, thereby cutting emissions as well.

On the negative side, (a) industrial agriculture has a giant carbon footprint, (b) fertilizer, pesticides an other large-scale inputs bump up the sector's emissions, and (c) agriculture tends to take over forest land, which deprives the atmosphere of a major carbon sink.

I wonder which kind of farming we should be supporting as our world warms?

Photo courtesy of newagecrap via flickr