We Don't Have To Choose A Dustbowl

It's hard to write calmly about yesterday's news, as discussed by Emily Gertz at Change.org global warming blog, that we're probably locked into 1,000 years of warming. Scary doesn't begin to cover it.

What's that going to mean for agricultural land management and food production? It's going to mean what's happening right now to the California farm sector:

... But the worst news, regardless of where you live nationwide, is what is happening in the central valley of California. The central valley is home to farmers ranchers and the big agricultural conglomeretes, who employ tens of thousands of people people throughout the valley.

The valley supplies most of the country with lettuce during the winter months and melons during the summer months. But farmers are now literally abandoning their fields, turning them into dust bowls due to a crippling drought and a number of court decisions that have reduced the amount of water flowing through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. ...

Farms aren't just getting pressured by water shortages, growing more common in many regions of the world, but by prices that don't support their production costs:

... There is no minimum wage for farmers, you take what the processor is willing to pay. I'm sure many will say thats tough, farmers chose to farm, they knew the risks, if you don't like it get another job. That's OK, that's their opinion, as long as they feel no one else has a right to minimum wage, unemployment, workmen's compensation, a pension and paid health care. And I write this knowing full well that people in all jobs are suffering, not just farmers, but being a farmer, I try and stick to what I know.

As is always the case in a failing economy, people criticize gaps in or the loss of their safety nets and rightfully so. They generally criticize high food prices, blaming the farmer, never realizing that there is no relationship between farm price and supermarket price.

They don't know that farmers have no safety net, no unemployment, no paid health care, no weekends off. They see government subsidy payment totals in the millions of dollars never realizing most of that money goes to a small percentage of the largest farms, some to people who don't even farm. They don't know that the vast majority of that money goes to corn, soy and cotton farms. There is no subsidy for pasture, or vegetables or fruit. ...

These smaller farms will increasingly be abandoned in areas where the water has run out. Many will switch from having poor, intermittent plant cover on depleted soils supplemented with fertilizer, to having sparse plant cover holding on with decimated partner animal populations. Much of that land, as it's increasingly doing in developing nations, will turn to desert. And when the bad weather comes, that uncovered soil will blow around for miles.

But if there are subsidies for anything in farming, as I've discussed before, there should be subsidies for carbon sequestration in range lands:

... "The world’s large grazing animals run in herds as a defence strategy against pack-hunting predators. The larger the number of animals, both prey and predator, the larger the herd masses. Such herding grazers have what are referred to as non-self-regulating populations. This means their numbers are only controlled by accident, disease or predation, rather than any innate breeding control. Because they cannot regulate their own numbers these populations were often enormous with numbers running to many millions[," said Dr. Allen Savoury.]

In fact, as we have discovered, only through increasing livestock numbers while planning their concentration and movement carefully can desertification be reversed on most rangelands. Once restored, rangelands can store even more carbon than croplands can for two reasons: the rangelands of the world dwarf the croplands in size; and most croplands support annual plants with lesser root volume and depth than the perennial plants of healthy rangelands. Root volume and depth is crucial to both carbon and water storage in soils. ...

Biodiversity in terrestrial ecosystems usually work this way: the greater the diversity and abundance of lifeforms aboveground, the greater diversity and abundance of lifeforms below ground. Causation in this relationship goes both ways, as well. While diversity of soil microfauna will be several times greater than diversity of macrofauna aboveground, the cycling of nutrients between these sets of animals improves the health, productivity and carbon sequestration of the plants that are the lynchpin of both.

Given that as a principle, and while more scholarly views are important, it makes immediate sense that destroying Indonesia's old growth forests to grow biofuel crops that support very little animal life is going to be a net negative to efforts to preserve the climate.

Once again, with feeling, every living thing represents a measure of solidified (fixed) carbon that was breathed in by a plant and turned into an organic compound useful for food. The more lifeforms, the more biomass, supported by any given patch of ground, the more carbon that geographical area is keeping out of the atmosphere. Replacing former pasture with fields of corn for ethanol might be an electoral winner, but it's easy to see how taking a complex ecosystem that supported many lifeforms with a few corn plants that are mainly going to be burned would be as actively destructive as tearing down a rainforest to grow oil palm.

The numbers are big and intimidating, but the principles are very simple, very easy to understand.

Our climate problems are also big and intimidating. Yet the amount of low-hanging fruit for carbon sequestration, in terms of lands and watersheds that could be managed to support more biomass per acre, is vast. Animal and plant communities can come back rapidly with habitat restoration, including the creation of permaculture and polyculture agriculture with balanced livestock communities inhabiting the usual niches of larger wild animals. These more diverse agricultural systems could also support more birds, soil microfauna and small animals, having unintended consequences that are highly positive.

It's possible to make great strides, and no one has a model for what we could accomplish if we decided that we should support agricultural production goals more complex than churning out feed soy, ethanol and high fructose corn syrup.

A note of hope is also sounded by Hank Green, who reminds us that the world is more complex than any model, so there's always the possibility that our continuing efforts could remedy the problem. While major reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have consistently underpredicted the speed and risks of global climate disruption, it's equally possible that the future could prove them wrong about the level of commitment governments and individuals will make to turning this crisis around.

(Photo credit: liberalmind1012 on Flickr.)