Stop making farmers pay for climate change
An example of regenerative agriculture at CIASPE in central Mexico.Photo: Cassidy Pearson
Food systems are a key theme at this year’s New York City Climate Week, and it’s a welcome addition to proponents of climate-conscious agriculture.Scientists and farmers know to fight climate change and win We need to rethink our food supply.
Globally, agriculture accounts for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions—even this huge percentage may be an underestimate. Emissions come from crop fields that convert natural ecosystems to monocrops, spray the land with fertilizers and pesticides, use diesel-intensive equipment for farming and harvesting, and more.
Agricultural technology enables us to produce more than 4 billion tons of food every year, ensuring fewer and fewer people go hungry. But what if there were smarter ways of farming?
Scientists have long recognized that if we could store more carbon in our soils, we might be able to curb the worst impacts of climate change.by clever how We grow food, we can produce more food on less land — and remove carbon from the atmosphere through a technique called regenerative agriculture. The Farm Bill, which will be updated in 2023, could play a key role in helping to achieve this solution.
smarter farming
This Natural Resources Defense Council says The principles of regenerative agriculture include “cultivating and grazing with knowledge of the land’s natural resource availability, building and prioritizing soil health, reducing and ultimately eliminating the use of harmful chemicals…and building strong relationships with communities.”
Consider this: In a corn field, every plant is competing for the exact same ingredients to survive. Important nitrogen, phosphate and potassium are rapidly depleted from fields, forcing farmers to add fertilizers to keep crops alive. If a pest like the corn leaf aphid finds a field, it’s in heaven — there’s food wherever it flies.This forced growers to use pesticides to keep aphids safe no way There is a chance to destroy the field.
By contrast, consider an agricultural system with multiple crops—like beans, corn, and squash. Pumpkin vines on the soil, preventing weeds from growing. Beans put life-giving nitrogen into the soil, while corn acts as support for the beans to climb. No wonder the second system requires less pesticides, less fertilizer, and less pollution.
This practice comes from indigenous knowledge. So why and when should we stop growing our food in a more efficient, diverse and better way for the environment?
Part of the answer comes from crop insurance. The dust storms of the 1930s hit American farmers hard as they faced low crop prices after World War I and the Great Depression. In response, Congress passed the first version of today’s Farm Bill, which ensures farmers receive fair crop prices by subsidizing sales.
Instead of thinking about where the problem was—why single-crop fields created dust storms in the first place—farmers were (necessarily) rescued from one crop: wheat.
That brings us to today’s $428 billion Farm Bill. The Act, updated every five years, is a complex system of farmers’ income protection and crop insurance.
It’s a spiral: by growing one crop, farmers work harder on the land, depleting its resources, producing more carbon, and contributing to climate change. In turn, tornadoes, floods, droughts and wildfires have become more common, threatening their crops and forcing farmers to profit from their insurance.
Here’s rule 22: Farm smarter and lose money. Plant a crop and the earth suffers, but you pay for it.
The solution is simple: Insure multiple crops on the same land.And this solution already exists.
The Whole Farm Income Insurance Program, passed nearly a decade ago, was added to the 2014 Farm Bill and provides coverage for multiple crops and livestock under a single program.
Few farmers are aware of the program. Even fewer farmers signed up. worse, Enrollment is decreasing.
Why?
One reason: Insurance agents refuse to sell these policies to farmers. They receive a commission per policy, and these multi-crop policies take longer to write, reducing costs for agents.
a farmer said“It’s not just that they don’t understand, but in my experience, they [insurance agents] Ostensibly hostile to different insurance plans. “
Another reason: Large agricultural companies like Monsanto lobbied for a single-crop solution because a large portion of their profits came from the sale of pesticides and fertilizers.
We need to stop blaming farms and start looking critically at those who profit from business as usual.
How to break the cycle
This climate week, policymakers and environmentalists touted regenerative agriculture as a key solution to climate change. Negotiations have already begun on the farm bill, due to be updated in August, and experts estimate it will cost about $600 billion.
Policymakers (I’m looking at you, Senators Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and John Bouzeman of Arkansas) must use this time to rewrite crop insurance policies and incentivize insurance agents to advocate for them. Doing so will make regenerative agriculture a real possibility for the future of agriculture. We must stop putting pressure on farmers to curb climate change without giving them the tools to do so.
Cassidy Pearson is a candidate for the Master of Public Administration at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.
