The Rising Star of the Paris Climate Conference – Soil!

Posted By Maria Juur on Dec 18, 2015

Center for Food Safety’s food and climate team went to the UN’s 21st Conference of Parties – COP21 with shovel-ready solutions and one big goal: to spread awareness of the vast, currently under-recognized, potential that restoring soil carbon holds for combatting the climate crisis.

We arrived in Paris and hit the ground running; the nascent soil carbon movement’s biggest ally – the French Ministry of Agriculture – had invited us to be part of the official launch of their game-changing “4 per 1000” initiative in the UN’s official “Blue” zone. The goal of this initiative is to combat climate change and ensure food security by increasing the organic carbon content level of agricultural soils by 0.4% each year.

The event featured the first public screening of our new four minute film “Soil Solutions to Climate Problems,” narrated by Michael Pollan. Created to coincide with the historic climate conference, “Soil Solutions” has a clear, positive message:  too much carbon in the atmosphere is a problem, but we now know how to put carbon back in the soil where it is a solution to multiple problems.

Watch the Video Below

Prior to the screening, CFS International Director Debbie Barker was invited to speak to a standing-room only crowd of ministers. She praised the French Ministry for proposing the important “4 per 1000” concept to the global community, but encouraged them to remain vigilant so that methods respecting agro-ecological integrity are at the center of the implementation framework. Signed by over 25 countries that day including France, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico and Germany, the initiative was also signed by Andre Leu, president of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM). Mr. Leu and the thousands of organic farmers he represents around the world will no doubt help safeguard the initiative’s integrity.

COP21 happened to coincide with World Soil Day, December 5th.  An essay in that day’s Washington Post, co-authored by Debbie Barker and Michael Pollan, highlighted the global opportunity to draw carbon out of the atmosphere using regenerative farming.  The well-timed piece, highlighting innovative practices that are successfully restoring carbon stocks at Cedar Circle Farm in Vermont, created great excitement in the soil carbon movement. Agriculture has historically been ignored as both a source of problematic greenhouse gas emissions and as potential repository for those emissions, so Paris was a chance to finally capture the attention of the mainstream climate movement.

We brought leading soil scientist Dr. Kris Nichols, chief scientist at the Rodale Institute, with us to events around the city to show that rebuilding soil carbon has universal application and multiple benefits. At her presentations at both the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF), the biggest single “nature” focused event at COP21, and the lively Climate Generations pavilion, Nichols gathered volunteers from the audience to demonstrate the superior water-holding capacity of carbon-rich soils.

Our panel of international expert speakers also included Dr. Hans Herren of the Millennium Institute and Precious Phiri, founder of Earth Wisdom and coordinator of the Africa Center for Holistic Management. Herren underscored the need to transition to agro-ecological methods that use nature and science together, and Phiri showed rapt audiences land in Zimbabwe where water and wildlife had returned and where people were able to make a living off of the land because the soil had enough carbon to carry out its many functions. Phiri ended her presentations with a montage of photos she called “the new face of climate heroes” – small-scale, regenerative farmers.

After decades of systematic abuse and institutional neglect, it is thrilling that one of our most essential natural resources finally got its due in Paris: We succeeded in realizing our goal, together with our colleagues in the budding soil carbon movement. But audiences in Paris weren’t the only ones inspired to learn about this zero-risk solution; media soon picked up the soil solutions story and spread the hopeful news worldwide. Perhaps this tweet at the end of the conference from Bill McKibben, the de facto head the climate movement, best captures soil’s breakthrough to the mainstream: “Soil is a rising star at climate talks.”

World Soil Day Can Bring Help to Climate Talks

Posted By Maria Juur on Dec 3, 2015

PARIS, FRANCE — Center for Food Safety (CFS) is honoring World Soil Day — Saturday, December 5th — by championing the potential of soil carbon sequestration to significantly address climate change.

Capping off unprecedented interest in this essential, but typically ignored, resource, this special day is spurred by International Year of Soils, and also marks the midway point of the Nov. 29-Dec. 12 Paris hosted United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). CFS experts are in Paris at the UNFCCC, drawing attention to the power of soil carbon sequestration through regenerative agricultural practices.

“Soil is so much more powerful than most of us realize,” says Diana Donlon, food and climate director at CFS. “Through regenerative farming practices, we have the ability to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, where it is wreaking havoc, and store it in the soil, where it is greatly lacking and where it has multiple benefits for food, water and climate security.”

“We have a huge potential carbon sink right beneath our feet and we’re not taking advantage of it, yet,” adds Debbie Barker, CFS international programs director. “We’re in Paris right now to ensure that the potential of soil and regenerative agriculture as a solution to our climate crisis is fully recognized by the world’s policy makers.”

How Soil Sequesters Atmospheric Carbon

Emerging soil research and field tests indicate that restoring global soil health can significantly decrease CO₂ levels while simultaneously pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back into the ground where it belongs and where it can do us a world of good.  Essentially, carbon-rich soil allows photosynthesis to do its job by drawing CO₂ into the plant. The plant then sends as much as 40 percent of the carbon it captures in its leaves down to its roots, where it the plant trades the carbon with micro-organisms living in the soil in exchange for minerals.  Carbon-based organic matter helps give soil its structure and nutrients, its ability to retain water, and its fertility.  But years of overuse of chemicals, heavy tillage, and leaving soils bare robs the soil of the carbon that is necessary for the full benefits of photosynthesis to be realized.

What’s Gone wrong

Globally, soil has lost 50-70 percent of its original carbon content. When soil organic matter is disturbed, carbon molecules escape and combine with oxygen atoms to create CO₂. By some estimates, at least 30 percent of global greenhouse gasses can be attributed to agricultural practices—this percentage includes direct and indirect impacts such as clearing carbon-rich peat forests to plant monocultures like palm oil plantations.

The Soil Opportunity

Rebuilding soil organic matter on a global scale is essential for food, water, and climate security. Institutions such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) project that, under current global warming scenarios, median crop yields will decline by approximately 2 percent per decade through 2100 when compared to a baseline without climate change. At the same time, the world’s population is projected to exceed 9 billion people by 2050.  Quite simply, if we don’t start returning carbon to our soil, it will be impossible to ensure an adequate global food supply.

We have a global soil carbon deficit that can be addressed immediately by transferring atmospheric CO₂ into stable soil carbon. We can accomplish this by adopting regenerative, organic agriculture practices including: polyculture, cover cropping, agroforestry, nutrient recycling, crop rotation, and organic soil amendments like compost.

It’s time for governments to set policies and incentives for restoring carbon and other nutrients to the soil using natural processes to better ensure a more secure food, water, and climate future.

Top 5 Reasons Why We Need to Rebuild Soil Carbon Now

Posted By Maria Juur on Nov 19, 2015

Originally published on Food Tank on November 19, 2015.

In a few weeks, delegates from more than 190 countries will convene in Paris for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to hammer out a binding universal agreement. And while reports from the climate front are mostly grim, there is also some good news offering hope for the future:

We now know how to put carbon back in the soil where it belongs. Using regenerative agriculture techniques, we can harness the power of photosynthesis and turn atmospheric carbon – a problem, into soil carbon – a solution.

Rebuilding soil carbon is a practical tool for addressing global warming that belongs in our collective toolkit of climate solutions, but this fact hasn’t been well-known. Soil Solutions to Climate Problems, a timely four-minute-film produced by Center for Food Safety (CFS), outlines both the problem with this essential resource and the global opportunity to restore it to health. Narrated by author Michael Pollan, it is being released together with CFS’s new Soil Solutions program.

CFS is honored to be convening a panel of soil experts from around the world to discuss strategies for implementation at three official UNFCCC events in Paris. We’ll be highlighting five reasons why we need to start rebuilding soil carbon immediately:

1. For Food Security and Sovereignty: 95 percent of our food is grown in soil. Carbon feeds soil, allowing it to produce greater yields of nutrient dense food. Healthy, rich soils facilitate food production that is appropriate to our individual climates and cultures. Farming systems that build soil health have also been shown to be more resilient to extreme weather events such as hurricanes, which will likely become more common as the planet warms.
2. For Water Security: One of soil’s vital functions is to clean and store fresh water. Typically, as the percentage of carbon or organic matter in soil increases so does the soil’s water holding capacity. Thus, soils rich in organic matter act like giant water-holding sponges. When soils lack carbon they can’t hold water effectively, causing landscapes to oscillate between flood and drought.
3. To Help Alleviate Poverty: When soils are degraded and lack sufficient levels of carbon, crops don’t thrive. This makes it difficult for small-scale farmers to make a viable living, which means they are often forced to migrate to urban areas where their skills are undervalued. Indeed, numerous high level reports call for the transition “towards more sustainable forms of agriculture that nourish the land and people and provide an opportunity for decent financially rewarding and gender equal jobs.”
4. To Protect Biodiversity: Carbon rich soils are better able to support abundant plant growth than degraded soils. Plant biomass, in the form of grasses, bushes and trees, provides food as well as critical habitat for a wide array of the world’s fauna.
5. For Climate Security: Too much gaseous carbon in the atmosphere is causing the planet to overheat. That excess carbon is dissolving into our oceans, killing marine life. Meanwhile, there’s actually not enough carbon in the ground where it has the potential to stay in a stable, solid form. Removing excess atmospheric carbon by increasing the rate of plant photosynthesis and leaving soil as undisturbed as possible will help take pressure off of our atmosphere and our oceans.

Agriculture, unlike other sectors of the global economy, has the power to both release greenhouse gases and to sequester them. It is time to act on what we know about both the extreme perils of unmitigated climate change and the multiple tangible benefits of rebuilding soil carbon. Moving agriculture to the regenerative side of the climate ledger is a win for humans and everything else that makes its home on this blue-green planet.

Toxic Chemicals in our Soil: Time to Pull The Plug on Methyl Bromide

Posted By Maria Juur on Oct 5, 2015

Originally published on FoodTank on September 5, 2015.

By Lisa Bunin

As the dramatic consequences of industrial development continue to worsen—from the five thousand mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico to Antarctica’s depleted ozone layer hole the size of North America—it is incumbent upon all industries to do their part to find solutions to global problems. Eliminating the use of the ozone-depleting chemical, methyl bromide, is one achievable solution that the U.S. government has forestalled for far too long. Surprisingly, strawberry fields account for nearly all of the methyl bromide used in the U.S. Injected as a fumigant in the soils of nursery transplants and again in strawberry fruit fields before planting, methyl bromide “sterilize[s] the soil, killing the vast majority of soil organisms.” Although farmers cover fumigated fields with plastic tarps, 50-95 percent of the chemical escapes into the atmosphere by the time they’re removed.

When released into the atmosphere, methyl bromide contributes to the thinning of the ozone layer that protects all life on Earth from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet (UV-B) rays. That’s why nearly 200 signatories to the United Nation’s Montreal Protocol agreed to ban methyl bromide in industrialized countries by 2005. But, the U.S. has defied this ban for the past 10 years. Claiming the lack of available alternatives, the U.S. has applied annually to the UN for critical use exemptions, mostly on behalf of the strawberry industry. The U.S. is by far the largest remaining industrialized country using methyl bromide—442,337 metric tonnes (MT) in 2014, versus 40,000 MT for Australia and Canada combined. All other industrialized countries have completely abandoned its use.

Right now, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering industry requests for 2017 methyl bromide exemptions.  Will the nation’s lead agency charged with protecting the environment permanently pull the plug on methyl bromide or will it again succumb to strawberry industry pressures and broker the U.S.’ continued contribution to ozone depletion?

Choose Your Poison

In California, the state that uses the most methyl bromide, the strawberry industry and government identified methyl iodide as the panacean alternative. But, in light of evidence that methyl iodide is a carcinogen four times more acutely toxic than methyl bromide, opponents argued that it was unsafe for any use. Sustained public outrage caused methyl iodide to be withdrawn from the market in 2012.[iv]

Other toxic chemical cocktails proposed to replace methyl bromide are equally unacceptable, including various combinations of 1, 3-dichloropropene (a carcinogen) and chloropicrin (a poisonous gas used in chemical warfare). While substituting these chemicals would undoubtedly decrease the strawberry industry’s contribution to ozone depletion, chloropicrin would also increase the industry’s contribution to climate change by releasing nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas with 300 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

This absurd strategy of exchanging one global pollutant for another to fight pests, diseases, and weeds in the soil that grows our food has led our nation down the questionable path of toxic chemical dependency.

Time to Ditch the Pesticide Treadmill

Methyl bromide is not necessary for the continued viability of the U.S. strawberry industry. Two-thirds of the land used to grow strawberries in California is no longer fumigated with methyl bromide, although fumigation with other synthetic, toxic chemicals still occurs. But, there is a better way. Innovative farmers and researchers are forging a more environmentally conscious path. Motivated by a drive to harness the pest-resisting qualities of nature’s ecosystems, soil microbiology, and biodiversity, the organic agriculture path is growing strong alongside chemical-based agriculture with equal if not better results.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have been conducting farmer-led field trials of a natural soil treatment process called anaerobic soil disinfestation (ASD)—a non-toxic method for controlling soil-borne pathogens in strawberry fields. By incorporating a carbon source like rice bran and/or molasses into topsoil, covering it with a tarp, and flooding plant beds with water, ASD creates anaerobic conditions that are toxic to pathogens. ASD has been effective in suppressing soil pathogens while maintaining yields comparable to those of fumigated fields.

To fill the research gap at the nursery level, Center for Food Safety has been bringing together organic strawberry stakeholders to collaboratively develop alternatives as a special project of its Organic and Beyond Campaign. Since no organic strawberry nurseries currently exist, organic strawberry growers’ only choice is to buy conventional transplants. Wanting to become part of the ozone depletion solution and not the problem, pioneer growers teamed up with a nursery in Arroyo Grande, CA, to test four University of California varieties. Field trial results of the organic transplants, grown in a soilless medium, are due this summer and look promising.

Despite this promising research, the strawberry industry has been reluctant to embrace the development of non-chemical-based, cultural practices to replace methyl bromide.

Pull the Plug on Methyl Bromide

Government-funded alternatives to methyl bromide have mostly focused on finding other toxic chemical replacements, with few exceptions. This is not a sane or sustainable strategy for ensuring a secure and stable food future. If the U.S. had prioritized the exploration of organic alternatives when it first signed the Montreal Protocol, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today—stuck on the pesticide treadmill with few other options.

Still, it’s not too late for EPA to stop accepting excuses from the strawberry industry about why it can’t stop using methyl bromide and permanently ban it once and for all, this year.

Alternative technologies and the organic know-how already exist to seed the long-overdue changes need to happen in agriculture. By following Denmark’s lead and making a commitment to prioritize transitioning our nation’s farms to organic, the U.S. can resume its rightful place as the international leader of ecologically sophisticated, regenerative, organic farming. This means actively supporting organic farm conversions with substantial technical assistance, research, funding, and the enthusiasm needed make this important shift that will benefit us all.