Climate Change and Food

“We have to make saving farmland a priority. We have to save land near cities, we need more farmers, and we need to teach people to farm and put them on land.”
—Michael Pollan, prominent food author, at Slow Food Nation

More than 60,000 people took part in Slow Food Nation in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend and the Sonoma Land Trust was there, serving as an event co-sponsor and also as a host for a Slow Dinner at Aziza Restaurant and a Slow Hike at the Sonoma Baylands. Both events proved exceptionally popular and sold out far in advance.

Executive director Ralph Benson spoke at Slow Food Nation on the “Meat” panel about the “infrastructure” of open space and the connection between a vibrant, local agricultural economy and Sonoma County landscapes (read more on this next month). Additionally, SLT staffers Sheri Cardo and Tenley Wurglitz attended several of the “Food for Thought” presentations, including the eye-opening panel about the connection between climate change and food. In case you were wondering, yes, there is one, and it’s big.

Moderator Mark Hertsgaard, journalist and author of the forthcoming Living Through the Storm: Our Future Under Global Warming, kicked off the session by informing the capacity crowd that climate change is locked in for the next 30 years. Even if the world stopped emitting all carbon right now (which is, of course, impossible), “the next 30 years are written in stone,” he said.

Some other disturbing facts:

By the year 2050, due to climate change, grain yields are expected to decline as follows:

• 10–30% in the Midwest, the U.S. breadbasket
• 50% in the Southeastern U.S.
• 34% in North Africa
• 50% in South Asia

Currently, 800 million people around the world are living in conditions of “water stress.” Within 50 years, that number will grow to three billion.

The factor that has agribusiness and smaller farmers most concerned is the unpredictability of precipitation patterns. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, said that while history shows that humans and agriculture can adapt to climate differences, uncertainty is another matter, one that makes it much harder to craft solutions.

Farmers are already seeing changes, according to author Anna Lappé, co-leader of the Small Planet Institute and daughter of Frances Moore Lappé, author of the revolutionary Diet for a Small Planet. She gave as an example the upstate New York farmers who are now able to grow habañeros!

“The farmers are the canaries: they are the most in touch with soil and weather,” she said. “Agribiz is very concerned about climate change.”

Wes Jackson, PhD, president of the Land Institute, said that farmers in the Midwest are most worried about soil erosion due to the increasing thunderstorms in the Midwest.

Lappé cautioned the audience not to consider biotech companies as the solution makers, although they are presenting themselves as such. “Biotech is not the answer,” she said. “It doesn’t increase yields, and it decreases biodiversity and democratization.”

She reported that new studies show that organic farming can match and exceed the yields of chemical agriculture. “Industrial agriculture depletes resources in so many ways not accounted for,” Lappé said.

The fossil fuel connection
Panelist Patrick Holden, an organic dairy farmer from Wales and director of the Soil Association, reiterated Richard “Peak Oil” Heinberg’s assertion that by the early 2020s, we will need to adjust to a quarter of our current fossil fuel use. Farmers, Holden said, will need to go from taking in 10 calories of fossil fuel to grow one calorie of food to “carbon-neutral” agriculture using renewable energy resources. And they’ll need “resilience” strategies to adapt.

Jackson concurred, stating that nitrogen fertilizer uses twice as much energy as it yields, and added this unsettling statistic: “The 22-year-olds of today have lived through 54% of all the oil ever burned!”

Pope chimed in saying, “We can’t sustain industrial monoculture with the price of oil – it’s no longer sustainable.” But where some see crisis, he sees opportunity.

“The good news is that they cooked the books,” he said with some satisfaction, referring to the fossil fuel-based monoculture subsidized by our fuel economy. “So we can make changes while we still have some soil and biodiversity left.”

“We’re going to see a dramatic shrinking of global supply chains and a re-localizing of agriculture,” he projected.

The meat question
Anna Lappé is her mother’s daughter and, as such, she was firm in making sure that the issue of meat was discussed. “Why are we continuing to divert so much land to grow feed for livestock?” she asked, stating that it still takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef, and that meat consumption is rapidly growing in China and India, which is a cause for concern.

“The population growth of humans and farmed animals are both up,” she said. “We slaughtered 55 billion animals for food in 2005 — that’s five times greater than in 1965.”

In fact, the United States consumes more meat than almost any other country. Some panelists proposed that if Americans simply decreased their consumption, other developing countries could increase their intake a bit.

Holden said he believes that meat-eating still has a place at our tables, but only, for example, when cows are fed naturally on grass rather than grain — grass used for crop rotation, to be more specific.

What can we do?
Home farming emerged as one viable solution. Dr. Ari Bernstien, pediatrician and author of Sustaining Life, said, “We cannot disentangle our health as human beings from the health of the world. Humans have a fundamental disconnect with the natural world, but farming helps people connect.” He said that it’s the urban poor, in particular, that needs to start farming so that they can have better access to clean, healthy food.

Along that same vein, Jackson said that if people are growing their own food, it’s an indication that they’ve joined the fight.

Welsh farmer Holden stressed the importance of developing regional strategies — “planning for our own backyards,” so to speak.

Pope concurred that we can’t rely on national leaders to solve the problem for us, saying, “There is a profound denial about food among U.S. politicians.”

He brought up another point of special interest to land trusts in California. With a hotter climate, he said, “we will no longer be able to store water in reservoirs,” because of increased evaporation, so California will need to start sequestering water in the land — and land will need to be set aside for that.

Jackson proposed a 50-year farm bill with five-year bills as mileposts, addressing small- to medium-sized agriculture, forestry and ranching.

And Lappé concluded by saying, “We are all media makers. This is a battle of ideas. We need to bust the myths and speak up where we can make a difference for sustainable agriculture and small farms.

So that’s what this media maker is doing. Next month, also look for a report on “Re-localizing Food.”