Can Agriculture Help Solve the Climate Crisis?
By Kirsten Ferguson
Fall is typically a dry season in the Midwest, but in Iowa’s rural Greene County this October, it was raining for well over a week. For corn and soybean farmer Jim Andrew, that meant he couldn’t do much but work on paperwork and wait for the rain to subside. While other parts of the country were suffering from severe drought, the Iowa wet spell delayed not only Andrew’s corn harvest but the crop harvests of farmers throughout the Midwest. “That was highly unusual,” Andrew says. “If anything, we’re usually worried about fires at that time of year.”
While Andrew couldn’t know for sure whether the unusual weather was the result of global warming, it did reinforce his belief that he and other farmers have nothing to lose—and everything to gain—from opportunities to manage their farms in ways that could help fight climate change while also producing many other environmental benefits, from cleaner water to healthy soil.
Last year, Andrew enrolled more than a thousand acres of his farmland in a ground-breaking, privately run program that pays farmers, ranchers and private forest owners to use conservation practices that could help in the fight against global warming. The nation’s working lands, which make up nearly 50 percent of the land in the continental United States, increasingly are being viewed as a critical asset in the effort to reduce the heat-trapping greenhouse gases linked to global warming. That’s because farms and forests act as natural “sinks,” absorbing vast amounts of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere, storing it in plants and soil.
Andrew, who was named “Conservationist of the Year” by the American Soybean Association this year, is on the cutting edge of this growing movement. Last year he signed a contract with AgraGate Climate Credits Corporation, a subsidiary of Iowa Farm Bureau, to farm his land in ways that can help offset the greenhouse gas emissions of other industries. Andrew grows his crops using “no-till,” a planting technique that disturbs the earth much less than traditional plowing methods. No-till traps greater amounts of carbon in the soil, a process known as carbon sequestration.
AgraGate determines, using “conservative” estimates by all accounts, how much carbon dioxide Andrew is helping to keep out of the atmosphere by sequestering it in the soil. The resulting “carbon credits” are then sold to companies that voluntarily agree to offset their own greenhouse gas emissions. “We are the country elevator of carbon credits,” explains Dave Miller, who runs the AgraGate program. The company is an “aggregator,” acquiring carbon credit contracts from agricultural producers across the country and then bundling them together to be traded on the Chicago Climate Exchange. The exchange is the first, and currently only, greenhouse gas emissions registry and trading system in North America.
About three and a half to four million acres of U.S. agricultural land is currently involved in carbon credit trading through AgraGate and similar programs run by the National Farmers Union and the Delta Institute in Chicago, Miller estimates. “The response in the agricultural community has been very good,” he says. “Producers see this as an added incentive for good environmental performance. They recognize that their conservation work provides multiple benefits for society.”
AgraGate and programs like it represent a new and growing opportunity for the nation’s farmers and ranchers to capitalize on sound environmental stewardship. Andrew was already growing his crops using no-till, because the technique provides other environmental benefits as well: reducing soil erosion, minimizing water pollution and cutting down on machinery use and fuel. So the AgraGate program, after Andrew took care of the relatively minimal paperwork needed to sign up, was an added bonus for his environmental performance. “If we’re already doing the right thing, we might as well take advantage of it,” he says. “It’s money on the table. And it helps me a lot as a conservationist, because I feel like I’m doing my part. I think we’re on the cusp of a real possibility for the future. I hold my head high that we’re doing our part.”
Farms and Climate Change Solutions
Mainstream scientists are now convinced that human activities, from deforestation to the burning of fossil fuels, are changing the composition of the atmosphere, increasing the level of greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere and could, if no action is taken, lead to drastic changes in the planet’s climate.
Scientists don’t know for sure how much the climate could change or what all the effects would be, but farmers and ranchers have particular cause to be concerned. Agriculture is especially vulnerable to the types of weather extremes that could occur as a result of global warming, including more frequent and potentially disastrous droughts, floods, fires, heat waves and storms. In addition, climate change could alter growing seasons, affecting what crops producers could grow, and could lead to increased conflicts over water use and greater problems with weeds and pests.
But while agriculture has much to lose from the future effects of global warming, it also has much to gain from being part of the solution to fighting it. “Increasingly, agriculture is being looked to as a critical part of the overall strategy to combat climate change,” says Ann Sorensen, director of American Farmland Trust’s Center for Agriculture in the Environment, which is researching ways that farmers and ranchers can help reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions—and produce many other environmental benefits for society—while generating new sources of farm income.
Sorensen points to several ways that agriculture can play a role in mitigating climate change. For one, agriculture—like all industries—is a source of its own greenhouse gas emissions, generating approximately seven percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by some estimates. That’s due in part to the release of nitrous oxide from fertilizer, methane gas from livestock and carbon dioxide from farm energy use. But agriculture can take—and in many cases already has been taking—immediate steps to reduce those emissions through management practices that are relatively low cost compared to changes needed in other industries.
Agriculture also has the potential to help the United States meet future emissions goals by offsetting, at least for the time being, greenhouse gases produced by other industries. A study from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change called Agriculture’s Role in Greenhouse Gas Mitigation determined that changes in agricultural practices, paired with the foresting of marginal agricultural lands, could offset up to one fifth of current U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, the nation could reduce emissions by 10 to 25 percent by replacing fossil fuels with biofuels made from agricultural crops.
“Agriculture alone cannot stabilize the climate, but it can buy us 30 to 50 years in the fight against global warming,” says Sorensen. “Scientists are looking at land management as a bridging strategy that can help us meet emissions targets by sequestering carbon until other industries can acquire the technology and energy sources needed to become less carbon-intensive.”
One recent report, Harnessing Farms and Forests in the Low-Carbon Economy, by Duke University Press, noted that land management projects could offset almost 1,500 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2025—around two-thirds of the reduction that climate models predict will be needed to avoid dangerous climate change. The report estimated that such reductions will only be possible if carbon offsets are worth $15 per ton of carbon dioxide, motivating enough landowners to participate. At a price of $50 per ton, so many landowners would have the incentive to participate that farms and forests could provide nearly the total required cut in emissions.
But right now, Jim Andrew and other farmers are receiving only about $5 for each metric ton of carbon dioxide they keep out of the atmosphere. That translates into about two dollars per acre each year for Andrew, an extra payment and “no-brainer” for him since he had already invested in the equipment needed to switch to no-till farming. But for other farmers, the changes they’d need to make are more formidable. “The trick is that conservation tillage doesn’t work for everyone,” Sorensen says. “New equipment is costly, it represents a new way of doing business, and crop yields may drop. Carbon credits need to be up in price for a lot more farmers to be able to participate.”
The New Low-Carbon Economy
Greater incentives for farm and forest owners may be on the horizon. The United States has yet to mandate that industries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, so companies purchasing carbon offsets on the Chicago Climate Exchange are doing so voluntarily. (Some believe philosophically in reducing their “carbon footprint” while others wants to market themselves as “green” and environmentally responsible.) This keeps the market, and thus the prices, for carbon credits weak.
“A federally uniform carbon policy—an adoption of a cap and trade program with offsets—would be a stimulus to the development of this market,” Miller says. In Europe, farmers began receiving more than five times what their American counterparts make for carbon offsets after the European Union signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, which required participating countries to reduce their emissions to pre-1990 levels by 2012. The United States never ratified the treaty and currently has not passed federal legislation mandating greenhouse gas reduction.
But many view it as only a matter of time before U.S. greenhouse gas emissions go from being voluntarily managed to being regulated by laws. And although the federal government has yet to take action, more than 700 mayors nationwide have signed a pledge to reduce their cities’ emissions. In addition, many states and local governments have made Kyoto-like commitments, from California with its Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 to seven Northeastern states that have joined to form the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
“We need to get agriculture involved so it can take a proactive role in the development of the nation’s climate policy,” Sorensen says. “Farmers can’t do this all by themselves. Our climate policies need to make it profitable for farmers to adopt the needed practices, to make biofuels production economically and environmentally attractive and to support needed research.”
To involve farmers in the climate change discussion, AFT, the Iowa Farm Bureau and other groups held a forum in Des Moines, Iowa, in July to talk with farmers about the factors that make them more willing to get involved in the carbon market. “One farmer stood up and said to the others—‘It’s a lot easier if we just think of carbon as another commodity,’” Sorensen relays. “We need to recognize that farmers need to make a living. AFT and the Iowa Farm Bureau see this as an opportunity. This is a service that farmers can perform—and it could be critical to their future.”
Andrew views his early involvement in “carbon farming” in similar terms. “Pressure is building worldwide to address global warming,” he says. “As we see federal legislation or the United States signs on to a treaty, there will be no choice. Farmers will have to get involved then. I prefer to be proactive and take advantage of what is already out there. When it does come about, I’ll say, ‘What took you guys so long?’”
Kirsten Ferguson is the editor of American Farmland.
New Opportunities in Conservation
Are you an owner of farm or forest land interested in learning more about selling carbon credits? Farm, ranch and forest landowners of all sizes, in all parts of the country, are getting involved in carbon credit trading. Conservation practices that qualify include maintaining continuously no-tilled fields; establishing new grasslands or committing rangeland to an improvement program; reforesting land or planting new trees on forested land; and managing methane with digesters. To learn more, contact:
