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A new data-driven approach looks at practices that are good for the earth and profitable for farmers:
[T]he agricultural industry contributes about 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Because the amount of land dedicated for agriculture is limited, farmers need to find more ways to operate efficiently, sustainably and profitably while also reducing GHG emissions. With new practices, farmers can make farms a net sink of CO2, helping the U.S. reach its goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.
Sustainable intensification is a two-prong approach many think could help. It tries to optimize land use and management practices for maximum farmland productivity at the same time it tries to minimize associated environmental impact. The trick is finding the right balance between the two objectives.
[...] "The concept of sustainable intensification of farming was applied into more broadscale landscape application," said one of the article's co-authors, Hoyoung Kwon, a principal environmental scientist in Argonne's Energy Systems and Infrastructure Analysis (ESIA) division. "We considered productivity and GHG emissions, attempted to optimize land management tactics and products, and investigated different trade-offs that improve the land and land productivity."
For example, farmers can clear and repurpose corn crop residue (or "stover") for biofuel, but a percentage of stover can remain in the soil for valuable nutrient and carbon sources for future crops. Farmers can plant cover crops during the winter (or "fallow") season, to supplement removed stover. The authors took into account energy, which has an emissions cost of planting of cover crops to holistically address net benefits of stover removal and cover crop planting. Farmers can also reduce how much land they till after a growing season ends, which lessens decay and reduces the amount of CO2 that emanates from the soil. However, the farmer has to till some of the land to be ready for the next growing season.
[...] According to the study, harvesting 30% of the corn stover for biofuel production would increase farm revenues, double net profitability and increase overall biofuel production from the landscape by 17–20%. Removal of the stover would also mitigate GHGs somewhat, but it reduced the baseline amount of good carbon in the soil by 40%. In comparison, integrated approaches that include winter cover cropping and/or tillage intensity reduction would increase carbon in the soil, improve farm profitability and mitigate more GHGs.
"We focused on corn and soy but our approach could be extended to other crops," said Hawkins. "Many farms today are large, industrial farms that are high-tech and rely much more on high resolution data. We want to give farmers, regional planners and others in agricultural management a tool to calculate how to use land sustainably and get the most value out of the land. This will further both profitability and environmental goals."
Journal Reference:
Trung H.Nguyen et al., A multi-product landscape life-cycle assessment approach for evaluating local climate mitigation potential [open], JCleanProd, 354, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.131691
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 22 2022, @11:31AM (1 child)
In farming, there are 2 kinds of limits you're up against: The limit where you absolutely cannot produce more right now, and the limit where you can produce more for a while but keep doing that and your farm stops being farm and starts becoming a disaster area.
And the trouble is that capitalism always incentivizes farmers to produce the absolute maximum right now, regardless of what it does to their long-term prospects. Especially if their neighboring farms are doing the same thing, because what the least sustainable farm does in an area affects all of them.
And so just a smattering of the problems that result include:
- soil depletion [berkeley.edu]
- soil loss [yale.edu]
- algae blooms caused by overuse of fertilizer [worldoceanreview.com]
- groundwater depletion [phys.org]
This is the kind of problem that reared its ugly head before on a large scale [wikipedia.org].
There are ways of fixing these issues and restoring the land, but they all involve maybe not producing so much right now and may be labor-intensive, which means they are usually rejected out of hand, while farmers engage in increasingly desperate and illegal methods to maintain their production level, until those don't work and then they lose their farm.
And the worst part is that the farmers don't even see the profits from doing this to themselves, because the main effect of this kind of overproduction is that the commodity price of what the farmers are selling goes down, which is great for the mostly giant conglomerate distribution companies but makes the farmer's financial situation worse and with no option other than "produce even more" to solve their shortfall. It's a vicious cycle.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 22 2022, @08:24PM
Not quite. That is what your fantasy world darth vader puppet version of capitalism does. Actual capitalism does no such thing.
You see, capitalism drives the goal of maximum accumulation of capital, i.e. a store of value. A farm can do quite nicely with low running and finance costs, bumping along without stirring the loins of anyone near Wall Street but quite stable. Many small farmers do exactly that because it turns out to be a resilient way of running a farm. These are the ones who have survived the last fifteen years of shit and have their financial heads above water.