Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

excerpt from Climate Catastrophe: Surviving the 21st Century by Ronnie 
Cummins and Will Allen
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_20200.cfm


Although transportation, industry, and energy producers are significant 
polluters, few people understand that the worst U.S. greenhouse gas emitter 
is "Food Incorporated," industrial food and farming. Industrial farming 
accounts for at least 35% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (EPA's 
ridiculously low estimates range from 7% to 12%, while some climate 
scientists feel the figure could be as high as 50% or more). Industrial 
agriculture, biofuels, and cattle grazing-including whacking down the last 
remaining tropical rainforests in Latin America and Asia for animal feed and 
biofuels-are also the main driving forces in global deforestation and 
wetlands destruction, which generate an additional 20% of all climate 
destabilizing GHGs. In other words the direct and indirect impacts of 
industrial agriculture and the food industry are the major cause of global 
warming.

Currently conventional (energy and chemical-intensive non-organic) farms emit 
at least 25% of the carbon dioxide (mostly from tractors, trucks, combines, 
transportation, cooling, freezing, and heating), 40% of the methane (mostly 
from animal gas, and manure ponds), and 96% of nitrous oxide (mostly from 
synthetic fertilizer manufacture and use, the millions of tons of animal 
manure from cattle herds, pig and poultry flocks, and millions of tons of 
sewage sludge spread on farms). Per ton, methane is 21 times more damaging, 
and nitrous oxide 310 times more damaging as a greenhouse gas than carbon 
dioxide , when measured over a one hundred year period. Damage is even worse 
if you look at the impact on global warming over the next crucial 20-year 
period. Many climate scientists now admit that they have previously 
drastically underestimated the dangers of the non-CO2 GHGs, including methane 
and nitrous oxide, which are responsible for at least 20% of global warming. 4

A major portion of the CO2e (all GHGs not just CO2) emitted by industrial 
farming comes from long distance transportation, heating, freezing, and 
processing. So, the more you cook from scratch, buy locally, and eat raw 
vegetables and fruits, the less CO2e you produce. The bottom line is that we 
as a society are what we eat. In the oncoming era of climate chaos and peak 
oil, we must make the transition to energy efficient, climate adaptable, 
local and regional based organic farms, urban gardens, and primarily 
vegetarian diets, or we will likely not survive.

Almost all U.S. food and farm-derived methane comes from factory farms, huge 
herds of confined cows, hogs, poultry operations, as well as rotting food 
waste thrown into land-fills instead of being separated out of the solid 
waste stream and properly composted. To drastically reduce methane releases 
we need an immediate ban on factory farms, dairies, and feedlots. We also 
need mandatory separation and recycling of food wastes and green garbage at 
the municipal level, so that that we can produce large quantities of high 
quality organic compost to replace the billions of pounds of chemical 
fertilizer and sewage sludge which are releasing GHGs, destroying soil 
fertility, polluting our waters, and undermining public health.

Nearly all nitrous oxide pollution comes from dumping billions of pounds of 
synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and sewage sludge on farmland (chemical 
fertilizers and sludge are banned on organic farms and ranches), mainly to 
grow animal feed. Since about 80% of U.S. agriculture is devoted to producing 
meat, dairy, and animal feed, reducing agriculture GHGs means eliminating the 
overproduction and over-consumption of meat and animal products.

Organic Farming and Ranching Can Drastically Reduce GHG Emissions

The currently catastrophic, but largely unrecognized, GHG damage from 
chemical farms and industrial food production and distribution must be 
reversed. This will involve wholesale changes in farming practices, 
government subsidies, food processing and handling. It will require the 
conversion of a million chemical farms and ranches to organic production. It 
will require the establishment of millions of urban backyard and community 
gardens.

If consumer pressure and grassroots mobilization geared toward changing 
public policies cannot force U.S. factory farmers to change the way they 
farm, process, and ship their products it will be almost impossible to deal 
with catastrophic U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. 5 On a 
very hopeful note, however, i f farmers do change, and make the transition to 
organic farming, farm and ranch land can become a significant sink or 
sequester pool for greenhouse gasses, literally sucking excess greenhouse 
gases out of the atmosphere and the ozone layer and sequestering them safely 
in the soil, where they belong.

Our planet has five pools or repositories where greenhouse gases are absorbed 
and stored: the oceans, the atmosphere, the soils, the forests, and 
hydrocarbon deposits. 6 Because U.S farm and forest soils are so degraded 
from chemical-intensive, mono-crop farming practices and over-logging they 
are only able to absorb and store half (or less) of the carbon gases than 
they would be capable of if they were organically managed. As a result of 
this reckless mismanagement, the atmosphere and the oceans are absorbing the 
bulk of the greenhouse gases that normally would be absorbed by farmland and 
forests. This has led to a catastrophic excess of GHGs in both the oceans and 
the atmosphere. This excess has caused changes in climate and extreme 
fluctuations in weather; including droughts and torrential flooding. It also 
causes oceanic acidification, oceanic dead zones, and dramatic declines in 
fish and crustacean populations.

Unfortunately, when they evaluate agricultural pollutants, pro-agribusiness 
government bureaucrats in the EPA and USDA do not include many of the 
greenhouse gas emissions. They do not take into account the transportation, 
cooling, freezing, and heating of farm products as agricultural GHG 
emissions, even though our food travels an average of 1500 miles to our 
tables and is routinely frozen and cooled to ensure its deliverability. They 
don't count the CO2 and "black carbon" particle emissions from trucks, 
tractors, combines and other equipment used on farms. They don't count the 
emissions from fertilizer manufacture or use, wasteful packing, sewage sludge 
spread on farm and range land, or the methane emitted from factory farms and 
the billions of tons of rotting, non-composted food in our landfills and 
garbage dumps. Instead, they lump and thereby conceal all these farm and food 
related GHG emissions under the categories of industrial manufacture, 
transportation, or electrical use. As a result, the public spotlight never 
shines on mounting agricultural, food, garbage, and sludge pollution.

Because government officials deliberately fail to evaluate the real farm and 
food-derived greenhouse gas emissions, they are free to act as if the 
emissions coming from agriculture are not significant compared to the U.S. 
total, even though they represent more than one-third of the total 
pollutants. Consequently, most lawmakers and the public don't realize how 
urgent it is to regulate and drastically curtail factory farm and Food Inc.'s 
emissions.

Chemical Fertilizer and Sewage Sludge: Silent Killers

The most damaging greenhouse gas poisons used by farmers and ranchers are 
synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and municipal/industrial sewage sludge. 
Obviously pesticide manufacture and use are also serious problems and 
generate their own large share of greenhouse gases during manufacture and use 
(more than 25 billion pounds per year). But, about six times more chemical 
fertilizer is used than toxic pesticides on U.S. farms, and an additional 
huge volume of sewage sludge is spread on farm and range land as well. 7

German chemical corporations developed the industrial processes for the two 
most widely used forms of synthetic nitrogen in the early 1900s. But, until 
World War II, U.S. use of synthetic nitrogen as a fertilizer was limited to 
about 5% of the total nitrogen applied. Up until that time most nitrogen 
inputs came from animal manures, composts and fertilizer (cover) crops, just 
as it does on organic farms today. 8

During the Second World War, all of the European powers and the U.S. greatly 
expanded their facilities for producing nitrogen for bombs, ammunition, and 
fertilizer for the war effort. Since then, the use of nitrogen fertilizer and 
bomb making capacity has soared. By the 1990s, more than 90% of nitrogen 
fertilizer used in the U.S. was synthetic. 9

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the average U.S. 
nitrogen fertilizer use per year from 1998 to 2007 was 24 billion 661 million 
pounds. To produce that nitrogen the manufacturers released at least 6.7 
pounds of greenhouse gas for every pound produced. That's 165 billion, 228 
million pounds of GHGs spewed into the atmosphere every year, just for the 
manufacture of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. 10 And, most of those emissions 
are nitrous oxide, the most damaging emissions of U.S. agriculture.

Besides its greenhouse gas impacts, nitrogen fertilizer has other negative 
environmental consequences. Two-thirds of the U.S. drinking water supply is 
contaminated at high levels with carcinogenic nitrates or nitrites, almost 
all from excessive use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Some public wells 
have nitrogen at such a high level that it is dangerous and even deadly for 
children to drink the tap water. Nitrogen fertilizer is also the greatest 
contributor to the infamous "dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico, the 
Chesapeake Bay, the coasts of California and Oregon, and 400 other spots 
around the world. Since very little synthetic nitrogen fertilizer was used 
before 1950, all of the damage we see today occurred in the last 60 years.

If we did an environmental impact statement on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer 
today, we would never give it a permit for agricultural use. Until it is 
banned for the production of food and fiber, we must impose a high carbon tax 
on its manufacture and use. Unfortunately, at this point, agriculture is 
excluded from even the weak cap and trade plan passed by the House. So, 
although factory farming is responsible for more greenhouse gases than any 
other U.S. industry, it will not be regulated under the proposed legislation 
designed to limit greenhouse gases, unless we demand it. We must demand that 
synthetic nitrogen fertilizer be highly taxed and regulated in the short 
term, and phased out, as soon as possible. 11

We must also demand an end to the giveaway or sales of hazardous sewage 
sludge in agriculture, gardening or forestry . Instead of sewage 
sludge-contaminated and chemical-intensive farms, organic agriculture 
produces safer, nutritionally superior, comparable crop yields during normal 
weather, as well as much greater yields under drought and heavy rain 
conditions, without the use of synthetic pesticides, sewage sludge, or 
chemical fertilizer.

The Good News on Organics and Climate Change

The heretofore unpublicized "good news" on climate change, according to the 
Rodale Institute 12 and other soil scientists, is that transitioning from 
chemical, water, and energy-intensive industrial agriculture practices to 
organic farming and ranching on the world's 3.5 billion acres of farmland and 
8.2 billion acres of pasture or rangeland can sequester up to 7,000 pounds 
per acre of climate-destabilizing CO2 every year, while nurturing healthy 
soils, plants, grasses, and trees that are resistant to drought, heavy rain, 
pests, and disease. And as we have noted, organic farms and ranches provide 
us with food that is much more nutritious than industrial farms and 
ranches-food filled with vitamins, anti-oxidants, and essential trace 
minerals, free from Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), pesticides, 
antibiotics, and sewage sludge.

In 2006, U.S. carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuels (approximately 25% 
of the world's total) was estimated at nearly 6.5 billion tons. If a 7,000 
lb/CO2/ac/year sequestration rate were achieved on all 434 million acres of 
cropland in the United States, nearly 1.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide 
would be sequestered per year, mitigating close to one quarter of the 
country's total fossil fuel emissions. If pastures and rangelands were 
similarly converted to organic practices, we would be well on our way to 
reversing global warming.

Toxic Sludge from Municipal Sewage Treatment Plants

Besides synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, unhealthy foods, pesticides, GMOs, 
and climate and environmentally destructive factory farm meat, a serious 
problem in the U.S. is the increasing use of hazardous sludge from sewage 
treatment plants to fertilize farm and pasture land. Sixty percent of all the 
sludge produced in the U.S. is currently applied to farmland that grows food 
for cattle and people. Estimates range from eight billion to more than 100 
billion pounds. 13

A critical mass of scientific studies indicate that municipal sewage sludge 
routinely contains hundreds of dangerous pathogens, toxic heavy metals, flame 
retardants, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, pharmaceutical drugs and other 
hazardous chemicals coming from residential drains, storm water runoff, 
hospitals, and industrial plants. Poisonous sludge is currently being spread 
on at least 70 million acres on 140,000 (non-organic) farms and ranches 
across the U.S. So-called EPA "regulation" of sludge is among the worst in 
the world. Unless we stop this dangerous practice, the sludge industry will 
destroy millions of acres of farmland as well as urban land we will need for 
future urban gardens. Sludge is also an increasingly worrisome greenhouse gas 
emitter.

The Organic Movement Must "Get Political" and Become a Major Player

We must advocate and agitate, as well as "walk our talk" in our daily lives. 
We must organize a U.S. and global mass movement for the conversion of the 
world's 3.5 billion acres of farmland and 8.2 billion acres of rangeland and 
pasture to organic production as soon as possible. Organic regulations 
prohibit the use of synthetic nitrogen, pesticides, sludge, antibiotics, 
artificial hormones, GMOs, and other environmentally destructive, 
health-threatening, greenhouse gas emitting practices. Organic must become 
the norm, not just the alternative. To facilitate a mass transition to 
organic we must force the U.S. Congress, as well as local and state 
governments, to fund a great "organic transition," including the creation of 
thousands of cadres of organically trained extension agents, and a million 
new urban, community, and school gardens. Thousands of U.S. farmers have 
already made the transition to organic. Now a million more need to do the 
same.

More and more farmers around the world are learning that they can 
significantly reduce greenhouse gas pollution and produce substantial, high 
quality yields by switching to organic farming practices. While we develop 
our alternative marketplace and pressure legislators and the regulators to 
act, we must urge conscientious conventional farmers to use existing federal 
Conservation Reserve, Conservation Security, EQUIP (Environmental Quality 
Incentives Program), and special practice programs to help them begin the 
switch to organic as soon as possible.

Restoring Climate Stability: Soil and More

U.S. farmers, as well as farmers all over the world, have known for at least 
200 years that they should replace lost soil fertility. Over the last two 
centuries, numerous strategies were devised in the U.S. to replace soil 
nitrogen and soil organic matter, without the use of chemicals. Many of these 
strategies are widely used today by organic and biodynamic farmers.

As early as 1813, John Taylor lamented the loss of vegetable (organic) matter 
in the soil and felt that we were destroying our precious soil fertility by 
over cropping and sloppy farming practices. 14 Since the 1840s, fertilizer 
manufacturers and alchemists tried to convince farmers to replace fertility 
with store bought chemicals. But, farmers were wary of these products and the 
claims made by their salesmen.

Other scientists argued over the years that soil with high-organic matter 
content was far more productive and fertile even in times of drought and 
excess moisture. 15 As a result, U.S. farmers traditionally replaced their 
organic matter with fertilizer crops, manure, and compost, and most did not 
buy store bought fertilizer until the 1950s.

In 2007 and 2009, results similar to these conclusions were reported from 
studies of the Morrow agricultural experiment plots at the University of 
Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana (the oldest continuously planted U.S. 
experimental farm plot). There, researchers found that continuous corn on a 
synthetic nitrogen fertilized plot since 1955 suffered significant carbon 
losses and soil nitrogen losses compared to pre-1955 when the plots were 
fertilized organically with manure, fertilizer crops, and compost. 16

A significant factor in the decline of these soils was the loss of organic 
matter, since soil organic matter both feeds soil microorganisms and the 
miccorhizal fungi-both vital components of a healthy soil. Since 1950, the 
soils of the major farming areas of the U.S. have been bombarded yearly with 
vast quantities of soil-killing pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, just as 
the Morrow plots were. The Morrow plot conclusions should be a wake-up call 
to farmers and synthetic fertilizer consultants. Those conclusions are that 
currently recommended fertilizer applications are from 40 to 190% excessive 
and that long-term fertility suffers when farmers depend on synthetic 
fertilizers and don't replace lost organic matter utilizing organic soil 
management.

On several chemically abused pieces of ground where we farmed, and with 
cotton, vegetable, and corn farmers we have advised, we were able to 
dramatically increase the soil organic matter in three or four years from 
1.5% to 3 or 4%, effectively doubling the amount of GHG sequestration while 
eliminating nitrate fertilizer runoff and emissions. Using a small amount of 
compost and growing fertilizer crops in the fall and winter months and 
cash-fertility crops in the spring and summer accomplished these increases. 
Each percentage point increase in organic matter represents a major increase 
in soil nitrogen, i.e., nitrogen produced by microorganisms decomposing 
organic matter. Each percentage increase in organic matter also enables the 
soil to absorb and store more carbon.

Beyond Factory Farm Beef, Pork, and Poultry

Along with changing the way we farm, we must also alter what we farm, and 
what we eat. Our excessive dependence on meat is not sustainable over the 
long term since, as we have noted, 80% of our agriculture is devoted to 
producing animals, which is the least energy efficient food. To raise meat on 
factory farms takes too many input calories (primarily fossil fuel), too much 
acreage, too much nitrogen fertilizer, as well as hazardous pesticides, 
antibiotics, and hormones, not to mention millions of acres of genetically 
modified (GM) crops.

A few examples illustrate this point clearly. It takes 10 to 12 pounds of 
grain (corn, wheat, soy, cottonseed) to produce one pound of marketable 
feedlot beef (that is 5000 to 6000 pounds of grain to produce 500 pounds of 
meat). It takes one gallon of oil to grow and ship the feed for one pound of 
beef. It requires 78 calories of fossil fuel (mostly to grow the grain) to 
produce one calorie of protein from feedlot-produced beef. 2500 gallons of 
water are needed to produce a single pound of confinement beef.

We all need to eat less (or better yet none) of the non-organic fatty meats 
that are grown in abusive feedlots, hog hotels, and poultry prisons. Just 
reducing U.S. meat intake by a third would reduce agricultural greenhouse gas 
emissions by one-third. And, if you replace the factory farm meat in your 
diet with range fed organic meat you will reduce your personal carbon 
footprint, strike a blow for humane treatment of farm animals, and improve 
your health. Meat eaters don't necessarily have to stop eating meat, they 
just need to understand which meat is safe and humanely raised (organic and 
grass-fed), and sustainable.

Ultimately, if we change our eating habits, and curtail our Madison Avenue 
and mass media-induced need to buy and consume so many clothes and consumer 
products, we can significantly reduce our carbon footprint. Whether or not 
government bureaucrats and corporations change their behavior in the short 
term will be determined by the strength of U.S. and global grassroots 
movements . But we will never be able to build, motivate, and lead these 
movements unless we first start walking our talk and create viable models of 
organic conversion and green economics in our individual lives and in our 
local communities.