Farms Can’t Stop Climate Change | The New Republic

Source: Farms Can’t Stop Climate Change | The New Republic

U.S. senators, McDonald’s, Microsoft, and the agribusiness lobby are pushing the dangerous myth that carbon storage in American farmland will stave off climate catastrophe.

…It all sounds too good to be true—and it is. While support for soil carbon is forging unprecedented partnerships, its scientific basis is collapsing. A comprehensive feature on the subject by Gabriel Popkin in Yale E360 emerged this spring; two months later, Mother Jones editor Maddie Oatman penned a similar investigation. Their findings were clear: The science of soil carbon, to put it literally, lacks depth. The first generation of studies that documented buildup of soil carbon on farmland only took measurements that went at most a foot deep. Once scientists began looking at meter-deep sections of soil, Popkin reports, they found that while carbon had been gained in the upper layers, it had also been lost down below. The result was that carbon had basically been shifted around rather than being captured and stored. The USDA’s main tool for filing soil data only measures the first 30 centimeters, about a foot.

…The task of accurately tracking the changes in soil carbon in sections of land and then confidently crediting a farmer for doing it is currently beyond our scientific capabilities. “Everybody I spoke with agrees that regenerative agriculture is good for soil health and has important environmental benefits that may be worth paying for,” Popkin wrote. “But nearly all scientists also want more certainty before wholeheartedly endorsing fighting climate change using farming practices.” Sequestration guru Jonathan Foley of Project Drawdown, writing to Mother Jones, called some of the claims around soil sequestration “somewhat irresponsible.”

… While farmland carbon capture’s primary problem may be that it overpromises results, the other tragedy of this policy fixation is the way it distracts from American agriculture’s dire need for broader reforms. Food production and farming practices are currently driving multiple forms of climate and environmental degradation, greenhouse gas emissions being just one. Row crops are breeding superweeds while chemical use has obliterated prairie biodiversity; manure from animal confinements is contaminating entire water sheds and suffocating the Gulf of Mexico; and rampant antibiotic use will compromise modern medicine. Farmland sustains modern society, and its inevitable collapse, if current practices continue, will only partly be due to planetary warming. Higher temperatures could spread pests and plant diseases, reduce yields through heat waves, droughts, and storms, and disrupt the seasonal schedule some trees need to bear fruit. But pollinator loss, widely attributed to pesticide use, is already harming production; runoff is sending ocean ecosystems into chaos; and severe water shortages in our most productive areas are imminent. All this depletion results in the harvest of 40 million acres of corn—a cornfield nearly the size of Wisconsin—to blend as ethanol into our gasoline: an older version of a corporate-backed, politically favorable, once-hopeful climate solution justified by flimsy science.

Mergers and partnerships between Big Tech and Big Ag are the opposite of what American farming needs. As Ted Genoways wrote in The New Republic’s latest issue, an agricultural system plagued by monopoly won’t benefit from further integration. As we’ve seen so clearly during the pandemic, agribusiness controls the White House like its puppet, gaining wartime privileges to keep slaughterhouses open while the virus infected thousands of mostly immigrant exploited workers, killing nearly 200 as of August 6. The poultry industry is being investigated for using software to fix prices; it’s hard to imagine that more data in their hands will be put to noble use.

…As more and more voters start supporting climate legislation, political doors are opening. But for real change, politicians will need to look beyond the seductive, lucrative myth of soil carbon sequestration as some kind of an emissions panacea. American farmland—one of our most precious and vulnerable resources—needs help. It shouldn’t be used as a questionably effective sewer to drain away Big Oil’s misdeeds.