The Agricultural Fulcrum: Better Food, Better Climate

By Diana Donlon

The National Climate Assessment, released this week, predicted increasingly negative impact of weather extremes on crops. But with industrialized farming as a key player in greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, the vicious cycle needs breaking.

This past year treated us to a climate change preview in spades: crazy heat waves, prolonged drought, and epic storms like Sandy. To help us stabilize the climate, before we reach the point of no return, we must tap the immense potential of our food system.

Since becoming an agrarian society, we’ve known that growing food successfully depends on climate stability. Not enough water, crops wither and die. Too much, they rot. Beyond this, we know that crops have specific climatic requirements. Wheat, for instance, grows best in a dry, mild climate. Stone fruits like cherries need a minimum number of “chill hours” in order to blossom and later fruit. Intense heat disrupts pollination and can even shut down photosynthesis. These are basic parameters. If we continue to disregard them, food will become more scarce over time and we will go hungry. Indeed, as the National Climate Assessment, the government’s 1,146-page report released earlier this week states: “The rising incidence of weather extremes will have increasingly negative impacts on crop and livestock productivity because critical thresholds are already being exceeded.”

Agriculture, positioned as it is at the intersection of food and climate, presents a unique fulcrum. Pushed in the direction of industrial agriculture, it contributes egregiously to our climate problem: As activist Bill McKibben has noted, industrial agriculture — predominant in the U.S. — “essentially insures that your food is marinated in crude oil before you eat it.” This is because at every step, from the production of fertilizers and pesticides to the harvesting, processing, packaging, and transporting of materials, the industrial food system depends on climate-changing fossil fuels. Indeed, in a new report on climate change and food systems, the agriculture research organization CGIAR concluded that our global food system is responsible for nearly a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.

But we can tip the scale in the other direction toward sustainable agriculture, working in concert with natural systems instead of depleting them. This side of the scale presents an elegant, under-recognized opportunity to stabilize the climate. Not only do agro-ecological, organic and other sustainable farming methods emit significantly less greenhouse gas (GHG) overall, they can also sequester or store excess carbon. Given our long list of existing environmental worries — erosion, polluted watersheds, dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico — strengthening our top soil is a lot smarter than loading it up with nitrogen and washing it down the Mississippi.

Sustainable agriculture not only recaptures GHG, it eliminates the need for synthetic fertilizers like manufactured nitrogen which emits nitrous oxide. According to the EPA, agriculture is directly responsible for 68% of U.S. nitrous oxide emissions (a potent GHG; each molecule has 310 times the atmospheric warming potential of one molecule of carbon dioxide). By favoring biodiversity, productivity, resource efficiency and resilience — sustainable agriculture also offers tangible benefits like cleaner water, preserved wildlife habitat, and reduced exposure to pesticides.

Despite these obvious advantages, sustainable systems are often dismissed as backward or as some romanticized fantasy, particularly by multi-national chemical companies with a vested interest in maintaining the industrial system. In reality these low-impact methods of farming are rooted in the realities of local climate and culture and provide promising models of resilience. Consider, for instance, Angelic Organics, a biodynamic farm in north central Illinois: it grows more than 55 different crops on 100 acres while using cover crops that sequester atmospheric carbon in the soil, harvest nitrogen from the air, protect the soil from erosion, and provide habitats for beneficial insects. Examples of such productivity combined with critical ecosystem services can be found all over the country and on every continent. Most importantly, a 2009 scientific report known as the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) concluded that sustainable agriculture is, in fact, more resilient in the face of climate change than industrial mono-cropping — the mile after mile of corn and soy that now dominates our farming states.

Imagine what we could do for the climate if instead of blanketing 30 percent of the nation’s farmland with a single industrial crop (corn), the U.S. were to create a thriving network of rural farms and urban gardens. To tip the climate scale in our favor we need the energetic,good food movement to care as much about politics as peaches. By flexing its growing political muscle, the movement can support legislation that promotes research and training in sustainable agricultural practices. These practices mitigate climate change and put good food on our tables. Legions of young people who understand the climate change imperative are turning to agriculture. As a country we must make it as easy as possible for them to pursue careers in sustainable farming, and support them with forward-looking agriculture policies that are grounded in the climate reality of 2013.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/the-agricultural-fulcrum-better-food-better-climate/267298/

Dave Gilson

The University of Illinois’ College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) in Champaign-Urbana made a momentous announcement: it has accepted a $250,000 grant from genetically modified seed/agrichemical giant Monsanto to create an endowed chair for the “Agricultural Communications Program” it runs with the College of Communications.

The university’s press release quotes Monsanto’s vice president of technology communications giving a taste of its vision for the investment:

With the population expecting to reach 9 billion by 2030, farmers from Illinois and beyond will be asked to produce more crops while using fewer resources. At Monsanto we are committed to bringing farmers advanced ag technologies to help them meet this challenge. Effectively communicating farmers’ efforts to feed, clothe and fuel a rapidly growing population is a major part of the solution.

A cynic might translate that statement this way: In order to maintain our highly profitable and hotly contested business model, we’ll need a new generation of PR professionals to construct and disseminate our marketing message.

Monsanto’s latest gift isn’t its first dalliance with the prestigious college, which is located in a city surrounded by millions of acres of fields planted with Monsanto’s GMO corn and soy seeds, both treated with regular doses of the company’s Roundup herbicide. Back in 2002, Monsanto donated $200,000 to ACES for the Monsanto Multi-Media Executive Studio, to be “used by faculty and staff of the college for presentations and seminars and for conferences involving companies and organizations with ties to the college and its mission.”

Nor is Monsanto the only gigantic food and ag company bestowing cash upon ACES. A cursory look at the college’s web site turned up a recent paper touting a novel infant formula that “boosts babies’ immunity”—funded by Nestle Infant Nutrition and co-authored by a researcher in its employ.

Then there’s this study, also by ACES researchers, which purports to show that soy protein “alleviates symptoms of fatty liver disease.” It’s brought to you by grants from the agribiz-aligned Illinois Soybean Association and Solae, a joint project of agrichemical giants DuPont and Bunge that calls itself “the world leader in developing innovative soy technologies and ingredients for food, meat and nutritional products.”

The most remarkable thing about all of this is that it isn’t remarkable at all. A few weeks ago, I pointed to a great Chronicle of Higher Education article documenting how university animal-health research has become dominated by the pharmaceutical industry—and how the products that emerge from that process are much more about pharmaceutical industry profits than animal health. Now there’s this eye-opening new report from Food & Water Watch (FWW) that documents in painstaking detail how the food and agrichemical industries have transformed our national public agricultural research infrastructure into essentially an R&D and marketing apparatus for their industry. (Similar trends hold for other areas of science research, most prominently medicine.)

FWW reminds us how ag-research institutions like the University of Illinois started: as so-called land-grant universities, launched by the federal government on public land in 1862. The idea of the land grants was to generate agricultural research, funded by the federal government, that benefited society as a whole. And that’s pretty much how things went for the first century. “Well into the 20th century, seed-breeding programs at land-grant universities were responsible for developing almost all new seed and plant varieties,” FWW writes. It might have added that those varieties were public resources, not owned or patented by any company. Farmers were free to save them for the next season, and many did.

But then, starting in the 1980s, the federal government started to level off its investment in ag research—and meanwhile, after passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, began to encourage professors to behave like entrepreneurs who could benefit financially from their research, not public employees creating ideas for the public domain. That’s when food and agribusiness companies, which were then in the process of consolidating into the vast global enterprises we know today, began to funnel huge amounts of cash into the land grants.

By the early ’90s, industry funding had begun to outpace USDA research support for the land grants. And now, as fiscal austerity further pinches federal research funding, the gap between the industry and the USDA as land-grant paymaster has hit an all-time high. Here’s FWW:

Food & Water Watch

And it’s not only research. Just as sports franchises have turned to corporate sponsors to fund stadiums, the land grants have turned to their agribiz benefactors for building funds, FWW found. At University of Minnesota, seed breeders toil in the Cargill Plant Genomics Building; while University of Missouri ag-science grad students attend seminars in the Monsanto Auditorium. Iowa State undergrads lounge in the Monsanto Student Services Wing; and food-science researchers at Purdue can bounce between the Kroger Sensory Evaluation Laboratory and the ConAgra Foods, Inc. Laboratory.

And all of this cash buys more than just symbolic power. In addition to landing their names on buildings, agribiz giants also “fill seats on academic research boards and direct agendas,” the report shows. At Iowa State University, reps from the agribiz-aligned Iowa Farm Bureau and Summit Group, an industrial-scale producer of hogs and cows, have won seats on the governing Board of Regents. The report brims with examples of agribiz employees occupying seats on advisory boards of various ag-related centers within the land grants. My favorite is the way the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety forms its advisory board. Get this, from the center’s web site:

We invite food processing and related companies who are not presently members of the Center for Food Safety to join more than 40 food processors who are actively involved in the Center’s programs. There are different ways in which you can be involved with the Center. You may want to become a member of the Center’s Board of Advisors. The role of the Board is to provide input on food safety research needs of the industry. In addition, the Board provides suggestions on unique (not routine) opportunities/services the Center can offer to industry. For example, Center faculty can offer specialized workshops on food safety and quality issues or training on advanced equipment and techniques. A $20,000 annual contribution to the Center entitles a company a seat on the Board. [Emphasis added.]

Companies that have taken the center up on its offer include Cargill, Kraft, Hormel, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Earthbound, and McDonald’s.

Sometimes, compliant administrators are rewarded generously for their work. Monsanto tapped South Dakota State University president David Chicoine for its own board of directors in 2009, FWW reports. According to Inside Higher Education, Chicoine stood to make more from Monsanto in his first year on the board than he did from his state job. It gets better:

Weeks before Chicoine joined Monsanto, the company sponsored a $1 million plant breeding fellowship program at SDSU. Chicoine’s appointment at Monsanto also coincided with a new SDSU effort to enforce university seed patents by suing farmers for sharing and selling saved seed.

At some of the more prestigious schools, professors have morphed into something that looks a lot like house researchers for the agrichemical industry. Check out this snapshot from Iowa State. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Food and Water Watch analyzed the grants received by a selection of professors between 2006 and 2010, and calculated what percentage of their grants came from private sources. Here’s what they found:
The corporate sector’s generosity might be commendable if it produced research that benefitted the public as a whole—such as new open-source seed varieties that are well adapted to organic ag, or techniques for rotating cattle and crops on land that improve soil and reduce fertilizer use. But that’s not what’s happening, FWW shows. Instead, the companies are funding strings-attached research that serves their own narrow interests. The report cites numerous studies to show this, and several concrete examples like these two:

When an Ohio State University professor produced research that questioned the biological safety of biotech sunflowers, Dow AgroSciences and [DuPont’s] Pioneer Hi-Bred blocked her research privileges to their seeds, barring her from conducting additional research. Similarly, when other Pioneer Hi-Bred-funded professors found a new [genetically engineered] corn variety to be deadly to beneficial beetles, the company barred the scientists from publishing their findings. Pioneer Hi-Bred subsequently hired new scientists who produced the necessary results to secure regulatory approval.

To be sure, while corporate cash has come to dominate university ag research, the USDA still funds a substantial amount of it: more than $300 million (vs. about $600 million from industry) in 2010. In addition to its research grants for land-grant professors, the agency also employs its own scientists and maintains its own labs; its total research budget stands at about $2 billion per year. Yet rather than act as a counterweight to the corporations, the USDA essentially mimics them. It “prioritizes commodity crops, industrialized livestock production, technologies geared toward large-scale operations, and capital-intensive practices,” FWW shows.

Here’s a startling example: the USDA dedicates more money to research on sweetener crops like sugar beets ($18.1 million per year) and oilseed crops ($79.4 million) than it does to nutrition education ($15.5 million).

Such expenditures of public cash help sweeten the fortunes of the food and agrichemical industries, but foretell a bitter harvest for society as whole.

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My own thoughts