Corn prices peaked during the run up to the 2008 economic crisis at $7.88 per bushel and as the prices of corn and other commodities rose we saw food riots worldwide. Commodity prices soon came back the earth — corn is currently trading at about $4 a barrel. Given that we’re in the middle of an anemic recovery, you’d think spiking food prices are thankfully the last thing we have to worry about.

Not so, say a pair of economists from University of Illinois (via Phil Brasher of the Des Moines Register). In an analysis of past growing seasons, they suggest that commodity corn prices could reach $7 by summer. The reason for the potential coming price spike? Would you believe ethanol?

Around one third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the way we produce, process, distribute and consume the food we eat according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Meanwhile, farmers the world over will be the most affected by climate change, as higher carbon in the atmosphere and higher temperatures increase erratic weather patterns, pests, and disease occurrence, while decreasing water availability, disrupting relationships with pollinators and lowering yield and the efficacy of herbicides like glyphosate (aka Roundup) — all detailed in a revealing new report from the USDA called The Effects of Climate Change on U.S. Ecosystems [pdf].

We should all give the USDA credit for keeping the ties between agriculture, food and climate change at the forefront of the discussion. Even in Copenhagen, where agriculture is getting less attention than it arguably should be considering its impact and potential for mitigating climate change, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke about the need for research, and seeing agriculture as an opportunity for climate change mitigation. He even said to the delegates in Copenhagen, “We need to develop cropping and livestock systems that are resilient to climate change.” While I agree on the surface with these statements, taking a deeper look reveals potentially problematic ideas for just how to do this.

Outlined in Vilsack’s prepared remarks are a few clues for how the U.S. is looking at adapting agriculture in the face of climate change. I find it valuable to do a little point-by-point debunking here, so we can look at the facts again, laid out so clearly in the USDA report above, and come up with real solutions. And since the U.S. is responsible for the most greenhouse gases, and we were the first to adopt intensive agriculture practices, we have an opportunity to lead the world to a more sustainable future.

No-Till. Here is a classic case of agribusiness co-opting a perfectly good solution and making it bad (and then whispering it into the USDA’s ear). Sustainable no-till practices involve building soil fertility with cover crops, which sequester carbon, and then turning them into a healthy mulch. No chemicals are used, and soil fertility increases. This practice is being studied at places like the Rodale Institute. The co-opted version, on the other hand, which i’ll refer to as chemical no-till, is the one touted by Monsanto with it’s Roundup Ready seeds, which can be planted and doused with glyphosate — killing the weeds and not the soybeans. Aside from the fact that superweeds are more and more common as pesticides increase in use, the life in the soil is also being killed by these chemicals. What this means is that the earthworms, protozoa, ants and other decomposers that are actively ’tilling’ the soil are not there to do so. Furthermore, bacteria in the soil, like rhizobia, actively fix nitrogen. Without nitrogen-fixing soil life to intervene, a putrefaction process called denitrification results in lost soil fertility, as nitrogen is released as nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. What is totally not funny about nitrous oxide is the fact that it is 298 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Do you get where I’m going with this? Nitrous oxide may only represent 7.9% of our greenhouse gas emissions in total, but it is one powerful source, coming directly from synthetic agriculture fields.

Carbon Markets. Sure it sounds good to offer cash benefits to farmers who use more sustainable farming practices. But what would this look like? Would it encourage farmers to utilize fewer fossil fuels, or to transition to organic farming? A lot of Big Ag players would kick up dust if that were the case, even though these are truly the ways to draw down our agricultural footprint. Unfortunately there are some ugly manipulations of carbon markets to watch out for. And according to a report by Helena Paul et al and prepared for the Bonn Climate talks last June called Agriculture and Climate Change: Real Problems, False Solutions [pdf], getting this wrong could mean exacerbating global warming instead of preventing it. Paul told the Ecologist about a few worries: First, that chemical no-till might be one of the so-called “sustainable” practices that qualify. Second, that stipulating the use of biochar, or charcoal, as a soil remediation technique, could result in plantations as sources for the biomass, adding incentive to cut down forests. Thirdly, she mentions that some Big Ag players argue for further intensification of livestock operations, making the case for using manure to make biogas. We can’t afford such paltry solutions.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). If Monsanto had its way, our government would be paying farmers to grow GMOs. However, GMO manufacturers have been promising ‘sustainable’ drought tolerant and higher yielding crops for decades now with no results. All these companies have figured out how to do in the short-term is to create herbicide resistant plants and plants that make pesticides. Meanwhile, these technologies have brought with them a whole host of new problems for the environment: genetic contamination; the addition of 318 million pounds of chemicals into our soils, water and air; and a significant loss of biodiversity. There are agro-ecological solutions that could be employed now to build our soils and sequester carbon — because this is a new technology that hasn’t been tested in the long term, and we need solutions now, it is worth rethinking the billions spent on GMOs for twenty years from now.

Ethanol. Vilsack and President Obama talk about ethanol as if it had the potential to quench our thirst for oil. What you need to know is this: ethanol takes more energy to make than it produces. However, a cottage industry has emerged to get politicians to support ethanol — the growth in use of which helped fan the flames of last year’s food crisis. Unfortunately ethanol offers a talking point, and fulfills our desire to give a quick, silver bullet solution to a difficult problem: how to maintain our standard of living in the coming resource-starved era.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has said that we will need to double world food production by 2030 in order to feed 9 billion people. I often see this statistic: 14% of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, while 17% come from deforestation, used by agribusiness to justify industrial farming as saving rain forests. In fact, it is the commodity market that encourages deforestation through increasing the size of farms and through over-production. Most of what is produced in this way is wasted or fed to factory-farmed animals. Since smaller, diverse and well-managed fields are more productive, we do not need to cut down the forest in order to feed a growing population sustainable food. Indeed, there will have to be more farmers willing to do the work, eaters willing to eat less meat, and better policies that support farmers before agribusiness. And I agree with Vilsack, we need more research. We also need to nurture soil life, as that is where the real heavy lifting is happening in agriculture.

Here in New York City, we are hopeful that we can change the climate impact food has in our city. But without federal, agricultural solutions to these problems, we will all continue dog-paddling through the flotsam and jetsam of unhealthy, resource-intensive, climate damaging food-like substances.

Photo: Reuters, Protesters in Copenhagen

If you’ve been listening to the news in the past month, you’ve probably heard quite a bit about biofuels. Simply put, they are fuel made out of plants – principally corn and soybeans in the United States.

The new Obama administration is solidly in favor of increased biofuels production. Everyone from his Secretary of Agriculture to his Secretary of Energy has voiced their support for this policy. But the production of biofuel is by no means uncontroversial, and solidly at the center of this controversy is Dr. David Pimentel, Professor of Ecology and Agricultural Sciences at Cornell University.

Dr. Pimentel was born on a large farm in California’s central valley, and he later moved to a smaller farm in Middleboro, Massachusetts. After his graduate work in entomology at Cornell and post-doctoral work at Oxford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago, Pimentel got a break when paper on the “life cycle analysis” of corn production was accepted by the journal Science in 1970. He’s been increasingly involved with agricultural issues ever since, and has become one of the most outspoken critics of both industrial farming methods and biofuel production. On both counts, he has published numerous papers demonstrating that modern agricultural technology uses more energy, is more toxic, and provides less benefit to a world of hungry consumers.

Some of his findings are:

1) According to recent analysis, it takes 143% more energy to make one gallon of ethanol than is contained in the ethanol itself.

2) If the entire United States corn crop were used for fuel, it would replace a mere 4% of US oil consumption.

3) One of the possible replacements for corn ethanol is called cellulosic ethanol – made from plant stalks, corn husks and other agricultural waste – but this material is even less efficient than corn and takes even more energy to produce.

4) It currently requires 1,700 gallons of water to produce each gallon of ethanol (mostly to grow the corn.)

His most recent paper Pimentel D et al. Food versus biofuels: environmental and economic costs, published in the journal Human Ecology, is as scathing an indictment of the effects of biofuel policy as a scientific paper can be. He and his coauthors conclude, “Growing crops for biofuel not only ignores the need to reduce fossil energy and land use, but exacerbates the problem of malnourishment worldwide.”

Ironically, in the recent economic environment ethanol production is starting to look a little less rosy for the people who make it, as well. A recent New York Times article details how the “goals lawmakers set for the ethanol industry are in serious jeopardy.” While new ethanol plants were recently being built as fast as possible, the article continued, “the industry is burdened with excess capacity, and plants are shutting down virtually every week.”

I recently caught up with Dr. Pimentel to see what all the fuss was about.

Dr. Pimentel, did you have any idea that this work was going to strike such a strong chord when you did this research a few years ago?

No, I didn’t but that’s what happens when you get mixed up with politics and big money.

But you’ve been working on biofuel issues for quite a few years?

Yes, more than 20 years.

And you’ve gotten some news for your work, but it seems like people on the policy level haven’t listened to what you’ve been saying.

Well, were gaining on the system and getting more and more people to understand the situation, so that’s encouraging.

Have you been contacted by the Obama administration?

Not really, no. And I’m a little disappointed by Obama right now, and the new Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack and Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, and the Secretary of the Interior Salazar – they’ve all expressed support for Ethanol. And that position is clearly not supported by the research.

Can we back up – didn’t your scientific career start out in Entomology?

Yes, that’s true, I started by studying insects but I was an entomologist with broad interests.

So how did you progress from entomology to sustainable agriculture and biofuel research?

Well, I got involved with energy and agriculture back in the early 1970’s – and we published a paper in Science at that time. Fortunately they accepted it way back then.

And I’m really intrigued by your 2005 study about organic agriculture producing the same yields as conventional?

I’m really proud of that study published jointly with the people at the Rodale Institute.

But with all the current press I’ve seen about your current biofuel paper, I haven’t seen people making the connection between large agribusiness and the biofuel companies?

Well, they all work together to keep the system of subsidies and dependence going. For example, the big chemical companies have definite interests in keeping the chemicals going, and in fact that’s what genetic engineering is about, especially the herbicide resistance. That’s been put into soybeans and corn – in fact 75% of both those crops are now herbicide resistant. And these are the crops that people want to use for fuel. All this does is waste energy and promote the use of herbicides that the chemical companies are most interested in selling.

So that’s what this business is all about. It’s not increasing the yield of corn or soybeans at all, it’s increasing the use of herbicides in soybeans and corn.

And recently I’ve seen advertising that they are making drought resistant GE crops to increase yield, but from what I understand there aren’t any proven crops that are drought resistant?

That is true. When they say they are drought resistant, what they mean is that the crop can wilt better than a conventional crop. But if you look at it, it still takes the same quantity of water to produce the same quantity of corn whether they are drought resistant or not.

In other words, it still takes about 700,000 gallons of water to produce an acre of corn whether it is drought resistant or conventional corn.

So Monsanto’s claim to be able to have a drought resistant corn in the next few years is all talk?

Yes, that’s right.

Do you follow the debate about organic farms with GMO seeds, saying that there isn’t any conflict between organic agriculture with genetically modified seeds?

I don’t agree with the genetically modified organisms, but I am glad that more people are interested in organic and are supporting it.

I certainly don’t want to propose that all organic is going to solve all our problems. There are significant problems with some of our crops – like potatoes, and apples, and oranges and so forth – that have serious pest problems that have to be dealt with.

But the corn and soybeans that we have studied and published in Bioscience was a very fortunate combination. We achieved the same yields of corn and soybeans over a 22 year period, comparing organic with conventional fields. That is very encouraging – using no nitrogen fertilizer, and no insecticides, and no herbicides in this study.

It shows that it can be done, and that we don’t need genetic engineering or chemicals to do it.

Are you following the current drought situation here in the US?

Yes, I have been following it, and it’s also terrible in Australia, too.

Yes, and also in China and South America.

They are having problems as well. But according to the climatologists, this is a normal amount of precipitation that we’re going to have to get used to. Of course, I hope we go back to the abnormal levels we’ve been having. There’s no question that we need more water.

And again, I emphasize, to grow an acre of corn for the growing season of three months uses 700,000 gallons of water, and that’s an enormous amount of water. Very few people appreciate the amount of water that is required by agriculture.

Out in California, you might have a better appreciation than we do back in the East.

Perhaps more than some. Here in California, it looks like we are going to be forced to drastically reduce our agricultural output this year due to water shortages, and California produces 50% of the national’s row crops. So it’s going to greatly affect our overall food resource in this country, and probably raise prices even in this depressed economy.

Yes, that’s true. So in this economy and environment it’s not a time to grow more crops for fuel. That’s my main point that I’m trying to make. Each gallon of ethanol requires 1,700 gallons of water to produce – we just can’t keep that up.

Did you see the recent USDA Census of Agriculture Report, indicating an increase in the number of small and organic farms?

Yes, and while it is true that the larger farms are producing most of the food, I’m still very supportive of the smaller farms because I was born and brought up on a small farm, so I’m biased. But I think they have a place, and should have a place, and I’m pleased to see that organic is growing.

What do you think is the future of sustainable agriculture?

When you say sustainable, what do you mean?

Exactly! That’s my question for you – what do you mean when you use the term? In general people don’t have a clear definition of that term.

Well, unfortunately, it means everything to everybody.

Do you have a personal definition?

Organic. It’s a simple clear term, if you’re talking about producing crops in an environmentally sound and energetically sound way. And I don’t want to indicate that all organic is easy and successful, because it’s not. But there are some crops such as the corn and soybeans, which are the two major crops in the United States, where organic can be used and be effective.

Photo: jurvetson

In fifteen days, Americans will make an important decision: who will take the reigns and get us out of this mess.  One topic the candidates have mostly left out of their speeches on the campaign trail thus far is food.  Whether they realize it or not, when either John McCain or Barack Obama sit down next January to begin the task of fixing our economy, to promote green energy in order to produce the jobs they’ve both promised, and to deal with the climate crisis and health care, food will be the unavoidable issue that keeps cropping up.

Perhaps the candidates don’t yet realize food’s role in these issues, or maybe they assume that because less than 1% of the population is currently working as a farmer, the topic does not appeal to the voting constituency that matters most.  But I think we are ready for a president that is willing to create a more nuanced food policy as opposed to leaving it unchanged in thirty years.  Telling farms to “get big or get out” as a philosophy for food security has long ago reached the point of diminishing returns.  So what will the next president do about it?

McCain’s agriculture policy can be found under the heading Prosperity for Rural America.  There is little here to show that a McCain administration would stray very far from current agriculture policy that favors agribusiness.  Recognizing agriculture’s role in national security is a good start.  But in McCain’s plan, there isn’t even a peep about organic or local agriculture.  He supports unchecked free trade, meaning that our lower priced subsidized food will compete with other nations that might not have such subsidy programs, disenfranchising small farmers in developing nations.  Should McCain follow through with his threat to end subsidies, however, there is no evidence here that he would offer any alternatives to struggling farmers.

He also views technology and growth as the sole measure of our agricultural potential.  Scary is McCain’s plan for upping production: to “direct the USDA to carry out comprehensive research to help develop more stress-resistant, higher yielding crops to increase production per acre,” giving a further carte blanche to corporations like Monsanto, which have dominated the genetically modified foods and pesticide sectors for decades.  McCain sees bio-technology as the key to “reducing reliance on petroleum-based inputs, and improving the long-term sustainability of agricultural production.”  But the track record is clear, genetically modified foods do carry unforseen consequences, require much oil in the form of pesticides and the energy moving the machines spraying them, encourage practices that strip the land of productivity over time and encourage less diverse crops and by extension, less diverse diets.

While McCain supports funding nutrition assistance programs, including indexing food stamps to reflect the current cost of living, he also seeks to cede the marketing of healthy diets to the fruit and vegetable companies, which have special interests at heart when doling out such information.

By comparison, Obama’s plan, Real Leadership for Rural America, reflects actual change from the current corporate-friendly policies.  Though for the most part lacking in concreteness, his plan goes further by recognizing the problems that previous administrations have been unwilling or unable to discuss.

Obama supports capping commodity subsidies at $250,000, and looks to close loopholes that allow farmers to subdivide their operations into multiple paper corporations.  His plan talks about regulating Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), which raise 40% of our livestock and are one of the largest polluters in America, with tougher air and water pollution standards.  Extending from that, the plan states that there will be limits placed on Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) funding to CAFOs, so that instead of taxpayers, the largest polluters must pay for their own environmental clean-up.

He promises to strengthen anti-monopoly laws, which thrills me, though I worry that riding on the Archer Daniels Midland corporate jet during the campaign has fueled Obama’s interest in ethanol, that company’s largest emerging industry, even though it has a poor net return on energy invested ratio (currently 1 unit of energy invested nets 1.3 energy output) and is destroying car engines.  Here I agree with McCain: corn-based ethanol production should no longer be subsidized by the U.S. government.

Both agriculture plans tie in energy, but Obama’s plan goes further to seek to improve the quality of life in rural America.  Community is an essential element to building local economies.  The Obama plan includes providing locally grown, healthy foods to school meal programs.  It also promotes encouraging young people to become farmers through training programs and capital gains tax breaks for those selling their land to beginning family farmers.  Obama’s plan also gives importance to encouraging organic and sustainable agriculture through increased funding to help farmers become certified.  But most impressive: “Barack Obama and Joe Biden recognize that local and regional food systems are better for our environment and support family-scale producers.  They will emphasize the need for Americans to Buy Fresh and Buy Local, and will implement USDA policies that promote local and regional food systems.”

Does this mean that the Victory Garden on the White House lawn that Alice Waters has been promoting and that Micheal Pollan suggested in last week’s New York Times Magazine might be within reach?  We will have to wait and see what happens on November 4th.

Photo: rhondawinter Victory Garden, City Hall in San Francisco

All human life — all terrestrial life, in fact — relies on that thin, fragile layer of topsoil that covers much of the non-oceanic earth. In a large sense, human societies rise and fall, thrive and decline, based on how well they nourish their topsoil. I’m not a huge fan of Jared Diamond, but his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed teases out an important lesson: burning through your share of topsoil leads to catastrophe.

Yet in post-industrial (that is to say, post-agricultural) society, our links to the land that sustains us have become so stretched, so abstract, that people have largely forgotten about the importance of soil. I see this most graphically in our political class’ euphoric embrace of ethanol — an allegedly “renewable” fuel that’s based on corn, our most soil-depleting crop.

Recent events in the Midwest, one of the globe’s greatest natural stores of topsoil, may yet force us to come to terms with the ground beneath our feet. Coverage of the early-summer floods that hammered the Corn Belt understandably focused on displaced people and ruined crops. But as this Associated Press article makes clear, the storms also washed away untold tons of fertile topsoil.

With the growing season going full bore and with some fields in Illinois still under water, it’s still impossible to know just how much topsoil the Midwest surrendered. Early indications aren’t encouraging. The AP reporter visited one Indiana corn farmer whose fields lie near the White River. Flooding became so powerful that the river’s overflow cut a “a channel with steep 12-foot banks at the edge” right into his cornfield. Such devastation evidently permeates Indiana. “Silt is piled up like sand dunes and uprooted trees still litter cornfields more than a month after the floods,” AP reports.

“It takes thousands of years to form one inch of topsoil,” an Indiana official told the AP. “Within a day, we lost it. It’s just devastating.”

The AP story effectively illustrates the storms’ effect on topsoil, but it doesn’t dig in to find the root cause: human-engineered changes in the land. In short, the practice of subjecting huge swaths of land to intensive monocrop agriculture makes it extremely vulnerable to topsoil loss from heavy rains. In the past 15 years, the Midwest has been subjected to two “100 year storms,” and both involved catastrophic flooding and topsoil loss.

Yet those hardly count as natural disasters, as a recent Washington Post article by Joel Achenbach makes clear. Rather, devastation from the floods stemmed from egregious land-use decisions, Achenbach found. Achenbach relates an interview he conducted with agriculture expert Kamyar Enshayan of the University of Northern Iowa:

[Enshayan] points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed. “We’ve done numerous things to the landscape that took away these water-absorbing functions,” he said. “Agriculture must respect the limits of nature.”

Of course, the pressures detailed by Enshayan have only intensified in recent years, spurred on by the government-dictated ethanol boom. To meet this year’s biofuel mandate under the 2007 Energy Act, at least a third of this year’s corn crop will be diverted into ethanol factories — nearly double the level of just three years ago. That spike in demand has caused corn price to triple in just three years, inspiring a mad rush to plant as much corn as possible.

In the 1970s, another sudden jump in grain prices — this one caused by a massive government-engineered grain sale to the Soviet Union — created a similar gold rush for industrial agriculture. The results of that short-lived boom bear heeding. From the veteran Washington Post reporter Dan Morgan in his 1979 book Merchants of Grain:

The land itself exhibited the scars of … the grain economy. Along the North Carolina coast, Italian and Japanese investors bought tens of thousands of acres of marshy wetlands, cleared the trees with bulldozers and Caterpillar tractors, installed drainage ditches, and announced plans for “superfarms.” The incentives were corn at $3.00 a bushel and soybeans at $6.50; the world needed more food. But environmentalists in the state expressed concern about the effect of the runoff of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides on the fish and wildlife in the coastal waterways. Investors also purchased marginal farmland in the western edge of the corn belt in Nebraska and ordered fragile grasslands to the plow. Groves of trees, planted under federal programs in the 1930s to prevent soil erosion, were bulldozed so that spindly irrigation systems that wheeled around a central well in 160-acre circles could move unhindered. The land irrigated by these watering systems was plowed, diked, and planted to corn. After the corn was harvested, the thin layer of topsoil blew away in many places, leaving gashes of dunelike sand in the fields of Nebraska.

Photo 1 by iowa_spirit_walker
Photo 2 by sundaykofax
Photo 3 by ellenmac11