https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6...limate-change/
Here’s an interesting and overall very good discussion on regenerative agriculture, but it also shows some of the problems there can be going from good science to good policy. Some scientists are really just scientists – which is still much better than the ones who misrepresent the science of course – and they don’t really understand good policy or even the full potential of their findings. Here’s an example from the above article:
“Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton who closely studied the potential of carbon farming for an upcoming World Resources Institute report, took an even more skeptical stance.
He said there are limits on how much farmers can change their soil management practices, and other restrictions on how much more carbon we can reliably store in soils that we continue to farm. In addition, some efforts that could be credited as carbon farming might have taken place anyway.”
-Even if there are “limits”, and unfortunately the article tells us noting about those limits, the potential here is so HUGE that this area is clearly very much worth exploring. And even if some of these would have taken place anyway, this is a way to make sure they keep taking place and to quantify what they are doing, and by signing farmers up to a program like this you could make them part of a research project that tell you how to do this even more effectively.
““Our view generally is that it’s been a huge diversion,” he said. “We have … an enormous number of things that need to done to be solve agriculture and climate change, and soil carbon ain’t it, at least from a mitigation standpoint.”
The first and most important priority for minimizing the climate impact of agriculture is to stop clearing more land for it, Searchinger stressed.
“There’s no scientific uncertainty about that,” he said. “You clear a forest and you lose a lot of carbon.”
In particular, he said, we need to make extra efforts to conserve or restore peatlands, a type of wetland that releases vast amounts of carbon dioxide when it’s dried out and converted to agricultural uses.”
-Without knowing what his alternatives are it’s hard to respond to his top statement, but pretty clearly the massive potential of this means that it should be one of the first things we focus on. And note that this solves two problems at once. It sequesters carbon and it regenerates the soil.
-And he fails to realize that a properly designed program would protect the forests and peatlands as well. Paying famers X dollars per tonne of sequestered carbon would add another revenue stream and earn the farmers more money on the land they currently farm. Clearing forest would release carbon and probably wipe out the carbon profits they make on their other farmland. Silvopasture might be an option for some of these forested areas and if so that sequesters carbon and would earn them more money.
“Boosting productivity on grazing and croplands—through, say, better processes, nutrients, crops, or seeds—can deliver bigger benefits, he argued, by easing pressure to expand agricultural operations. Better still would be for farmers to convert some fields back to grasslands and forests, which store far more carbon in their leaves, trunks, roots, and soil.”
- Again, if you’re paying farmers to sequester carbon then you’re increasing their income without increasing the productivity of the land, at least not in the traditional sense. You are essentially adding a “carbon farming” stream and in that way you are making the land more productive. This scientist clearly doesn’t understand how a properly designed program could achieve most of the things he wants.
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