Can farming be climate smart?
The recent round of UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa produced little of substance. One thing that did emerge was the promotion of something called climate-smart agriculture. The basic idea is to 1) increase agricultural production, 2) strengthen farmer resilience to climate change (“adaptation”) and 3) reduce agriculture’s contribution to to climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing carbon storage on farmland. In other words: more food, better prepared farmers and mitigation of climate change. The so-called triple win.
The trick to this is an old one: sustainable agriculture. It’s too soon to say whether climate-smart agriculture is something that’s time has come, with real resources, policies and action ready to go into sustainable farming. Or will it be captured by elite players like Monsanto Co. and the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR)? Or is this all just a hustle to divert attention away from the big polluters like the US and China?
In any event, the practices suggested for climate-smart agriculture are basically the work program for Fair Earth Farm and others like it. If these things were really to be taken seriously, that would be a good thing. The practices suggested for climate-smart agriculture are:
- mulching
- intercropping
- conservation agriculture
- crop rotation
- integrated crop-livestock management
- agroforestry
- improved grazing
- improved water management
The photos below show some of these practices and here are a few links.
- This short video by the World Bank lays out the basic idea.
- This article includes some critical commentary of the concept.
- This and this are from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
CLIMATE-SMART AGRICULTURE IN ACTION
MULCHING
Mulch is a protective cover of organic matter placed over the soil. Ai Seud mulches vegetable beds with local carbon-rich material like cardboard, water hyacinth, composted cow manure and rice straw. For a farmer, this helps to conserve moisture, build topsoil, suppress weeds and increase soil biodiversity. In terms of climate change, this practice helps to sequester carbon in soil and plants.
INTERCROPPING
A variety of plants co-exist in one area at the same time. The soil is continuously covered, maintaining soil moisture and facilitating microbial life. Carbon is returned to the atmosphere more slowly when soils are protected in this way.
CONSERVATION AGRICULTURE
Our future world will need to produce food for more people from less arable land. We don't need Monsanto's magic GMO seeds; we need conservation agriculture. This photo shows a rice seedbed using the System of Rice Intensification. With SRI, we use 1/10th the amount of seed and seedbed space than conventional methods.
CROP ROTATION
Rotating crops has many benefits for farming. It replenishes soil nutrients, protects against crop diseases, and means more varied diets and markets. Crop rotation can also help increase the resilience of farmers in the face of climate change and extreme weather. This plot is never plowed nor is the soil exposed to the elements. A crop of grain like maize or sorghum gives way to beans and then to cassava and peanuts, then later back to grain.
INTEGRATED CROP-LIVESTOCK MANAGEMENT
It has only been in recent decades that the traditional union of animals and plants on farms has been divided into factory systems of monocropping and giant animal farms. Wendell Berry famously said that this division has taken one solution and created two problems: lack of fertility (read: animal dung) for plants and too much waste (again: dung) from huge hog farms and the like. In terms of climate, the two problems are reliance on petro-chemicals like nitrogen fertilizers and production of the greenhouse gas methane from lagoons of manure. When we return animals to our farms, we help the climate by helping ourselves and our customers.
AGROFORESTRY
A mixture of annual and semi-perennial plants grow with fruit trees along the edge of the rice paddy. Along this dike we grow banana, mango, pineapple, Jamaican cherry, moringa, lemon, mulberry, sorghum, beans and a bunch of other stuff. In the paddy, there're fish and ducks and, in season, rice. Agroforestry can help fix carbon from the atmosphere, build resilience to climate change, diversify income and provide habitat for wildlife.
IMPROVED GRAZING
This is a "pastured poultry" technique. The chickens, turkeys and guinea fowl spend part of each day in a movable cage. We know that people need fresh vegetables, exercise and stress management. So why do we deprive these things from the animals we raise and eat? It's bad for them, bad for us, and bad for the environment. Pasturing poultry in this way is a middle path between the damage inflicted on the farm by free-range fowl and the negative consequences of animal containment.
IMPROVED WATER MANAGEMENT
These canals are a feature of a system known as Multipurpose Rice Fields. A rice field is diversified with canals and wide dikes. We store water in the canals for the dry season and use them to drain excess water during the rains. We raise fish in the canals and grow water plants like hyacinth, water lettuce, water mimosa, and morning glory. These make great food for livestock and good material for composting and mulching. The dikes can be used to grow crops, with plenty of water nearby for irrigation.
I just went on a trip with a friend running errands and while waiting read some pages from “Small Farmers Secure Food” by Lindsay Falvey and it is a joy to now to come and read your short story above. However I have been thinking about the Climate-Stupid farming with chemicals killing the frogs in all the fields around Fair Earth Farm so I ask : “Have you written about the cause of the conservatism gripping the farming community in Mae Rim and perhaps contrasting that with Yasothorn and their organic rice production?”
Hi Ricky,
Thanks for the post. I don’t know if “conservatism” is the right word for practices that require dumping poisons into the remaining swamp paddy ecology in Mae Rim. The idea that we can only acquire food through chemical warfare against Mother Nature is pretty darned radical (in the figurative use of the term).
I’m not sure what’s going on. If you ask Ai Serd, he shrugs his shoulders and says that’s what everyone has always done. He says this despite the fact that it’s been within his own lifetime that farming practices have undergone a fundamental change. His parents’ generation did not have use of tractors, so-called “improved” hybrid seeds, dry-season irrigation, or the whole petro-chemical package of fertilizers and biocides. Nor did his grandparents’ generation or anyone else’s since the beginning of Thais or farming.
It’s easy to walk along the dyke throwing handfuls of colorful granules or pumping a backpack sprayer. Wielding a hoe or sacks of compost to accomplish the same goals is just not an option. Tell them about the fact that biological activity in the paddy helps, or that ducks are better than molluscicides against snails, or that the reason their yields suck so badly is because the Ph is so low from decades of soil abuse … well, don’t bother. Talk is cheap and they’re used to hearing a lot of cheap talk. I save my breath for the few bright lights who are ready to try something different. If enough of them emerge, then there will be viable alternatives ready when the shit hits the fan. And then the rest of the herd will come along out of necessity. Of course, by then, all my neighbors will have sold their land to Bangkokians, their kids will be unemployed and burning up shit, and the last flocks of migrating egrets will have ceased to arrive.
People are just ignorant. The people that grow the food, and the people that buy it from them. Where do you get your food? Unless you’re buying from the precious few natural alternatives, then you too (me too!) are rewarding bad farming and bad food. I reckon we lay off the farmers and turn the heat on the consumers. All the do-gooding self-righteous people of Chiang Mai STILL buy their food from the same damned places. Ride our bicycles from the green strategy meeting (in the coal-fired air-conditioned concrete box) to the chemical market and send a message to the chemical farmers: Thanks for your hard work against our Mother. Keep at it; I’ll be back tomorrow for more.”