A Better Planet: Forty Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future
Edited by Daniel C. Esty
416 pages, Yale University Press, 2019
Sustainability has emerged as one of the most urgent challenges of the 21st century. And given the complexity, severity, and scale of the numerous environmental crises we face—from climate change and water scarcity to the deforested and burning Amazon —many feel anxious, helpless, and desperate for ideas about what to do. This is precisely the mission of the new book A Better Planet: Forty Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future—a collection of 40 essays that offer concrete ideas for what we can do to reignite environmental progress. As contributors to this collection, we were asked to share our ideas for how to achieve truly sustainable agriculture.
The following excerpt lays out opportunities to combat climate change while maximizing agriculture’s sustainable handprint and helping farmers manage through increasingly frequent extreme weather events. The agricultural sector is often blamed as a cause of climate change and far less frequently highlighted as a champion of climate solutions. Farms and ranches have the capability, given adequate resources and technology, to capture carbon in soil with the potential to become carbon neutral. We can change the narrative and demonstrate how agricultural communities, with collaboration across our food systems, can be climate champions instead of climate villains.—Erin Fitzgerald and Greg Gershuny
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For more than 10,000 years, agriculture has been the foundation on which civilizations are built, empires rise and fall, and humans raise themselves out of poverty. Food is the foundation of family and communities, the thing that brings us together, and, in some cases, the thing that can drive us to war.
If humans are going to continue to prosper and feed our evergrowing population, we need to understand agriculture’s role in our society and maximize its potential to promote sustainability and to address climate change. To achieve true sustainable agriculture, the farming community and food supply chain must be stewards not just of the land but also of sustainable nutrition and climate change action. On the farm, this principle has long required not just that farmers plant for this season’s harvest or raise a herd of animals, but that they equally maintain a far deeper sense of commitment to the land, their children, and their grandchildren. This stewardship obligation should be seen as a commitment by the farming community and the food supply chain as a whole to simultaneously provide for the current population while also preserving and enhancing the land for the next generation. Farmers and ranchers look to the horizon, making decisions now based on what is best for today and the future. With the help of established practices, newer technologies, and renewed commitments, American farmers and ranchers—who care for almost half of all U.S. land—can continue to adopt new solutions that will help create a better, more sustainable future.
Challenges—Nutrition and Climate Change
Agriculture has provided nourishment to people and has allowed us to flourish as a society. However, as agricultural productivity has grown over past decades and centuries, many have been left behind. In 2016, the United Nations launched the Decade of Nutrition to put special emphasis on Zero Hunger, the second of 17 Sustainable Development Goals meant to guide human progress. The triple burden of malnutrition (that is, undernutrition, micronutrient deficiency, and overweight and obesity) is recognized globally as a universal challenge. Malnutrition affects nearly one in three people worldwide and can have negative long-term consequences. Undernutrition increases the risk of disease and death, drives up health care costs, burdens families and communities, limits educational potential, and impedes economic progress. On a societal level, proper nutrition and basic food security underpin peace and prosperity. Adding to these challenges, between 2009 and 2050, the global population is projected to grow by one-third, requiring around a 70 percent increase in food production from 2005–2007 levels.
In addition to nutrition challenges, we face the growing threat of climate change, which could destabilize the current food system and undermine efforts to achieve nutrition for all. In 2016, agriculture accounted for about 9 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Practices in both animal and crop agriculture release greenhouse gases, primarily methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide. Of all climatewarming greenhouse gas emissions associated with the U.S. agricultural sector, most come from livestock production, with crop production accounting for the next largest amount. Embedded in all these source emissions is food waste, which is the largest source, and accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the carbon impact from the food and agriculture sector.
While farming and ranching contribute to warming the planet, climate change also greatly affects the sector. Increases in average temperature can cause major impacts on crop production, spread pests and diseases to new environments, increase soil evaporation rates, and threaten the health of field workers. More extreme heat may also cause more heat stress for livestock and greater risk of heat exhaustion, heatstroke, and heart attack for humans. Increased occurrences of heavy rainfall could lead to excessive runoff, flooding, and soil erosion, as well as degraded water quality in nearby bodies of water and loss of the carbon important for soil health. Increased droughts and other changes in precipitation could lead to reduced availability of water for rainfed and irrigated agriculture. Changes in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events (for example, floods, heat waves, storms) and wildfires (for example, on rangelands) could cause devastation to agricultural lands.
Keeping farming resilient in the face of a changing climate requires significant adaptation. With increased carbon dioxide in the air, plants will garner increased yields, but episodic weather patterns, droughts, and extreme rainfalls could affect growing and stability in this sector. Adaptation of production methods, input use, new genetic varieties for drought and water adaptation, climate smart precision agriculture, and sensing could enable better management and predictability. For instance, biotechnological plant breeding of corn, cotton, soybeans, and several other crops offers an extremely precise strategy to help with our evolving climate. Other adaptation measures could include changing crop mixes, irrigation methods, fertilization practices, tillage practices, pesticides (and pesticide uses), and land management. All of these measures, however, while helpful, have limits as climate change impacts grow more severe.
Nourishing a growing world population while reducing environmental impacts will require food and agriculture systems to integrate their conservation and efficiency efforts. These sectors will also need to collaborate closely to document environmental impacts while working to continually improve their environmental footprint. Advancements in precision agriculture, data sensing for carbon, soil, and water that helps manage outcomes and predictive capabilities, and other new technologies are essential. Working together, farmers, ranchers, and food makers across the food supply chain can explore new ways to produce nutrient-rich foods that are affordable and accessible and help pave the way to sustainable nutrition for all—today and for future generations. While the challenges will be hard to overcome, food and agriculture around the world can cocreate the sustainable food systems of the future.
Tools and Opportunities
From changing the composition of livestock feed to reduce methane emissions from digestion to continuing to improve agricultural yields, thereby avoiding conversions of native landscapes to cropland, many pathways exist for the U.S. agricultural community to reduce its impacts on climate change, increase resiliency, and promote sustainability more broadly. Two of the most important and fundamental opportunity areas are soil and water resource management.
Soil health and carbon cycle management. The carbon cycle is at the heart of agriculture. Through photosynthesis, plants take carbon from the air, use some for growth, and put the rest into the soil through their roots. Carbon from the air is thus stored both aboveground (for example, in leaves and stems) and belowground (for example, in roots, soils, and rocks). Globally, soil contains more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere, and the more carbon that remains in the soil, the better for the soil, crop yields, and the planet. In addition to storing carbon, however, agricultural and forestry processes can also produce it, including through land use conversion and land management practices. The net carbon flux between the land and the atmosphere depends on the balance between sequestration gains and carbon losses.
While agriculture contributes to greenhouse gas production, it can also be part of the solution to climate change. Advances in soil sciences and soil management can be tools in the fight against malnutrition and climate change, helping to sequester carbon while also improving yields. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, sustainable soil practices involve minimizing soil disturbance, cultivating a variety of species, not uprooting living plants, and maintaining soil cover. Soil disturbance through tillage, improper input use, or overgrazing can destroy soil microbes, interfere with the symbiotic relationships among soil microorganisms, damage roots, and increase soil temperature. Likewise, failing to keep soil covered can cause a loss of soil moisture, raise soil temperatures, and expose soil to the impacts of rainfall. Accordingly, practices to improve soil carbon include conservation tillage practices that reduce disturbance to soil structure; returning crop residues to the soil; using cover crops; rotating planting with perennial crops and those with greater root mass; addition of manure, compost, and digestate; and rotational grazing on grasslands. In addition, advanced nutrient management techniques and precision agriculture can more precisely allow for fertilizer inputs.
Many practices to improve soil health have multiple benefits. For instance, windbreaks and riparian forest buffers integrate trees and shrubs into agricultural landscapes, thereby not only reducing soil erosion and surface water pollution but also adding important carbon sinks. Increasing the carbon stored in topsoil worldwide by just 0.4 percent per year would both improve soil fertility and halt the annual increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Some practices that sequester more carbon in soils, though, can also impact the fluxes of methane and nitrous oxide—two other powerful greenhouse gases—so we have to consider the net impacts of various management strategies on all greenhouse gases. All practices require placebased solutions through adaptation and attention to detail on farms, given that there are over twenty thousand soil types. Enabling precision application on each acre can drive improved outcomes related to soil health and carbon management.
Water Use, Quality, and Scarcity. Every corner of the globe is now experiencing the effects of water scarcity. This new reality has a big impact on agriculture, which of course depends on water. As global population growth and economic development increase competition for water, access to adequate clean water has become a growing concern for agriculture stakeholders around the world.
American agriculture accounts for about 80 percent of the country’s consumptive water use, although much of that cycles back through the water cycle for eventual reuse. Over time, the source of water used for irrigation purposes in the United States has shifted, with growing reliance on groundwater compared with surface water. As of 2008, the most depleted U.S. aquifers were the High Plains, Mississippi Embayment, and Central Valley, which all serve as the primary source of irrigation in major agricultural regions. Water uses for industrial purposes, drinking, and food consumption risk becoming increasingly at odds.
Efficient irrigation systems and water management practices can reduce agricultural water use. The most common type of irrigation has “shifted over time,” from gravity and flood irrigation to more efficient pressurized sprinkler and drip irrigation. Precision technologies (for example, soil moisture sensor networks) are also becoming more typical in irrigation systems, given their ability to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Improving water use efficiency can improve crop yields and reduce water costs while also freeing up more water for other uses (for example, habitat). Improvements in irrigation efficiency, however, can sometimes lead to greater water usage, such as when farmers expand their irrigated acreage or start growing more water intensive crops as a result.
For livestock agriculture, water conservation practices have to focus on how feed is grown, which consumes a huge portion of the water livestock systems use. In dairy, for instance, feed production makes up more than 90 percent of water use. To address water scarcity, farmers can use less water intensive crops as feed. They can also reuse water (where safe and appropriate) on the farm. One example of this is dairy farmers using a plate cooler to chill their milk. They then use the same sanitary water for the cows to drink. Water usage has long been a challenge for our food supply chain. However, reducing water usage is particularly important in arid geographies and will only grow in importance as climate change impacts affect future water availability.
In the United States the vast majority of precipitation falls first on private lands, almost half of which are devoted to farming and ranching. Water quality depends on nutrient management, precise application of fertilizers, and integrated pest management. Increasingly, we are seeing community-based solutions for urban and rural management of water quality, such as with the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Agriculture can uniquely make strides in water quality through buffer strips, precision agriculture practices, soil management, and wetland conservation. As urban environments expand, nutrient pollution of waters increases; agriculture can act as a solution. One key consideration to keep in mind is that best practices in hydrology and water systems vary in different regions and therefore have to be tailored to local conditions. Equally, an urban and rural approach to integrated water management solutions can take into account agriculture’s unique ability to contribute to and manage for water quality in urban environments.
Agriculture for the Future
The work of American farmers and ranchers depends on the environment, and the environment is dependent on their work. Effective resource management, like optimized soil management and water usage, can enhance opportunities for farmers and ranchers to be more sustainable while producing more food that’s also more nutritious. Recognition of agriculture’s role in providing ecosystem services that support human wellbeing, encouraging innovation, and providing information to enable more precise decisions on carbon, soil, and water management can unlock solutions for climate change adaptation in the future. Guided by the values of stewardship embraced by farmers and ranchers for generations, today’s agriculture can be the foundation of prosperity, environmental resilience, and food security.
Five pathways, in particular, will be critical for a more sustainable future:
- Collaboration: Encourage farmers, agricultural experts, researchers, and investors to collaborate with the food value chain to find shared solutions to the full spectrum of environmental and social challenges—and create much needed research on sustainable food systems.
- Emphasis on nutrition: Ensure that agriculture meets the nutritional needs of a diverse and growing population. Plant and animal agriculture play important and complementary roles, not only in human health but also in supporting cultural, social, and economic wellbeing and enjoyment, improving our quality of life.
- Focus on reducing food waste: Food should always be put to its best use, which means we must reduce the amount of food wasted every year. Encouraging consumption patterns focused on lifestyles, including not taking or buying too much, and reducing food waste and food loss across the value chain from farm to consumer can have a large impact on sustainable food consumption.
- Technology innovation: Investments should be focused on enabling mitigation and adaptation to natural resource constraints while improving production efficiencies for yield and quality, including nutrient content, food safety, environmental outcomes, and resistance to pestilence and climate shocks. These investments should not underestimate the place-based complexity of solutions for farmers. Further, advancements in economic modeling to look at return on investment for both production and environmental services would provide valuable insights for farmers and policymakers.
- Carbon sequestration as a solution: Collaboration across our food systems and an outcome-based approach should elevate the ability for agriculture to create climatesmart solutions and provide vital ecosystem services in the emerging Anthropocene era characterized by human impacts on the planet. Current trajectories predict the ability for U.S. agriculture’s soil to continue to improve and store more carbon. With the right policies and practices in place, agriculture has the potential to completely offset its greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon.