As we hear about the Copenhagen talks and what is coming out of them, very little is being discussed about the impact of US agricultural practices and climate change.  The Seattle Times had an article up last week about a UW climate scientist, David Battisti, and his shift in interest from the looking at the regional impacts of global warming to understanding the impacts of climate change on crops around the world. 

According to the article, Battisti has worked with scientists and government researchers around the world to forecast how shifts in El Nino patterns would impact rice harvests in Indonesia and later China and how changing rainfall patterns would impact wheat growing in northern Mexico.   On a global scale, he and Robert Nicholas, a UW doctoral student who came to Seattle to work with Battisti, have "calculated that average growing-season temperatures around much of the world likely will be higher than ever before in recorded history by 2100.  Crops such as corn, rice and wheat grow faster when its hot, but produce less grain." 

Of course, agricultural practices have an impact on climate change as well.  Jill Richardson, writing at La Vida Locavore and DailyKos, talks very clearly and simply about the different impacts the primary two different systems of growing food have on the world's climate.  From a recent post at DailyKos:

"Method #1: Let nature do the heavy lifting. Nourish the microbes in the soil (and larger soil life too like earthworms and bugs) and they will do the work for you. They will bring nutrients to the plants, compete with and prey on pests, and make the soil the right texture to hold and absorb water. If there's a lot of rainfall, that rain will be able to trickle all the way down into the groundwater. The soil will hold water too, so if there's a drought, you'll have reserves of water to help you out. This form of agriculture is superior in its ability to resist heat, cold, drought, flood, pests, and disease - AND it puts more nutrients in the food.

Method #2: Kill all of the soil life and replace its functions with man-made technologies like pesticides, fertilizer, tilling, and irrigation. The only problem here is that we don't perfectly understand what all of the soil microorganisms do, so it's hard to recreate their functions. Furthermore, where we do understand what we do, we can't always recreate their functions perfectly, and we can't always do it without harmful side effects like pollution.

Method #1, if used on all of the world's cropland, has the ability to sequester 40% of the world's carbon emissions. Method #2 is really, really, really profitable for a lot of corporations."

Jill is not optimistic about the choices that she expects decision-makers to make.  As she says, it all comes down to money.   Large multinational agricultural corporations don't want to lose money and they wield a lot of influence in the corridors of power.  They not only want to keep American farmers using their seeds and pesticides and fertilizers but they want to expand that method (Method #2 above, obviously) into other continents, especially Africa.

The industrial ag theory is that using all these chemicals increases yield and that is still the conventional wisdom but Jill and others have consistently debunked that.  Here she is again:

"Scientists found that if the entire world switched to agroecological methods using only the land cultivated now, we could produce enough food to feed everybody and we could even feed a growing global population. They also found that we'd have enough nitrogen to grow food agroecologically. In the U.S. where we use a lot of agrochemicals, we'd see a very slight decrease in productivity. However, in the developing world, where they DON'T use very many chemicals to grow their food, they would see an 80% INCREASE in the amount of food produced."

Back to the impact of the two systems/methods on climate change itself.  "Agroecological methods of farming can sequester carbon into the soil at the rate of 1% per year, whereas industrial methods deplete carbon from the soil at the rate of 1% per year."

This is a conversation we really really need to be having.