Regenerative Agriculture Should be at the Top of Everyone’s Menu: Taking Organic to the Next Level
By Mike Snow
Broccoli and cauliflower aren’t typically tantalizing. But exotic edibles fashioned from these and other garden variety vegetables are always at the top of everyone’s menu at the Natural Products Expo, where semi-annually buyers and sellers from 135 countries by the tens of thousands size up bite sized samples of everything from ordinary fruits and veggies to cutting edge culinary concoctions such as water melon seed butter, veggie turkey jerky, and Smartvine glyphosate-free keto-friendly wine, infused with turmeric, chicory root, lemon peel, and muscatine grape skins. Creme de la creme recognition at a recent show went to Wild Joy Goods Banana Jerky Original (organic, of course), crowned Best Specialty Item, and Organic Essence Scrub Butter, which captured “Editor’s Choice” honors. After you chew over that, tickle your taste buds with a cricket bar.
These and other gastronomical wonders are reminders to sellers about the importance of marketing their own healthy product lines with creativity enough to edge out competitors. Both Expo East in Philadelphia and its sister show, Expo West in Anaheim, Ca. offer serious food for thought about the pressing need to walk back industrial farming practices that churn out cheaper but not typically better tasting or healthier food that, in addition to giving Mother Nature heartburn, threatens to broadside us with titanic environmental and health consequences.
Critics are quick to finger big oil and big coal as the main culprits behind our headlong plunge toward a Sixth Extinction while overlooking or downplaying the prominent bad boy role of industrial agriculture in our purported pending demise. The good news is that regenerative methods of producing food - that is, merging farming and natural resource conservation - are capable of securing our salvation by enabling small farmers to produce yields that dwarf industrialized agriculture output and do so with no environmental strings attached. A recent study conducted by former U.S.D.A. whistleblower Jonathon Lundgren found that growing corn regeneratively boosted profits by 78% over traditional corn growing systems and at the same time reduced pests by a measure of 10 without reliance on toxic chemical concoctions. If our farm economy expects to get back up to speed, we need to borrow a page from the past and re-implement time-tested farming methods that diminish rather than pile on to atmospheric insult. In a nutshell, incorporating soil health, animal welfare and social fairness into the production of food.
Agriculture took a wrong turn in 1973 when then Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz famously noted that bigger farms were more productive and that farmers needed to “adopt or die” and “get big or get out.” But the drive to maximize yields centered solely on mono cropping and synthetic fossil fuel-based nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides. At first, the industrial model rapidly jacked up output. Over time, though, it stripped the soil of vital minerals, polluted the environment, and ultimately rendered large swaths of farmland infertile while leaching water-soluble nutrients into the atmosphere.
Environmental watchdogs say that replacing our industrialized system with cover cropping, integrated pest management, residue mulching, composting, crop rotation, and conservation tillage would require as much as 50 percent less fossil fuel energy than industrial farms but produce healthier, non-depleted soils that retain carbon and large quantities of water, prevent erosion and better enable plants to tolerate weather extremes.
Despite growing awareness about the advantages of farming regeneratively, Big Ag remains dug in, a GMO Rock of Gibraltar fortified by an army of special interest lobbyists and bought-and-paid-for political hacks who push through subsidies that facilitate production of cheaper but often sketchy foods that tend to bring consumers higher hospital bills and other costs associated with environmental degradation while those willing to pony up for organic fare, for the most part, pay upfront but ultimately pay less. Garbage in, garbage out.
In the past, climate change - at least here in the U.S. - was treated much like the weather, something that everyone talked about but nobody did anything about. But increasingly ferocious windstorms and catastrophic fires such as those that destroyed dozens of lives and 10,000 homes in the California town of Paradise in November 2018 are raising new levels of concern and fueling activism everywhere. While those entrusted with the public good tinker around the edges bluster, but mostly blow smoke at the problem, angry students fare leading the charge. In 2019, 150,000 children from around the globe walked out of classes to bring renewed attention to warnings of climate experts that we are the eleventh hour with as few as a dozen years remaining to reverse course. We should listen to them, because if we don’t stop rearranging the Titanic’s deck chairs and affect real change, we can expect more melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and record heat waves.
Global warming occurs when carbon dioxide, nitrogen and other gasses escape into the atmosphere, absorbing and essentially trapping the sun’s thermal energy and causing it to heat up the earth like a greenhouse. In the past 50 years, the average global temperature has broken 16 heat records, most of them since 2000. Transportation and coal-burning power plants are most often singled out for blame. But, depending on who you ask, emissions generated from food production are responsible for anywhere from 14 to more than 50 percent of global greenhouse gases (increasing, by most accounts, at the rate of one percent per year). Of the two industrialized branches of agriculture, meat and mono cropping, meat production gets the baddest rap. A 2014 World Bank report estimated that bringing cattle to market requires 28 times more land, six times more fertilizer and 11 times more water than pork or chicken production, while driving up emissions of greenhouse gases by four times.Cowspiracy and other documentaries have outed factory farming and its abusive treatment of animals confined to CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) as a key contributor to global warming, speeding a popular migration among humans toward plant strong diets.
Meanwhile, mono-cropping, or growing the same crops in the same place year after year - usually large scale genetically modified (GMO) corn and soy - often gets a pass. GMOs are especially vulnerable to fungus, insects and parasites, and require chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics, plus prodigious amounts of fossil fuels. This toxic tidal wave has devastated bird, bee and butterfly populations, while seeding hospital profits, making medical treatment facilities the biggest profit centers in America, according to author Stephen Brill. Especially problematic is glyphosate, or Roundup, integral to GMO production, which has been implicated by the World Health Organization as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Glyphosate recently has become the target of ongoing litigation that last fall gobsmacked GMO giant Bayer (nee Monsanto) with a $289 million (later reduced to $78) judgment to California groundskeeper Dwayne Johnson, who contacted non Hodgkin’s Lymphoma after being exposed to the chemical during work. More recently, an $80 million award was bestowed on fellow Californian Edwin Hardeman, who developed the same malady after spraying Roundup (glyphosate) on poison oak at his 56-acre Sonoma County, California spread. Thousands of similar lawsuits are waiting to be heard.
But such comeuppance is a pittance considering the toll taken by Big Ag’s bad practices and how much they may cost us in the years ahead. Central to global warming is the carbon released into the atmosphere when rainforests and other large swaths of land are cleared to make way for cattle grazing or growing GMO mono crops. Regenerative farming, on the other hand, does just the opposite. Its reliance on minimal tillage, cover crops, crop rotations and rotational grazing produces dynamic soil that sequesters rather than spews carbon skyward, reducing greenhouse gases and, if widely implemented, is the solution we are looking for.
Ronnie Cummins, the Organic Consumer Association’s International Director, has singled out soil as a viable solution to global warming and climate change. “One of the best-kept secrets in the world today,” he recently remarked, “is that the solution to global warming and the climate crisis (as well as poverty and deteriorating public health) lies right under our feet.” Cummins especially targets healthy soil which, when rife with with microorganisms, traps carbon and curtails climate change, similar to the microbiome within our guts which, when rich with diverse, beneficial organisms, enriches our health. Cummins and other food experts believe if we can get rid of farm subsidies (and regulations on the corn crop, 30 percent of which goes into fuel production) and cut back on consumption of meat and processed foods that most GMO corn and soy go into producing, we can arrest and probably reverse our downward spiral.
Food for thought as you chow down on that cricket bar.
