In their new book, Farming for Our Future: The Science, Law and Policy of Climate Neutral Agriculture, Peter Lehner and Nathan Rosenberg write that agriculture needs to move beyond producing what are sometimes called the Four Fs: food, feed, fiber and fuel.
But when you take all the elements of agriculture, and look at them on policy-relevant timescales—20-year global warming potential rather than 100-year, which makes methane far more important—and then take into account the enormous land use impacts of agriculture, you see that agriculture is actually on a par with the transportation sector in terms of emissions.
This obscures the fact that there is a relatively small number of well-financed and large operations that are doing most of the polluting in agriculture.
Excluding these communities from the conversation and conflating the farm economy with the rural economy, or the interests of farmers with rural interests, obscures these voices and helps perpetuate systems that don’t benefit society broadly.
While at one point we could say that farming should focus on productivity, on producing calories, that’s just not the case anymore.
Rosenberg: There is much that can be done, both by Congress and by the Biden administration through executive action, right now.
In contrast, today we have farmers, all around the country, on different crops at different scales, using very productive practices that are storing more carbon in the soil and in biomass and are reducing greenhouse gas emissions and producing healthier food.
We already have lots of programs that are spending billions of dollars every year that can be better targeted—we don’t have to find new money.
There’s also the policy problem: If farmers are changing practices to reduce greenhouse gases and increase soil carbon, we should encourage it, but it would be a profound societal problem if that then allows the fossil fuel polluter to keep polluting.
The promise of biogas is that we can cover these manure lagoons that are emitting greenhouse gases and burn the gas for fuel, which, as it is presented, would mitigate emissions.
They’re often placed adjacent to poor communities, and there’s been a large number of spills and accidents that make living near these facilities intolerable and cause direct health problems. So the industry often portrays it as kind of this win-win, where we’re making the living conditions of the people in the community better while reducing emissions and giving farmers another avenue of financial support.
Rosenberg: The last major change in agricultural policy was during the New Deal, and since then we’ve kind of been keeping our policy together with these kludgy changes and just kind of working from the same frame that we’ve had for almost 90 years.
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