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The Garden Plot for December 21, 2007
3:55 PM - 4:00 PM
[Program Website]
Today's Highlight: "Agriculture & Energy Policy 1"
Since our gardens are all put to bed now, I’ve been thinking about agriculture and the farm bill. Never has a federal farm bill been so contentious as this one. Despite astounding technological advances in biology and agricultural science, we still can’t increase the size of the farm bill pie. We can slice the pie into smaller and smaller pieces so that everyone gets something, including large, medium, and small farmers, organic and conservation farmers, food and nutrition programs, community food security and social justice interests. But we can’t perform pie-enlargement alchemy and give each interest group as large as slice as they want. Consensus on energy policy is just as problematic and policy makers are looking with gluttonous eyes on the farm bill pie. Corn prices and biofuels, such as camelina and native grasses, are on the lips of all of us who depend on oil. Its been a long time since so many non-farmers were so interested in agriculture and the farm bill.
While agriculture is in the limelight, it’s a dark night of the soil for the land from which this expanding farm and energy policy pie will make its extractions. Increased biofuel production, besides decreasing the land on which food is grown for an already hungry world, will use and further stress the natural resources required to produce it. Biofuels are renewable, but not a sustainable “free lunch”. They require soil, water, and soil nutrients to produce. When biofuel crops are harvested, some of the soil nutrients and water leave with the crop and must be replaced for the next crop. It’s really just simple ecology: Carbon in and carbon out. If the carbon keeps going out, the soil framework weakens and eventually collapses into non-productivity. Even perennials and native plant species that function in “no-input” natural systems, without fertilizer or irrigation, do so because we’re not harvesting them rigorously and natural nitrogen, carbon, and other nutrient cycles are in place. To think that we can replace our oil consumption with annual crops like corn and camelina or perennial crops like Switchgrass, is a biological version of the expanding, limitless pie myth. As most gardeners already know, natural resource and money pies have limits.
What can we do? One positive step would be to combine energy and agriculture policy. These two important things on which we depend – food and energy – and which make us vulnerable as individuals, communities, and countries, really belong at the same discussion table. Both literally and figuratively, there is common ground for energy and agriculture policy. A good example is the Conservation Security Program. A modified Conservation Security Program might be a way to better include more of the interest groups vying for a piece of the farm bill pie. Some innovative thinkers have suggested a modified Conservation Security Program based on performance standards, such as soil health parameters. For example, after a few years of cover cropping and reduced tillage, a farmer could measure soil organic matter levels and microbial activity to see if soil health had improved. Or, a rancher might measure water quality after years of riparian management along streams and rivers. The greatest farm bill dollars could be shunted towards encouragement of ecological approaches in which farmers and ranchers get payments for improving our energy and food producing natural resources: soil, water, and “ecological function”. Ecological function is a more nebulous term and harder to monitor and measure, but agroecology researchers are making great strides in this area. Next week we’ll talk about agroecology and how a modified Conservation Security Program might encourage local and regional agriculture and energy development.
Helen Atthowe's new short program of gardening tips
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