“We have a soup of microbial material in the water,” said Lo, while presenting his research at the Salton Sea Authority Board meeting in March 2023. “We are interested in whether that material is pulled into playa, and into dust,” he added. To identify which communities are most severely affected by particulate matter, Lo wants to conduct a detailed epidemiology study to document specific symptoms, as well as winds and environmental conditions. But funding has yet to come through.

And Colorado River water cuts are not going to help matters. The Imperial Irrigation District, the largest and arguably most powerful one in the nation, has used the ongoing concerns over rising Salton Sea dust to keep a hold on precious Colorado River water for years. In November 2022, the Imperial Irrigation District agreed to conserve up to 250,000 acre-feet of water per year—in exchange for $250 million in federal funds and indemnification against any liabilities arising from potential environmental and public health impacts from the cuts.

What Will it Take to Spur Change?

“I don’t know of any community benefits from the ag industry,” says Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comite Civico del Valle Inc., a community advocacy organization based in Brawley, California. He cites the lack of unions or profit-sharing models. “If we are going to be eating the waste or contaminants in our environment, we need to have a return,” he adds.

Although the Imperial Irrigation District rigorously models only desert and playa dust emissions, farm soils in this wind-prone region are routinely disturbed. Agriculture’s contribution to air quality is dominated by wind-blown dust, says Withycombe, the former California Air Resources Board member. The existing rules and regulations for dust mitigation plans from agricultural lands—if properly enforced—would further reduce emissions to some extent. “That would result in the biggest improvement in air quality in my opinion,” says Withycombe.

Adoption of conservation practices in the region is quite low. Of the almost 540,000 acres in production in Imperial County, less than 10 percent, or just under 46,000, are organic. And the 2017 USDA census data indicate that only 5 percent of farmers practice no-till, which disturbs the land the least, and 1 percent use cover crops.

The eastern Coachella Valley AB-617 community is also working to tackle pesticide use concerns. It’s “a courageous decision because emissions of pesticides are controlled by the Department of Pesticide Regulation, which has historically been very supportive of the industry it governs, agriculture,” explains Withycombe. As a result of residents’ advocacy, the state is overseeing a review of three different fumigant pesticides used in the region.

And Withycombe agrees with Sinclair that more effort is needed to determine the exact public health impacts from the nutrient-saturated sea. In February, Ramirez, Sinclair, and others wrote a letter to the Colorado River Basin Regional Water Quality Control Board urging the establishment of total maximum daily loads to improve public health and air quality.

In the near term, Porter  is teaching residents how to make their own low-cost air filters using box fans. Until now, Withycombe adds, air pollution control districts have focused on reducing emission sources rather than providing air filtration equipment. “But given what we know,” he says, “it would be a good investment at this time to improve [community] health.”

Cohen has been working on the Salton Sea, and with the marginalized communities that live around it, for roughly 25 years. He is relieved to see dust suppression projects finally being built, but he says the region is going to need much more to improve environmental conditions. “We’ve always said that if the Salton Sea was [in] San Francisco, Sacramento, or Los Angeles, the problems would have been solved long ago,” he says.

This reporting was supported with funding from the USC Center for Health Journalism.

The post As the Salton Sea Shrinks, Agriculture’s Legacy Turns to Dust appeared first on Civil Eats.

Water from Navajo Lake flows through 70 miles of canals before heading down an additional 340 miles of lateral irrigation ditches to a sea of roughly 700 central pivot-irrigated circles. There, the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry, known as NAPI, grows blue cornmeal, whole sumac berries, and juniper trees, among other culturally relevant foods under the Navajo Pride label.

Alfalfa and corn are the top cash crops, however. Total sales have made NAPI profitable enough to contribute over $1 million to the Navajo Nation in 2020. “The rangeland is depleted,” says Delane Atcitty, the executive director of Indian Nations Conservation Alliance and a NAPI board member. “That’s why the alfalfa [for cattle feed] is selling.”

But NAPI would make a lot more money if it sold all the alfalfa off the reservation. Instead, it balances tribal food security with economic development. Locals can buy Navajo Pride products at an outpost near NAPI headquarters and at outlets such as Walmart off the reservation, but the Navajo Nation’s 13 grocery stores typically don’t carry the products.

The farm, located near Farmington, New Mexico, a small town with a 19.9 percent poverty rate, spans almost 72,000 irrigated acres. However, it should have 110,630 irrigated acres.

The U.S. government has yet to uphold its end of a deal struck over 60 years ago, in which the Navajo Nation traded some of its water rights to divert San Juan River water, a major tributary to the Colorado River, to the growing urban areas along the Rio Grande in exchange for irrigation infrastructure for NAPI. Sixty years later, and as water resources dwindle, the remaining 40,000 acres of irrigation originally promised to the farm remain undeveloped.

Tribal communities typically have the most senior water rights in a region—at least on paper—yet they often lack the resources to build infrastructure to utilize the water. As a result, not only have Southwestern tribes’ ability to farm been compromised, but approximately 30 percent of the Navajo Nation has no access to clean, reliable drinking water. Currently, about 25 percent of Native communities receive some form of federal food assistance, but they would prefer to expand the markets for Native American farmers.

As water grows scarce in the West, two different branches of government are sending mixed signals on tribal water. One the one hand, the Biden administration recently announced that $13 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law would be invested directly into tribal communities, including $2.5 billion to implement the Indian Water Rights Settlement Completion Fund, which will help deliver long-promised water resources to tribes. And there is more focus than ever before on tribal water settlements, 34 of which had been enacted by the Department of Interior (DOI) by 2021.

On the other hand, later this month, the Supreme Court will hear a high-profile case in which the federal government has decided to push back on its responsibility to provide tribes with an adequate water supply. In 2003, the Navajo Nation sued the DOI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona arguing that the 1868 treaty established the Navajo Nation reservation as a permanent homeland and pledged support for agricultural settlement, and therefore required the federal government to provide water.

Last year, the Ninth Circuit Court upheld the fact that the Navajo reservation’s purpose expressly included farming. Most of the 16,000 farms in the Navajo Nation are family-owned, and there is no other commercial farm the size of NAPI. While the Supreme Court case, which will be heard on March 20, was not brought on behalf of NAPI, any decision the top court makes could impact the massive operation. For example, water rights settlements on the Colorado River and Little Colorado River could decrease overall water available for NAPI to utilize.

The implications of the case are striking, says Dylan Hedden-Nicely, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, head of the Native American Law program at the University of Idaho, because the Navajo Nation “wants to use this [river] water for agricultural and production and economic development while also freeing up groundwater for domestic use.”

All of this is taking place despite that fact that the critical need to provide water on arid reservations was made clear all the way back in 1865, during the first congressional appropriation debate for irrigation of what was then called the Colorado River Indian Reservation.

“Irrigating canals are essential to the prosperity of these Indians. Without water, there can be no production, no life; and all they ask of you is to give them a few agricultural implements to enable them to dig an irrigating canal by which their lands may be watered and their fields irrigated, so that they may enjoy the means of existence,” a delegate from the territory of Arizona said at the time.

Of course, just because the government understands the need doesn’t mean its leaders have felt responsible to meet it, say Native water right experts. “We have arrived at this existential threat because, after 200 years, there’s still no structural place for tribes to engage in the water policy conversation at a level that acknowledges their sovereignty and their self-determination,” says Daryl Vigil, co-director of Water & Tribes in the Colorado River Basin and water administrator for the Jicarilla Apache Nation, of the state of the Colorado River negotiations amid the Supreme Court case.

And without adequate water, tribal communities in the region have often been unable to develop their water resources to achieve food sovereignty. And, if NAPI—a profitable, efficient agricultural operation run by members of the largest tribe in the U.S.—is still owed water infrastructure according to a 60-year-old treaty, what confidence should the other 29 Colorado River Basin tribes have that their water needs will be met?

Broken Promises

Unfortunately, NAPI’s story isn’t unique. “There are a lot of outstanding claims from [Native American] nations to water,” says Laura Bray, a research scientist at the University of Oklahoma. If anything, she adds, NAPI’s plight “is exemplary of the failure of the U.S. government to provide adequate water, something very basic for sustaining society.”

Vigil agrees. “In the Upper Colorado River basin, 40 percent of the tribal water rights have been unused because of their inability to participate in conservation programs and inability to develop water rights usually because of a lack of infrastructure funding,” he says.

At the same time, tribes are doing their part to conserve water. In 2022, NAPI used only 60 percent of its diversion rights, according to the farm’s CEO, Dave Zeller. “NAPI does not bank any unused water. The unused water is released from Navajo Dam by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, where water managers can then decide whether it flows down into Lake Powell,” he said via email. “That’s water rights going down the river,” adds Atcitty. He says the capacity to develop water infrastructure is the key to tribes’ ability to take responsibility for their own food systems.

A map of the 11 blocks that make up NAPI; blocks 9-11 have never been developed. (Photo by Virginia Gewin)

“I don’t think the federal government wants NAPI to fail because that would reflect poorly on them, but there doesn’t seem to be much incentive on their end to build the project out with the water [the farm] is not using yet [but] is entitled to,” says Zeller.

And NAPI is operational for only eight months of the calendar year. “The canal system would need to be winterized annually if it was to operate 12 months a year,” adds Zeller.

Tribes Are at the Center of Water Negotiations in the West

And the amount of water under tribal control is only likely to grow as the remaining 12 tribes settle unresolved water rights claims.

Long-term in the region, “there’s only two sources of new water rights in the Colorado River basin—agricultural water and Indian water,” says Daniel McCool, a political scientist who studies Native American water rights at University of Utah. “That’s where the action will be in the next few years.” Just last week, the Klamath tribes, senior water users on the river, called for more water, which could prove devastating for farmers in the Rogue River Valley and Medford irrigation districts.

The Supreme Court case promises to clarify the degree to which the federal government has an obligation to provide water to the tribal reservations it created. “Tribes are the weakest actor in water rights and allocation—part of that is historical, [as they were] purposely excluded from the Colorado River Compact (completed in 1922),” says Andrew Curley, a Diné member who studies water governance and Indigenous geography at the University of Arizona.

Vigil adds that while tribes may have senior water rights, they often have no way to leverage those rights into usable water. “We just want the same opportunities [to develop water infrastructure] that was afforded to other stakeholders,” he says. The federal government wanted to assimilate tribes by turning them into farmers and ranchers. “These unfulfilled promises, like to NAPI, prevent tribal sovereigns from being able to create their first-time economies for themselves,” says Vigil. “And if you can’t create self-sustaining economies, it’s really hard to start thinking about how you feed yourselves.”

“No water was ever allocated in the Colorado River basin willingly by Western politicians. They were forced to do it by the courts,” says McCool. For most of the 20^th century, Western states and the federal government ignored Native American water rights when developing water projects, he adds. In fact, he says, “the first time the Anglo water holders along the Colorado River said, ‘Let’s bring the Native Americans to table,’ is when they had to engineer cutbacks.”

In most cases, Native water rights date back to the establishment of reservations and supersede state water law. One case in 1908—Winters vs. United States—determined that tribal rights to water are based on future need rather than past use and are not forfeited if tribes don’t exercise their claims.

“The Winters doctrine” is the tool still used by the one branch of government that has been most supportive of tribal water rights—the courts. “The Winters [precedent] has been a pretty big hammer for the last 100 years,” says McCool, “but we may see the big hammer disappear altogether with this conservative [Supreme] Court.”

Paper Water vs. Wet Water

The water in the Colorado River is already overprescribed, as climate change has reduced precipitation in the region over the last decade. “This basin’s hydrology has changed, but water use has not changed commensurately and the basin’s reservoirs are heading toward bankruptcy,” says Robison.

In a bid to save water over the last few years, for example, largely non-Indigenous farmers along the Middle Rio Grande received payment to voluntarily fallow their land and not use water. But tribes don’t enjoy payment for the water rights they don’t use. “There’s undeveloped [Native American] water rights that are considered system water,” says Crystal Tulley-Cordova, the principal hydrologist in the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources.

To decrease demand on Colorado River water this year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is aiming to pay farmers in California and Arizona to fallow their land as well. “Yet many Navajo families live in poverty while the water they have rights to gets used by others,” says Heather Tanana, a Diné member and law professor at the University of Utah. “Everybody, historically, was taking [tribal] water without any consideration of the impact to tribes, or what would happen when tribes did develop.”

For Indigenous communities, it’s a difficult moment to push for more water given the ongoing shortages. “Everyone is being pushed to conserve,” says Tulley-Cordova. “Tribes aren’t at the same level as everyone else; our big push is to secure our water rights, so we have a more secure and sustainable water future.” By that she means what are often called “wet water rights”—actual access to water, not the rights that exist on paper.

As a result, Indigenous communities spend an inordinate amount of time and money protecting the water they do have. “[Tribes] were promised this water, and now have to spend millions to protect it,” says Hedden-Nicely, who is a co-author of this amicus brief in support of the Navajo Nation. “And we have a solid chunk of our membership that are living in absolute poverty.”

As the Supreme Court wades into water relations, any decision promises to have far-reaching consequences. And the current court hasn’t shied away from upending precedent. “The worst-case scenario is that our whole system of water management in the West is disrupted,” says Tanana. On the other hand, “if the case recognizes an enforceable federal trust responsibility, then we’ll likely see more paper rights turning into wet rights,” says Tanana.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for tribes throughout the West. “Water negotiations right now are essentially fighting over what’s left,” says Curley. And crises have typically forced tribes to take less than they deserve. “That’s how colonialism has played out for tribes—’Take a bad deal now or lose even more later,’” he adds.

Regardless of the Supreme Court decision, it’s unclear whether NAPI will be able to irrigate the remaining 38,000 acres. Although the farm has received over $9 million in appropriations through the Water Infrastructure Improvement for the Nation Act since 2019, it has struggled to secure the estimated $242 million from the government for deferred maintenance costs on its existing irrigation infrastructure.

Zeller says NAPI needs an answer from the government either way so it can take steps to keep the farm profitable. “As expenditures on fuel, labor, and fertilizers continue to rise, NAPI’s revenues have grown stagnant because we can’t grow the farm out anymore,” he says. “If the federal government is not going to fulfill their obligation as per law, then it should buy NAPI out [of its water rights].”

Still, UW’s Robison is optimistic the enormous farm will ultimately prevail for two reasons. “Of the 30 basin tribes, the Diné have developed impressive capacity for water management,” he says. And, he adds, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act have set aside considerable water development funding for basin tribes.

“The most important thing is that tribes have the sovereign capacity to make their own decisions about water,” says Hedden-Nicely. “Ultimately, food security is going to be an integral part of that, but it could be to grow food for their own membership or to develop their economies.”

Atcitty agrees. “To us, true tribal sovereignty revolves around agriculture and means being able to feed your own people,” he says.

The post Supreme Court Case Could Reshape Indigenous Water Rights in the Southwest appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2022/11/08/new-mexico-farmers-face-a-choice-pray-for-rain-or-get-paid-not-to-plant/ https://civileats.com/2022/11/08/new-mexico-farmers-face-a-choice-pray-for-rain-or-get-paid-not-to-plant/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2022 09:00:12 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=49319 The conservation district had, over the previous two years, piloted programs to pay some farmers and landowners to stop farming and fallow their fields. The water savings is meant to maintain flows for both aquatic species and downstream states, but adoption has been slow. This year, it boosted the payments. Facing bleak prospects, farmers had […]

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As the summer of 2022 began, 90 percent of New Mexico was in a severe drought. The largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history raged in the northern part of the state. Snowpack melted weeks early, leaving reservoirs throughout the Southwest running low. In late May, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD), the authority that manages water for agriculture in the Middle Rio Grande Valley, announced that it would not be able to guarantee farmers any water past June. The outlook for farmers was dire.

The conservation district had, over the previous two years, piloted programs to pay some farmers and landowners to stop farming and fallow their fields. The water savings is meant to maintain flows for both aquatic species and downstream states, but adoption has been slow. This year, it boosted the payments. Facing bleak prospects, farmers had to make a choice: plant and take their chances on the monsoon or play it safe and secure a payment to fallow.

The arid Southwest gets the bulk of its precipitation during the summertime monsoon—when Gulf of California moisture is lured northward as temperatures rise and is then converted into afternoon thunderstorms. It typically occurs sometime between June and September, but its duration and intensity are all but impossible to predict.

“I’m not going to be paid not to farm; that’s just not in my DNA.”

Mark Garcia and his brother farm just shy of 400 acres in Los Lunas, New Mexico—a rotation of oats, grass, and alfalfa, one of the thirstiest crops. When he heard the news, he grappled with the decision to put over half of those acres—those that were in oats—in fallow for a year. His knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss the idea. “I’m not going to be paid not to farm; that’s just not in my DNA,” he recalls saying to himself.

Then Garcia crunched the numbers and decided the $425 per acre offered by the district was a safer option than betting on the monsoon during an unprecedented drought that rattled the region. “It was with a heavy heart that I agreed,” he said.

Mark Garcia, pictured at his farm in Los Lunas, New Mexico, worries that the fallow program is a first step toward losing precious agricultural land to development. (Photo credit: Virginia Gewin)

A lot of other farmers gambled on their chances this year, Casey Ish, the MRGCD water resources specialist in charge of the fallow program, told Civil Eats in April. “We were honest about our inability to guarantee late season water. When we run out of instream flow, farmers will be at the mercy of monsoon,” Ish said at the time.

Everyone was well prepared for continued drought. Then, a historic monsoon season hit, bringing more rain than parts of the state had seen in 130 years. In late June, Garcia’s alfalfa fields, both established and newly-planted, had soaked up the initial rains, lush and green. By October, he was second-guessing his decision to leave unplanted acres idle. “Hindsight is 20/20,” he said as the above-average rains continued. If he could go back in time, he added, “I wouldn’t have done it.”

“This valley is wholly unprepared for the dynamic nature of water going forward.”

Garcia is one of the 190 irrigators who signed up over 2,500 acres for the 2022 fallow program. There are a growing number of fallow programs being offered at the state and national levels to pay farmers throughout the Southwest to idle their operations to save water. And while they reduce water demand, they’re also costly and can increase dust emissions during droughts. But as farmers increasingly face a monumental decision each season—whether or not to farm every acre—it threatens to alienate them and take more and more farmland out of commission.

“This valley is wholly unprepared for the dynamic nature of water going forward,” said Jason Casuga, CEO of the MRGCD.

More Demand Than Supply

Sandwiched between Colorado and Texas, New Mexico is hamstrung by limited options to satisfy all of the state’s water demands.

Years of drought along the Rio Grande have coincided with the renovation of the El Vado dam 160 miles north of Albuquerque, a project that has further hampered the district’s ability to store water for dry periods. And then there’s the elephant in the room. MRGCD is legally obligated to supply water to the Elephant Butte dam, the point of water delivery to Texas. The amount of water varies annually, depending on actual flows and precipitation run-off in the region.

The agreement is part of the 1938 Rio Grande Compact—on which New Mexico is dangerously close to defaulting. If the debt reaches 200,000 acre-feet, the state will incur a costly violation and litigation. For these reasons, the state’s fallow program offers a way for MRGCD to decrease demand by, hopefully, discouraging irrigators, particularly the least productive farms.

In addition to irrigation water for farmers and compact debt, the MRGCD is obligated to provide enough water for the endangered silvery minnow in the middle Rio Grande reaches that are prone to drying out. “The acreage that was enrolled in the fallow program this year is only going to support the minnow at strategic [river] outfalls,” said Ish.

Several farmers were adamantly against the fallowing program—despite the dismal forecast. “Every time there’s a shortage of water, it comes from the farmer; they take agricultural water and give it to endangered species,” said Glen Duggins, who farms chiles and alfalfa in Socorro, New Mexico. He’s also a MRGCD board member.

While Duggins chafed at MRGCD efforts to take agricultural water for the silvery minnow and other wildlife in the ecosystem, he pointed out that other aspects of the fallow program have a direct impact on the long-term survivability of farmers. For example, Duggins pays $150-170 per acre to lease most of the land he farms. “Why should [a landowner] lease it to me for $170 when he can get $425?” he asked.

“To idle the farm, and think you’ll start it up next year, that’s a dream.”

However, Ish said there are rules in place to prevent this very scenario. The program requires that leasing farmers co-sign the agreement, and it is up to both parties to decide how payment is split. There are also rules on rotating land in and out of the program.

In fact, one of Duggins’ landlords did end up taking advantage of the fallow program and signed up 35 acres that have an irrigation system in need of an overhaul. “Duggins didn’t want to be part of the agreement and allowed the district to work directly with the landowner,” said Ish.

Duggins sees the fallow program as yet another threat to farming in the region. “You don’t have a farm without a farmer,” Duggins said. In fact, his son and farming partner has found other work; his farming future is uncertain.

And, Duggins said, it will take a lot more work to bring a fallowed field back to life. “To idle the farm, and think you’ll start it up next year, that’s a dream,” he said.

Small-scale regenerative farmer Kristen Couevas points to her cover crop field in in Tomé, New Mexico. (Photo credit: Virginia Gewin)

In late June, Kristen Couevas, a small-scale regenerative farmer in Tomé, New Mexico, agreed with Duggins that leaving the region’s highly alkaline fields bare is a recipe for disaster. She predicted that if the sun doesn’t bake the life out of the fallowed fields or winds and rains don’t erode the soil, invasive weeds will put down roots. “Instead of a $15 million fallow program, why don’t we get some cover crops?” she asked. Cover crops would not only keep the soil alive, they could also help the land absorb and store water, she added.

One goal of the fallow program is to create enough of an incentive that water wasters—ideally, the most inefficient endeavors—opt in, which helps alleviate unnecessary water demand on unproductive lands. “We hemorrhage water inefficiently in areas of this valley,” Casuga said of small-acreage homes that can take over a dozen hours to irrigate a lawn. And they can because they have an untouchable water right.

“A water right to zero amount of water is zero amount of water,” Casuga explained. The water wasters further frustrate farmers who are asked to reduce their water consumption. “Somewhere we need to define what’s a farmer and what’s a farm. A 2-acre lot is not a farm,” Duggins said. He believes larger operations that feed the nation should have priority when it comes to water.

Perhaps not surprisingly, alfalfa is often criticized for being an inefficient use of dwindling water supplies and misplaced in the Southwest. But farmers say it is a low-input perennial crop, lasting about seven years, which helps prevent soil erosion. The region’s large dairies also rely on alfalfa, so the question of whether it belongs in the state is inextricably linked to that larger, very powerful industry.

To increase water use efficiency, the region also needs appropriate infrastructure. The aging, intricate web of dams, canals, and ditches was built for a different climate. “The dams are in the high elevations to capture snowmelt,” said Casuga. And deluges in the lower elevations not only have the potential to damage crops, but the water flows into the river below the point at which MRGCD can store and make use of it. “How we get [our precipitation] is going to change,” said Casuga. Forecasts predict the state will lose 70 percent of its snowpack by end of the century.

“[MRGCD] is stuck between a rock and a hard place, but farmers are not happy at all.”

Unfortunately, farther down the river, the federally managed infrastructure serves little function, in part due to changing conditions. The Low Flow Conveyance Channel was built in the 1950s to increase the efficiency of water going to Elephant Butte reservoir, but sedimentation leaves it prone to overbanking when flows are high, which threatens endangered species. As a result, it hasn’t been viable for anything other than drainage in years.

Monsoon: Miracle or Curse

In late July, while the region was struggling to keep the Rio Grande flowing through Albuquerque, the monsoon rains began in earnest. MRGCD banked enough water from the fallow program to satisfy the support needed for the silvery minnow—and it may even have a substantial amount leftover to apply to compact debt, said Ish.

By mid-October, west-central New Mexico finished the season with the wettest monsoon on record, according to New Mexico meteorologist Grant Tosterud. Still, after a series of very dry years, it wasn’t enough to fully lift the state out of drought.

Casey Ish (pictured left), a MRGCD water resources specialist in charge of the fallow program, said the program next year will likely offer more flexibility to respond to farmers’ needs. (Photo credit: Virginia Gewin)

And those record-level rains were a mixed bag for farmers, said Ish. Some alfalfa farmers were able to get multiple cuttings, while other operations saw lower yields due to stress. Farming has always been a gamble, but the stakes are getting higher as climate change alters water management. Ish pointed out that any farmer enrolled in the fallow program this year had the potential for a big year—a guaranteed $425 per-acre payment and the ability to make any feasible cuttings on established alfalfa stands that produced without irrigation. And, he says, there’s nothing in the program that would prevent anyone from taking advantage of monsoon rain conditions to put in a fall crop.

At the same time, the deluge decimated Duggins’ green chile harvest due to wet conditions that invited disease and made managing the proliferation of weeds impossible. He hopes the red chile harvest (which happens later in the year) will salvage his season. Either way, he plans to reduce his chile acreage from roughly 35 to 15 acres next year. “We’re one of the best known chile growers. But financially, I can’t do it anymore,” he said.

Duggins dismisses talk of drought following this year’s monsoon. Not surprisingly, wetter conditions have complicated water conversations with farmers.

“We’re trying not to be ‘the district that cried wolf,’” Ish said. “There have been a couple of times now when we’ve warned farmers that we are still at the precipice of a significant water shortage, and so far, Mother Nature has provided.”

Couevas, however, predicts that few farmers will take advantage of the fallow program again next year. “Everybody’s done,” she said. “[MRGCD] is stuck between a rock and a hard place, but farmers are not happy at all.” Still, MRGCD will have to wait to see how winter snowpack will shape up its ability to deliver irrigation water next year.

Although the monsoons mean that New Mexico’s water debt likely didn’t grow, it didn’t get any smaller either. And the only thing that is certain is that climate change will make conditions less certain. “What we experienced this year is consistent with what we expect to see in the future,” said Ish, of the more variable snowpack and the location and timing of precipitation. And that’s why MRGCD developed programs that offer farmers flexibility.

Still, driving home in an October storm as irrigation ditches brim with water, Garcia was frustrated to see his fallowed fields full of weeds like goat head and pigweed. Couevas consults for other farmers who are grappling with similar outcomes, and she says the fallowed fields often require deeper tillage and laser treatment to level the ground. Farmers thought they were saving money, but next year they will likely spend more to get the fields back into production, she added.

Garcia wants a fallow program that serves as an emergency lifeline that farmers only have to reach for when absolutely necessary.

Garcia is among the many growers who fear the fallow program is a first step toward losing precious agricultural land to development. “I don’t feel we’re being pushed out,” he said, adding “but I don’t think we’re being helped to stay in either.”

Garcia will have to make the same decision whether to fallow or not next year—knowing that there are long-term water shortages despite plentiful monsoons the last two years. “It’s a great program,” he said. And he’s grateful to have options. But he hopes MRGCD will continue to tweak the program so that “effectiveness meets efficiency,” he said. In other words, he wants a fallow program that serves as an emergency lifeline that farmers only have to reach for when absolutely necessary.

Ish said that next year’s program will likely offer more flexibility to respond to grower’s needs. “For a reduced payment, growers could be allowed one or two waterings in the shoulder of the season so they can establish a fall crop,” he said of the pending change.

Either way, until the El Vado dam storage is back online—likely around 2026—conditions will be at their most uncertain along the middle Rio Grande. And that will most likely leave Garcia and other growers’ rolling the dice on the monsoon.

The Water Desk, an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder, supported this reporting.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/11/08/new-mexico-farmers-face-a-choice-pray-for-rain-or-get-paid-not-to-plant/feed/ 3 https://civileats.com/2022/11/02/conserving-farmland-also-benefits-the-air-we-breathe/ Wed, 02 Nov 2022 08:00:38 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=49046 The study found that areas with more acres of land set aside through CRP had lower levels of fine particulate matter. Using data from 2,300 counties, the researchers cross-referenced national public health data from 2001–2016 with each county’s percentage of arable land enrolled in CRP. Fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, refers to particles no more than […]

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The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP)—a federal program that pays farmers to stop farming on low-quality pieces of their land through 10–15 year contracts—may be one of the most cost-effective ways to improve air quality, according to a new study. While the program’s benefits to habitat, soil, and water quality have been documented throughout the program, this study, published in the journal GeoHealth, is the first to quantify its life-saving air quality benefits.

The study found that areas with more acres of land set aside through CRP had lower levels of fine particulate matter. Using data from 2,300 counties, the researchers cross-referenced national public health data from 2001–2016 with each county’s percentage of arable land enrolled in CRP.

Fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, refers to particles no more than 2.5 micrometers in diameter. The particles are small enough to cause inflammation that leads to asthma, heart and respiratory diseases, and several cancers. This hazy cocktail often consists of dust, fossil fuel emissions, and the volatile organic compounds applied to farmlands. Ammonia from fertilizers, for example, breaks down to form fine particulate compounds. And when tractors and other heavy machinery till the soil it reduces plant cover, increasing windblown dust. Droughts also exacerbate PM2.5 levels. But the researchers found that areas with more CRP acreage also saw fewer deaths—“and many billions of dollars saved via those prevented deaths,” the study reads.

“Our findings represent the real possibility that [the CRP] could pay for itself many times over just based on one small component—reduced fine particulate matter concentration.”

In 2008, when CRP acreage was 35 million acres, the authors estimate there were 1,300 fewer deaths than would have occurred if all the land had been farmed. Placing the value of a statistical life at $7 million (a bit less than the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recommendation), CRP saved roughly $9.5 billion.

“Our findings represent the real possibility that [the program] could pay for itself many times over just based on one small component—reduced fine particulate matter concentration,” says study co-author Douglas Becker, a postdoctoral economist at the University of Idaho in Moscow. In fiscal year 2021, about 20.5 million acres were registered as part of CRP, costing the USDA roughly $1.8 billion per year. Given his preliminary estimated public health savings, “CRP could be a mind-bogglingly efficient program,” he adds.

While the air-quality benefits were not an intended goal of CRP, the findings shed further light on the impacts of intensive agricultural practices. “The key takeaway is that the air quality improvements are due to the absence of [agricultural] production,” says Michael Happ, who was not involved in the study and works on climate and rural communities at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).

Clear Ties to Farming

PM2.5 concentrations are measured in micrograms per meter cubed (mg/m3). While the GeoHealth study found that the average PM2.5 concentration for the entire period was 9.5, CRP reduced that average by up to 1.6 in heavy agricultural areas—including the former Dust Bowl region of the central and Southern Plains states, vast swaths of the Dakotas, and the windblown loess farming region of eastern Washington and Oregon.

“That’s huge,” says Becker. All this is happening in the “bread basket” Great Plains and Midwest. “CRP is a big deal in these places,” says Becker.

Last year, the World Health Organization updated their air quality guidelines for PM2.5—it is not to exceed 5 mg/m3 for annual mean concentrations—citing air pollution as one of the biggest environmental threats to human health. The EPA’s National Ambient Air Quality annual average standard for PM2.5 is 12 mg/m3—a limit that the agency is currently reconsidering after an independent panel called for the national standard to be lowered to 8–10.

“Air quality is one [of CRP’s environmental benefits] that was under the radar. . . . Look at all the environmental costs that we, the public, are bearing. People are getting sick and dying.”

“Even a small amount of air pollution over a long amount of time can have measurable impact on health,” says study co-author James Crooks, a climate epidemiologist at National Jewish Health hospital in Denver, Colorado. “Even though 9.5 is below the current EPA standard, there is significant evidence that these concentrations can still lead to premature death,” he adds.

“Air quality is one [of CRP’s environmental benefits] that was under the radar,” says Silvia Secchi, a natural resource economist at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the study. On the other hand, this study helps make the impact of agriculture on air quality more visible. “Look at all the environmental costs that we, the public, are bearing. People are getting sick and dying,” she adds. Ammonia reduction policies, the most cost-effective way to tackle PM2.5 pollution, also exist in Europe, but not so in the U.S. or China (another big agricultural powerhouse).

And Yet, CRP Numbers are Dropping

CRP acreage hit a peak in 2007 at around 36.7 million acres, but it has been decreasing since then. Currently, total acres enrolled sits at roughly 21 million—a decline fueled by high corn and grain prices, sent higher by global yield reductions due, in part, to the war in Ukraine. “The reduction [in CRP acreage] is not because we don’t need environmental benefits; it’s that farmers want more land to farm,” says Secchi.

She also points to the fact that the GeoHealth study findings don’t tease apart two things happening at the same time—farmers took the land out of CRP and employed more intensive practices on it. “Farmers turned to continuous corn, rather than the corn-soy rotation that employs less fertilizers, less tillage, and results in less emissions,” says Secchi. In fact, the ethanol boom has expanded corn production by 8.7 percent, or 6.9 million acres, between 2008 and 2016.

As grain prices continue to increase, American farmers have also been allowed to end CRP contracts a year early to plant wheat “for the country,” says Happ. Although the program’s environmental benefits are well-emphasized, economists highlight that the program also serves as a price control mechanism by keeping farmers from over-producing. “As discussions around the new farm bill come up, we need to talk about human lives and how we reduce particulate matter,” adds Happ. To encourage enrollment in CRP, Happ advocates for raising both the program’s acreage cap and the payment cap so that it’s more competitive with corn and other commodity prices.

In general, Secchi and Happ both want to see agriculture’s impact on human health receive more consideration as farm bill renewal negotiations get underway.

“It has been very frustrating for me as a researcher to see how secondary environmental goals are in the conservation title of the farm bill,” says Secchi. “The way to solve air quality is not to design better filters,” says Secchi. “You’ve got to keep those emissions out of the air to begin with.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/06/06/a-wild-windy-spring-is-creating-a-soil-erosion-nightmare-for-farmers/ https://civileats.com/2022/06/06/a-wild-windy-spring-is-creating-a-soil-erosion-nightmare-for-farmers/#comments Mon, 06 Jun 2022 08:00:17 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=47089 Not only did that wind event—technically categorized as both a derecho and a haboob—send soil airborne, it unearthed wet crop residue. “I had some oats that were about three inches or so—and it sheered them off,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it pulled up that amount of dirt; we had just had two inches of […]

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When he saw a roiling thunder bank of black clouds blowing into Salem, South Dakota, last month, farmer Kurt Stiefvater thought it would take 20 minutes to reach his property. It took five. “I couldn’t believe how fast it was moving,” he says of the over 100-mile-per-hour gusts.

Not only did that wind event—technically categorized as both a derecho and a haboob—send soil airborne, it unearthed wet crop residue. “I had some oats that were about three inches or so—and it sheered them off,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it pulled up that amount of dirt; we had just had two inches of rain two days before,” he recalls. The line of thunderstorms, which developed in Nebraska, raced into eastern South Dakota, northwestern Iowa, and western Minnesota. On his farm, Stiefvater says, the dust storm lasted only about 25 minutes.

“They saw this storm as one freak event. I don’t think they comprehend how much soil they are losing.”

“I was hoping [the soil] would stay in place better,” says Stiefvater, who grows corn, soybeans, alfalfa, and oats on his 1,800-acre crop operation. But, ultimately, he was one of the lucky ones. The storm killed two people, downed power lines, and most of his neighbors in the town of 1,500 saw damage to their houses, sheds, and grain bins. Not only was he in a safer location, but his approach to soil management as a farmer who grows cover crops and practices no-till likely helped him avoid bigger losses.

Overall the region lacks dust monitoring infrastructure, and the single air quality sensor in Sioux Falls suffered a power outage the day of the storm, making it impossible for local scientists to accurately gauge the actual dust concentration in the air the day the storm hit. But two weeks after the storm, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) generated rough estimates of soil loss during the event on a hypothetical 100-acre bare field. Given the fact that the storm hit during planting season in an area that doesn’t have much conservation tillage or cover crop usage, it’s fair to assume the estimate applies to many of the impacted fields. Erosion estimates for the day the storm hit range from 3 to 12 tons of lost soil per acre, said Chris Coreil, a Fort Worth, Texas-based soil erosion specialist at NRCS, in an email.

But what’s striking is that Coreil also ran the model for another day a week earlier that had sustained high winds, and found that farmers had lost even more soil—his estimate ranged from 3 to 29 tons per acre—without a dramatic storm. To compare, the maximum amount of soil experts say farmers in the region can lose before it impacts their production levels is 5 tons per acre, per year.

“If you had bare, dry, and unprotected fields on [both days], you probably exceeded the acceptable amount of annual soil loss on each of those days,” he explained. “Farms that use conservation practices are on the lower end of the range . . . and those with bare, tilled fields are on the high end.” For instance, if the soil most prone to wind erosion—a loamy fine sand—was covered with residue or had a crop actively growing in it at the time, it would have lost only a fraction of a ton on both of these days, explained Coreil.

Neither derechos nor haboobs are common in the Northern Plains states. But dusty conditions have been on the rise as a result of the drought. “We’ve been getting more frequent reports of these dust events, and this year the reports have been the most I remember,” says Eugene Backhaus, a state resource conservationist with NRCS in Denver, Colorado—a region, he points out, that was the epicenter of last century’s Dust Bowl. Backhaus says his office doesn’t even try to calculate the soil loss for large-scale events—rather they run those models for individual producers. “They are concerned,” he says.

And although it’s well-known that farming with the soil in mind and using regenerative practices can reduce the impact, it’s not clear whether the increase in dust storms throughout the Farm Belt will cause farmers to reflect and invest in different practices.

“The wind events, with the drought widespread in the plains, are feeding on each other, because any wind on poorly-managed soils allows for much more wind movement.”

Stiefvater, for one, doesn’t think it will. “They saw this storm as one freak event. I don’t think they comprehend how much soil they are losing,” he says. When he learns of the NRCS estimates of soil loss in May, Stiefvater wonders aloud:  How much top soil, the very thing farmers try to maintain or build, did the region really lose and where did it go?

The Perfect Storm for Soil Erosion

Aside from the derecho, this spring has been much more windy and dusty throughout the Northern Plains than usual. “The winds have been ferocious. I can’t remember more days of 40-mph sustained winds,” says Anthony Bly, a soils field specialist for South Dakota State University Extension in Garretson, South Dakota.

“The wind events, with the drought widespread in the plains, are feeding on each other, because any wind on poorly-managed soils allows for much more wind movement,” says Dennis Todey, director of the Midwest Climate Hub in Ames, Iowa. The dry soil has played an often-overlooked role, he explains, by heating the air above the surface, which warms and adds to the turbulence. “The lack of soil moisture adds energy to the atmosphere, exacerbating the wind,” Todey adds.

Dust storms require high winds and emissive soil. But three things dictate how emissive the ground will be—how loose it is, how dry it is, and how much is growing in it—i.e., “vegetative cover,” says Jennie Bukowski, an environmental scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles who studies haboobs. In spring, vegetative cover is at an annual low, especially in regions where farmers till a lot. But as the drought persists in the West, crop residue—the layer of stalks, stubble, leaves, and seed pods left on the surface of the soil after harvest—isn’t holding up. “What keeps residue resilient is the moisture in it,” explains Backhaus. “With humidity in the single digits, residue tends to break down faster,” he says. “And without residue to hold the soil [down], it blows [away]. It’s this vicious cycle.”

Tillage also reduces residue and loosens soils, making it more prone to blowing away. Researchers compared wind erosion under different tillage regimes in North Dakota in 2003, a dry year with two months of less than 30 percent of average precipitation, and 2004, which saw more typical precipitation. They found that the residue-destroying effects of a single tillage event can be considerably exacerbated by a moderate, seasonal drought. Erosion was more than five times worse in 2003 than it was in 2004. Two field passes with disk tillage, a common practice to manage post-harvest crop residue in the fall, resulted in 5 tons/acre of soil loss compared to just under 1 ton/acre in no-till fields. “It doesn’t take much tillage to disturb that surface and cause it to go,” says study co-author, Ted Zobeck, a retired USDA erosion specialist based in Lubbock, Texas.

In addition, SDSU’s Bly is concerned that the enormity of modern equipment causes even more tillage-based degradation. “I really think we are wrecking the soil quicker than 30-40 years ago,” he says. A recent study—comparing farm vehicles to dinosaurs—backs up his experience. The total weight of combine harvesters has increased nearly 10-fold, from around 8800 pounds in 1958 to about 80,000 pounds in 2020. At a time when farmers are desperate to hold onto soil moisture, the subsequent compaction caused by all this weight can limit water infiltration, which is particularly troublesome when high intensity rains can’t be captured and stored in the soil.

In these regions, there is very little conservation tillage, says Bly. Stiefvater estimates that at most 15 to 20 percent of his neighbors use conservation practices. “It’s maximum tillage, and very little cover crops,” says Bly. Backhaus says in Colorado no-till acres have been on the rise, but farmers still have a long way to go. “In my mind, no-till should be on 100 percent of cropped acres,” he says.

A Wake-Up Call?

Backhaus was in Minnesota when the derecho went through the area. “That was a first,” says the Iowa native. “This isn’t Arizona,” he says. “That tells me that a lot of changes—especially to storm intensity and duration—are occurring and somehow or another we have to reverse [the trend toward soil loss] to get it back to something sustainable,” he says. “If we don’t store some more moisture, we won’t be able to produce the food that feeds the world.”

“We do have a choice. Are we going to rise to the occasion in terms of climate, water resource management, and good farming practices—or are we not?”

Stiefvater says he hasn’t seen much interest in conservation or regenerative farming practices in South Dakota. “There is no long-term planning, it’s just routine,” he says. “We gotta break the routine.”

As Steifvater was helping clean up homes impacted by the dust storm in town last month, he says old timers brought up the “Dirty Thirties,” a decade when dust storms were common and millions of acres of cropland could simply not be farmed. “They remember having to shove rags in windowsills so babies didn’t choke to death,” he says. “We don’t want to go back there.” He wants farmers to take the initiative rather than risk government having to step in. “We don’t have to do it all at once, but let’s start moving in that direction,” he says.

Maxwell Webster, Midwest policy manager for the American Farmland Trust, agrees. “We’re really starting to see impacts from climate and extreme weather accelerate,” he says. “As an organization, we’re trying to expand adoption of conservation practices in a short period of time to minimize soil losses.”

Climate change models predict more intense rainfall, when it occurs,  and more frequent drought in the central and southern Plains in the near future. “Winter wheat farmers and rangelands will struggle [in the southern Plains],” says Webster. Changes that allow the land to soak up and hold moisture are key. “Part of the reason we focus on cover crops is to keep soil in place, and add organic matter back to help improve water retaining capacity,” says Webster. “It’s important for mitigating drought, but also mitigating the impacts of flooding,” he adds. Put simply: The aim is to keep water in crops rather than letting it wash into a drainage ditch.

Cover crop adoption, however, in most states hovers between 3 and 5 percent, says Webster. The USDA’s goal is to expand cover crops to 30 million acres by 2030, effectively doubling the amount in the ground currently.

Bukowski suggests farmers should adopt cover crops sooner rather than later, while it’s still an option. “At some point, we may not have enough precipitation for cover crops,” she says. “We do have a choice. Are we going to rise to the occasion in terms of climate, water resource management, and good farming practices—or are we not?” she asks.

There are encouraging signs that conservation incentives are having at least a modest effect. North Dakota, for example, had the most acres enrolled in the Pandemic Cover Crops Program (PCCP), a temporary USDA program that offered farmers receiving federal crop insurance $5 an acre to grow cover crops. In fact, several Plains states—Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota—also ranked high in PCCP acres. Perhaps the people conducting outreach in the Plains states did a better job of engaging farmers, but, Webster adds, “areas that have the highest soil health concerns are the areas where you see the highest level of conservation practice adoption.”

As a recent study demonstrated, soil erosion has been extreme—at a median historical erosion rate of roughly 2 mm per year, which is equivalent to 12 tons per acre—and continues today, despite conservation efforts. “The scale of current conservation practices is simply too small to meaningfully protect agriculture, soil health, and water quality from the damages of extreme weather,” says Webster.

One hurdle, however, is that NRCS doesn’t have the bandwidth to assist even close to the number of growers who need it. “Right now, we’re short staffed,” says Backhaus. “We’re trying to build staff back up, then we can educate them to provide technical assistance to producers.” And, he adds, producers like to work with a single person, and build a rapport, which is another challenge given staffing shortages. There is also way more demand for federal conservation  programs that support improved practices—such as Conservation Stewardship Program and Environmental Quality Incentives Program—than the funding allows for, says Jessica Michalski, South Dakota NRCS State Resource Conservationist.

But the amount of soil that blows into the air in the spring is also lost money down the line—in the form of additional fertilizer needed to offset losses, seed, and yield potential when topsoil is lost. “It’s easy to think about short-term economics when farming, it’s much more difficult to think about the long-term impacts to the land,” she says.

But, Michalski hopes to see more farmers “take first step and admit that you need to make a change.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/06/06/a-wild-windy-spring-is-creating-a-soil-erosion-nightmare-for-farmers/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2022/02/14/how-corn-ethanol-for-biofuel-fueled-climate-change/ https://civileats.com/2022/02/14/how-corn-ethanol-for-biofuel-fueled-climate-change/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2022 09:01:38 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=45628 For the last decade, ethanol has helped keep corn in high demand, and made it the most-planted U.S. crop. In fact, roughly 40 percent of all corn is now used to make ethanol. Meanwhile, the number of corn farms over 500 acres in size has increased over time, while the number of small corn farms […]

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The U.S. is the world leader in biofuel production—generating 47 percent of global output over the last decade. The ten-fold expansion in ethanol production in the U.S. from 2002 to 2019 has been driven by the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a federal program that since 2005 has required transportation fuel to contain a minimum volume of renewable fuels. So far, that has largely meant corn ethanol. Currently 98 percent of gasoline in the U.S. contains some ethanol, most commonly 10 percent, or E10.

For the last decade, ethanol has helped keep corn in high demand, and made it the most-planted U.S. crop. In fact, roughly 40 percent of all corn is now used to make ethanol. Meanwhile, the number of corn farms over 500 acres in size has increased over time, while the number of small corn farms is dwindling. And all this growth has led to record profits for the companies that buy and sell the nation’s corn. For instance, last month, Archer-Daniels-Midland, the food processing and commodities trading giant, reported its highest-ever earnings, a net income of over $2.7 billion, due in large part to rising biofuel demand.

For the last decade, ethanol has helped keep corn in high demand, and made it the most-planted U.S. crop. In fact, roughly 40 percent of all corn is now used to make ethanol.

Despite the promise that the RFS would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) today finds that expansion of U.S. corn cultivation has come at eye-popping environmental costs. Corn production expanded by 8.7 percent, or 2.8 million hectares (6.9 million acres), between 2008 and 2016. As a result, the researchers found that nationwide annual fertilizer use surged by 3 to 8 percent and water pollutants rose by 3 to 5 percent. The sheer extent of domestic land use change, however, generated greenhouse gas emissions that are, at best, equivalent to those caused by gasoline use—and likely at least 24 percent higher.

That’s because the RFS caused corn prices to spike by 30 percent and soybean and other crops by 20 percent. As a result, farmers planted corn everywhere they could, replacing other crops and pastureland, and plowing up land that had previously been reserved for conservation purposes. They also often skipped the soybeans in their rotations, despite the potential impacts on their soil.

Tyler Lark, who studies land use change at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has been tracking cropland expansion for years, but the burning research question in his field has been: To what degree have biofuels driven that expansion? Lark teamed up with agricultural economists and water quality experts for five years to produce what is one of the most comprehensive studies to date.

The bottom line is bluntly straightforward. “If you crank up demand, you get land use change,” says Lark, who is also a co-author of the new study. Every major agency in the U.S. that puts out data, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have all observed this rapid cropland expansion, adds Lark.

Previous studies, however, dramatically underestimated the impacts those land use changes had on carbon emissions; in fact, the models treated the land that was converted from conservation or pasture as if there was little change in the amount of carbon stored once it was planted with corn—which runs counter to existing empirical evidence.

The new study comes at a crucial moment. This year, the Biden administration will reset the biofuel volume targets of the RFS, and it’s yet to be seen how new targets could ultimately impact the price of corn, demand for soybeans to make biodiesel, the farms that produce these crops, and—ultimately—the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

Plowing up Carbon

Lark’s findings are the latest evaluation of the hotly contested biofuel carbon footprint. Several disparate data sources have confirmed the overall trend of grassland-to-cropland conversion in recent years, but researchers have used many different methodologies and assumptions to analyze that footprint over the years, leading to divergent estimates of greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the RFS.

The current study used the survey-based USDA National Resources Inventory (NRI), which had been endorsed previously by the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade association for the ethanol industry, to quantify cropland expansion area and the portion attributable to corn ethanol. Still, the organization criticized the findings.

“The claims in this report simply don’t align with reality and the facts on the ground. By slapping together a series of worst-case assumptions, cherry-picked data, and disparate results from previously debunked studies, the authors created a completely fictional and erroneous account of the environmental impacts of the Renewable Fuel Standard,” said Geoff Cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association in the statement responding to the study. (Requests for comment from the National Corn Growers Association and the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association were not returned.)

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to keep some of their land uncultivated, saw the acreage in the program decrease precipitously after 2007 as farmers capitalized on high corn prices. The CRP is now at its lowest enrollment in over 30 years.

Given the differing estimates of greenhouse gas impacts, Jeremy Martin, director of fuels policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), doesn’t think asking whether corn ethanol is better or worse than gasoline is the most important question. “I don’t think that biofuels are going to go away. But clearly they’ve had an impact on water quality and fertilizer usage—which are important findings to consider when setting future biofuels policies,” he says. He suggests a more relevant question is: How many acres of corn can farms plant while still meeting water quality or conservation goals?

The federal Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to keep some of their land uncultivated, saw the acreage in the program decrease precipitously after 2007 as farmers chose to capitalize on high corn prices. As a result, the carbon storage gained via the CRP was lost to the atmosphere. And now, the CRP is at its lowest enrollment in over 30 years—while the USDA just announced it plans to spend $1 billion to encourage carbon sequestration in soil.

Image courtesy of Silvia Secchi. Read about the difference between Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) enrollment and general CRP enrollment.

Ethanol critics say this study suggests what some have long suspected—that the RFS is a tool to prop up corn prices. “If this paper is discounted [in RFS deliberations], or we fail to acknowledge the net greenhouse gas effect of corn ethanol, we will be admitting this policy is all about income support for farmers,” says Silvia Secchi, a natural resource economist at the University of Iowa.

Secchi says 15 years ago, corn ethanol was touted as a means to energy independence as well as a climate change mitigation strategy. “But the U.S. is effectively energy independent with fracking, so that’s out the window,” she said. “The second argument—that it would reduce net greenhouse gas emissions—is destroyed by this paper.”

In addition to its role as a force for change for Corn Belt farms, ethanol has also become a cornerstone of Midwest politics. With 42 ethanol plants, Iowa is the nation’s biggest producer of both corn and ethanol. Political support for biofuels inevitably cites the industry’s economic importance to the region, and its role in keeping rural economies afloat.

Some say the numbers behind that narrative are routinely overinflated, however. The latest renewable fuels industry estimates claim 46,000 jobs through the Iowa economy, but Iowa State University economist Dave Swenson says he can only find around 7,200 jobs. By Swenson’s calculation, counties with ethanol plants actually averaged larger population declines, grew merely 0.2 percent more as measured by wage and salary jobs, and had a higher rate of farm proprietor decline. “Ethanol has not been any sort of a game changer for rural Iowa’s overall economies or their demographics,” says Swenson.

Corn’s Impacts Are Visible in the Gulf

The downstream costs of expanded corn production are increasingly difficult to ignore.

According to the new study, the states with the largest expansion of corn cultivation, between 50 to 100 percent, were North and South Dakota, western Minnesota, and other states further to the south in the Mississippi alluvial plain. The increased fertilizer use caused by more corn acres likely contributes to the nutrient pollution that causes the annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2021, more than 6,300 square miles of Gulf Coast waters, the equivalent of more than 4 million acres of fish habitat, were starved of oxygen—over three times larger than the 2035 target set by the task force working to shrink the dead zone.

In another example of this trend, the state of Illinois—where farmers planted 11 million acres of corn in 2020—aimed to reduce nitrates and nitrogen by 15 percent and phosphorus by 25 percent by 2025, but a recent report indicates that nitrogen loss actually increased by 13 percent and phosphorus losses increased by 35 percent during that time, as farmers planted an unprecedented number of corn acres.

“In places like Iowa, where farmers typically rotated corn and soybeans, we see a lot more continuous corn or three-year rotations of corn, corn, soybean,” says Secchi. She has also pointed to the fact that Iowa farmers receive the most federal subsidies in the country, meaning that taxpayers are essentially paying farmers to continue and expand practices that reduce soil health, maintain a dead zone that costs $2.4 billion in disrupted fisheries and damaged marine habitat, and at best generate the same carbon emissions as gasoline.

‘Fueling Jets with Vegetable Oil Is Even Worse Than Fueling Cars’

In 2008, contrary to EPA models suggesting otherwise, Timothy Searchinger, a senior researcher at Princeton University’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, was one of several who predicted that using U.S. croplands for biofuels would increase greenhouse gas emissions through land use change. Now, his assessment has been validated by the new study. Searchinger says the new study boils down to a simple, inescapable truth: Using land has a cost. And some uses simply don’t make sense because the cost is too high.

“It’s crazy to use this very limited resource—highly productive land—for energy,” he said. “It’s almost spectacularly inefficient.” Corn ethanol converts 0.15 percent of solar energy into usable energy, while a solar cell today converts 15 to 20 percent of sunlight to energy. “And the good news is you don’t need to put a solar cell on the best available farmland.”

The fact that the study only focuses on greenhouse gas emissions within the U.S., likely reveals only a fraction of the impact. “The international effects are undoubtedly larger than the domestic effects,” says Searchinger.

“It’s crazy to use this very limited resource—highly productive land—for energy. It’s almost spectacularly inefficient.”

Secchi says corn isn’t like other crops. Agricultural innovations over the last century have led to a system that produces so much of it that the agriculture industry has often found itself manufacturing demand to meet the supply. “It’s time to factor in the broader impacts of creating that demand,” she adds.

“We currently use over one-third of the corn we produce for biofuel, and it offsets 6 percent of gas use. We could get the same benefit by increasing fuel economy of cars from 22 to 24 miles per gallon,” says Jason Hill, a bioenergy researcher at the University of Minnesota.

Although the RFS targets have had an important impact on corn production in the past, it’s not clear whether they will be an important lever going forward. “Right now, corn ethanol consumption isn’t even meeting the targets of the RFS, but even if you got rid of these policies, you probably wouldn’t sell substantially less ethanol (than the current 10 percent blending rate),” said Union of Concerned Scientists’ Martin. (That said, the Iowa governor is pushing legislation that would require the state’s gas stations to have at least one pump at each station carry E15, a 15 percent ethanol blending rate.)

At the same time, the efficiency of electric vehicles is also expected to complicate the future demand for ethanol. And with this in mind, the budding biofuel industry is turning its attention to vegetable oil production to make other fuels.

“Post-2022 RFS targets are very unlikely to lead to dramatic increases in ethanol use. In the last decade, RFS policy has had a much more dramatic effect on the use of vegetable oil-based fuels, especially biodiesel” says Martin. “And looking forward, renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel could add substantially to the use of vegetable oil for fuel.”

That shift could create a similar—and likely more devastating—impact. Fueling jets with vegetable oil is an even worse idea than fueling cars, says Searchinger. Oil production requires even more land than starches do and new sources of vegetable oil would likely cause soybean and palm oil expansion in the tropics. “You could have staggering environmental effects if, for example, half of the aviation fuel is supposed to come from biofuels by 2050,” he explains.

Either way, it’s clear that the RFS presents an important crossroads for the future of biofuel production—and the land on which it is farmed. As study co-author Lark put it: “Decisions made this year have the potential to impact our climate and landscape for decades to come.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/02/14/how-corn-ethanol-for-biofuel-fueled-climate-change/feed/ 6 https://civileats.com/2022/01/06/dust-growing-problem-farmland-pollution-soil-cover-crops-tillage/ https://civileats.com/2022/01/06/dust-growing-problem-farmland-pollution-soil-cover-crops-tillage/#comments Thu, 06 Jan 2022 09:00:41 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=45130 Dust storms aren’t unusual in these areas, but they typically occur in the spring and at a smaller scale. And yet, as a two-decade drought persists in the West, scientists are concerned that they could become even more prevalent. This is, after all, Dust Bowl terrain. “It was never easy land to begin with; climate […]

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As hurricane force, record-breaking winds blew through eastern Colorado in mid-December, the skies took on an eerie sepia glow. Visibility dropped to almost zero as a massive dust storm roiled through the Great Plains states, impacting 100 million people. Two weeks later, high winds and severe drought led to the devastating Marshall wildfire in urban northern Colorado.

Dust storms aren’t unusual in these areas, but they typically occur in the spring and at a smaller scale. And yet, as a two-decade drought persists in the West, scientists are concerned that they could become even more prevalent. This is, after all, Dust Bowl terrain. “It was never easy land to begin with; climate change is just going to make it more difficult,” says Becky Bolinger, a Colorado state climatologist who shared a warning on Twitter about the possibility of a dust event the day before the storm.

As the percentage of dust in the air increases, so do hospital visits for respiratory complications, as well as dust-borne diseases such as Valley Fever and meningococcal meningitis.

Dust is a growing concern for a number of reasons. As the climate-fueled drought across the western half of the country continues and irrigation sources likely become limited on farms—resulting, potentially in the increasing the amount of bare, fallowed land—researchers are working hard to identify dust hot spots and how they are linked to agriculture.

As the percentage of dust in the air increases, so do hospital visits for respiratory complications, as well as dust-borne diseases such as Valley Fever and meningococcal meningitis. Traffic accidents are also a growing concern across the western U.S., where dust affects road visibility. In the last two decades, car crash victims and insurance companies have shown an interest in holding farmers accountable for poor practices that created dust sources—but their liability is hard to prove.

Importantly, many of today’s dust events are region-wide phenomena. All fall, throughout eastern Colorado, “it’s really been bone dry,” says Bolinger. “I’m not sure there was much that agricultural communities could have done to mitigate the amount of dust that was up in the air.”

At the same time, tillage has increased in the region in recent years as farmers work to combat a growing number of herbicide-resistant weeds, explains Eugene Kelly, a soil scientist at Colorado State University.

During the unprecedented December storm, satellite imagery captured dozens of sites in the southeastern corner of Colorado and the Oklahoma panhandle where the dust was first lofted into the air, a region known among dust researchers as an active source area. Eastern Colorado soils are 70 percent windblown loess, but cultivation, grazing, construction, and roads—anything that destabilizes the soil—can generate dust, says Kelly. “These episodic events are really damaging because they can move an awful lot of material,” he adds.

Still, scientists are working to understand “the chaotic cascade of dynamics that causes a dust storm to initiate a particular point in space and a particular point in time,” says Thomas Gill, a dust researcher at University of Texas at El Paso. Nevertheless, his research points to agriculture as an important source to watch.

Continued advances in modeling capabilities—and soon data from satellites to be launched in 2022 and 2023—not only promise to make pinpointing dust sources more routine, but also to enhance dust forecasting.

Gill co-authored a 2020 study using data from satellite imagery to characterize sources of dust in the Southern Great Plains. It showed that the Great Plains contained seven times more dust points than the Chihuahuan desert (over 1,200 compared to 187). Cultivated fields comprised 43 percent of them, while shrublands and grasslands combined contained 40 percent.

As the public’s interest in air quality grows, as evidenced by Purple Air’s network of over 10,000 air quality monitoring devices, researchers are eager to identify the dustiest sources to inform policymakers. And they will soon have new tools available. Continued advances in modeling capabilities—and soon data from satellites to be launched in 2022 and 2023—not only promise to make pinpointing dust sources more routine, but also to enhance dust forecasting. What that will mean for agriculture is harder to predict.

Monitoring Dust

Without a dedicated dust monitoring network, researchers have long relied on the two nationwide air quality sensor networks and happenstance satellite imagery.

One network was designed to monitor the particles that contribute to haze near national parks in order to maintain clear views. The other network, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Chemical Speciation Network sensors, are located predominantly in urban areas to implement the National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

“These were never designed to monitor dust,” says Jenny Hand, an air quality researcher at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Notably, a small percentage of the ground-based sensors from both networks are located in or near agricultural areas.

Still, the data these networks generate has shed light on modern dust dynamics. Two sizes of dust are typically monitored—PM2.5 and PM10, shorthand for particle micrometer diameters. In recent years, regulatory effort has focused largely on the smaller PM2.5 particles, which can penetrate deeper into the lungs than PM10. While interest has shifted to the health concerns of PM2.5, PM10 is still a problem. Exposure can aggravate heart disease and asthma and damage lung tissue. Recent research shows that long-term exposure to PM10 can also increase the severity and mortality of COVID-19. For example, a recent study found the relative risk of hospitalization for a range of conditions significantly increased after a dust storm in El Paso.

In fact, the nationwide decline in PM 2.5, as a result of the regulation of combustion, is an often-overlooked success story. But particulate matter is an ongoing concern, for example, in several parts of farm country.

While we don’t have the ability to identify the exact sources of the dust, agriculture is likely the cause given the seasonality of the dust, which is often heavy during harvest time.

Hand co-authored a 2019 analysis of dust particles sized between 2.5 and 10 micrometers, called “coarse mass”, between 2000-2016. The study revealed that California’s Central Valley, along with southwest Arizona and parts of the central U.S.—all agricultural areas—are coarse mass hotspots. And while we don’t have the ability to identify the exact sources of the dust, agriculture is likely the cause given the seasonality of the dust, which is often heavy during harvest time, explains Hand.

Last year, Hand and colleagues used satellite imagery to detect a 5 percent increase in airborne dust every year in the Great Plains between 2000 and 2018. Not only has cropland coverage increased by 5–10 percent in the same region, but increases in dust have been found to coincide with the harvest and planting of dominant crops—notably, soybeans in Iowa and corn in the southern Great Plains.

“Marginal lands are the ones being developed [as farmland],” says study co-author Andy Lambert, currently a physical meteorologist at the Naval Research Laboratory. All the best farmland has long been in production and prices have been high for corn and soy crops in recent years offer a greater financial incentive than the programs such as Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to leave the land undeveloped. As a result, adds Lambert, “Grassland is being developed at much higher rate than it used to be.”

Improving Technology

Scientists have been able to detect dust storms with satellites for over 55 years—but only if the satellites had the right sensors and were in the right place at the right time. For example, one of the most commonly used satellites for recording dust only takes one image at mid-day over the entire U.S. Yet dust storms often kick up in the late afternoon. When it comes to satellite imagery, there has long been trade-offs between the frequency of images, spatial reliability, and even the accessibility of the data, explains Gill.

But that is swiftly changing. NASA is upping its air quality monitoring considerably over the next year. The Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (dubbed EMIT), scheduled for launch to the International Space Station in May, will produce maps of the minerals transported from dust-producing regions. In December 2022, NASA is scheduled to launch a new satellite called TEMPO, which promises to further enhance not only the search for specific dust sources, but also other agricultural air pollutants, including nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and formaldehyde. TEMPO will make hourly observations and produce a new dust source map for North America, which will help scientists track dust plumes backwards to their sources.

Whether improved technology will alter land use policy or prompt more regulatory enforcement of dust-prone agricultural areas is yet to be seen.

And earlier this year, Gill and colleagues demonstrated how “CubeSats,” a constellation of over 200 nano-satellites orbiting close to Earth, can capture plume development in the Chihuahuan Desert. The images showed numerous distinct point sources, essentially 8 percent of the focus area was eroding.

Will More Science Bring More Regulation?

Whether all this improved technology will alter land use policy or prompt more regulatory enforcement of dust-prone agricultural areas is yet to be seen. For starters, little has been done in farm country to enforce the current air quality standards.

For example, California’s San Joaquin Valley is home to a great deal of the state’s farmland and is one of the primary areas that has experienced increased air quality standard exceedances since 2017. According to data obtained on the California Air Resources Board website, PM10 values in the district have steadily gotten worse over the last few years.

In 2020, 18 of the 21 PM-10 monitors in the San Joaquin Valley Air Basin exceeded the 24-hour maximum standard at least once, and often several times throughout the fall months that correspond to harvest—a typically dry period when the soil is disturbed. One site had air that exceeded the safety limit for a total of 36 days in mid-August through early November. On one day in September 2020, the PM10 reading topped 480—over three times the EPA standard.

The monitors gauging PM 2.5 in the air in the valley showed similar numbers. In 2020, 37 out of 45 PM 2.5 monitors exceeded the standards. In 2021, it was 28 out of 31.

“The San Joaquin Air Pollution District has a very hands-off approach in how it chooses to regulate agricultural sources,” says Brent Newell, senior attorney focused on food and farming at Public Justice, a national legal advocacy organization that works on civil rights and environmental justice. “When it does, the regulations are milquetoast.” For example, to comply with the rule, Regulation VIII, adopted in 1993, which governed directly emitted PM10 particles from agricultural operations and roads, farmers were only required to check boxes on a menu of actions that were basically what they were already doing, such as water or oil down roads or reduce the speed limit, says Newell.

Soil degradation is becoming a chronic problem, says Kelly. He argues that the amount of dust in the atmosphere offers a way to take the pulse of ecosystems.

Paul Cort, an attorney with Earthjustice who unsuccessfully challenged the agricultural dust control measures in the San Joaquin Valley in 2009, agrees. “To the extent any regulation has occurred, it’s been done in a way that is super flexible to the point of being almost toothless,” he says. If it’s dust, he says, the odds are good that it’s coming from agriculture.

“No one is arguing it comes from construction or road dust or from some other source,” says Cort. What’s more, there’s little public concern about PM10, which is often seen as simply airborne soil, and part and parcel of farming communities. “There’s some public perception that that’s not the pollution we need to be worried about. [That] it’s just dirt,” he says.

But soil degradation is becoming a chronic problem, says Kelly. He argues that the amount of dust in the atmosphere offers a way to take the pulse of ecosystems. “What’s happening now is we’re getting much larger events, not only in terms of the wind speeds, but over much larger geographic areas,” he says. And, he adds, it will take decades for the soils to recover from the ongoing drought.

Kelly suggests that a large-scale, multi-agency effort—one that combines satellite imagery, climate models, historical data, and new sensors is needed to identify the most vulnerable landscapes—and potentially stop farming them, at least for the time being.  “We need to get to the point where we can identify these areas and say we cannot put these lands into production because they are too risky,” he says.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/01/06/dust-growing-problem-farmland-pollution-soil-cover-crops-tillage/feed/ 4 https://civileats.com/2021/07/27/as-carbon-markets-reward-new-efforts-will-regenerative-farming-pioneers-be-left-in-the-dirt/ https://civileats.com/2021/07/27/as-carbon-markets-reward-new-efforts-will-regenerative-farming-pioneers-be-left-in-the-dirt/#comments Tue, 27 Jul 2021 08:00:21 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=42703 Ellis’s land, pieced together over a number of years, had several previous owners. One native pasture was severely overgrazed. “Another pasture is currently in the ICU being restored to native grasses,” she says. However, in May, Ellis documented 20 different plant species in one square meter of a recovered native pasture on the ranch. And […]

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Meredith Ellis views her family’s cattle ranch in Rosston, Texas, as a giant experiment in how to store more carbon in the soil, improve water quality, and maximize biodiversity. In recent years, Ellis, who works with her father, GC Ellis, has been adding warm-season cover crops to winter wheat fields, rotating the cattle between pastures more frequently, and leaving the grass much higher to build more soil carbon and habitat for wildlife.

Ellis’s land, pieced together over a number of years, had several previous owners. One native pasture was severely overgrazed. “Another pasture is currently in the ICU being restored to native grasses,” she says. However, in May, Ellis documented 20 different plant species in one square meter of a recovered native pasture on the ranch. And she regularly shares videos featuring crystal-clear water running off her land, bees pollinating blooming plants on the pasture, and the owls and wild turkeys she has spotted on the land. But it’s the black, organic matter-filled soil that she’s especially proud of. And she joined a pilot research project that first sampled 40 locations on her fields in 2019 to measure carbon—and document grass type, soil type, the number of cattle grazing, and the weather—to model carbon sequestered. They will sample the soil again at the five-year mark (in 2024).

And yet, even if their soil has already sequestered large quantities of carbon, Ellis’s land won’t be eligible for credits from many of the carbon credit companies—because of the fact that the carbon is already in the soil.

Many hope that carbon markets are uniquely positioned to do what voluntary government incentive programs, such as the Conservation Stewardship Program or Environmental Quality Incentives Programs, have not—galvanize a widespread transition to soil-building practices at the massive scale needed to soak up significant quantities of atmospheric carbon and slow, or mitigate, global climate change. The enthusiasm stems in part from the growing number of companies making voluntary pledges to achieve “net zero,” a balance between emissions produced and removed from the atmosphere.

The National Academy of Sciences estimates that regenerative agriculture can sequester 250 million tons of carbon dioxide in the U.S. annually, or around 4 percent of the country’s emissions. And, according to an analysis published in January, global demand for voluntary carbon offsets could increase by a factor of 15 by 2030 and 100 by 2050. Since May 2020, more than 2,100 companies have promised through the United Nations’ Race to Zero initiative to reduce their net emissions to zero by 2050 through various methods, including carbon offsets.

Indigo Carbon, Nori, TruCarbon, Bayer Carbon Initiative, and Nutrien are just a few of the most high-profile existing carbon credit companies. And they have been emboldened by the Biden Administration’s Growing Climate Solutions Act, which will allocate $4 million to help support those markets to get off the ground.

Ellis’s land isn’t eligible for most of the credits those companies are offering because of a concept known as “additionality,” which means that, since she has already adopted regenerative practices, she and other pioneering farmers can’t get paid for them. And she’s not alone. Most of these markets exist to pay farmers who agree to adopt new carbon-storing practices, so although the most experienced regenerative farmers took risks and invested money in establishing the practices, it will be the newbies—and primarily the largest conventional growers—that transition to these practices in the coming years who will reap the market benefit.

“[Additionality is] one of the biggest criticisms of the offset markets,” says Ben Lilliston, director of climate change and rural strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “It rubs many [people] the wrong way.”

Even though Ellis understands the market dynamics, they can make her feel defeated. “[My land is] a huge carbon sink,” she says.

Farmers sign contracts ranging from 5 to 10 years to get paid—typically around $10–15 per ton of carbon dioxide removed—to start planting cover crops, diversify their crop rotations, and reduce their tillage, or to expand the number of acres on which they utilize those practices.

Experts agree that effective market-based incentives able to encourage a greater transition to regenerative practices—on a scale necessary to reduce agriculture’s greenhouse gas footprint—would have undeniable benefits. In fact, they say that regenerative management is the only endeavor able to combat climate change, restore soil health, and improve resilience to increasingly extreme events, such as June’s record-breaking heat dome in the Pacific Northwest and the recent floods in Detroit, parts of Texas, and New York City.

At the same time, carbon offset markets are coming under ever greater scrutiny for a range of reasons—most notably, because “done poorly, carbon offsets can be a giant distraction, causing even more delays to meaningful climate action,” wrote Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown.

In fact, a proliferation of inexpensive carbon credits has so far led to more pollution in California. And there’s no guarantee the carbon will remain stored forever; a portion of the 400,000-acre Bootleg fire in southern Oregon is currently burning up trees used in a carbon offset project.

The rapidly evolving carbon credit marketplace, developed using a variety of protocols that make it difficult to compare climate impacts, has resulted in confusion over what carbon markets can and cannot accomplish. “The stakes for the climate and farmers are extraordinarily high,” said Emily Oldfield, lead author a new report on the carbon markets and agricultural soil carbon scientist at Environmental Defense Fund. As a result, many farmers are leery of all the disparate carbon credit companies. “There is tentative interest, but there’s also a lot of skepticism,” says IATP’s Lilliston.

Is it possible to create voluntary market mechanisms that could benefit veteran regenerative farmers like Ellis as well as new converts—while maintaining environmental integrity? Some companies are working to answer that question, but they’re taking decidedly different approaches.

A Revival of Carbon Offsets

Only a few years ago, carbon offset markets were fading away, says Mark Trexler, director of Climate Change Knowledge Systems at The Climatographers, a climate change advisory company in Portland, Oregon. “[They said], ‘Offsets cannot play a significant role in hitting the global targets.’ Then somebody came up with brilliant idea of ‘net zero,’ and everybody needs offsets again,” says Trexler. The only way most companies can make net zero pledges work is through offsets. “Now offsets are going to ‘save the world,’” says Trexler, noting that we haven’t solved any of the problems that bedeviled carbon markets the first time.

Markets come with a cold, hard truth, says Trexler. For offsets to meaningfully mitigate climate change, they have to differentiate between what he calls “good deeds” and legitimate, additional carbon removal. For example, because Ellis helped her land absorb carbon as part of a larger, holistic effort to improve it without a prior market incentive, her work, perversely, won’t count as an offset by most efforts.

Soils are dynamic and carbon most certainly won’t be sequestered forever. But the whole goal of the offset market is to ensure that credits translate into additional tons of carbon dioxide emissions removed from the atmosphere for as long as possible, he says. After all, companies that buy the credits are allowed to emit greenhouse gases that will stay in the atmosphere forever, says Trexler.

There is a huge financial incentive for those who have made early efforts into the offset markets—but if too many find their way in, “the environmental integrity of the market can quickly be undermined,” Trexler says, adding, “carbon offsets aren’t intended to be fair; [they] are intended to mitigate climate change.”

Debbie Reed, who helms the nonprofit Ecosystem Service Market Consortium (ESMC), agrees that additionality is an important requirement of offset markets. “Markets never pay early adopters; they don’t pay today for corn you sold yesterday,” she says. “If we don’t have an additional requirement, it does nothing to bring down atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. It’s business as usual.”

Still, the growers who have been practicing regenerative agriculture continue to build carbon that has value—and they could till up the soil or sell the land to a developer tomorrow—potentially releasing much of the carbon stored in the soil. To capture that value, ESMC, which is set to launch in September 2022, is also developing inventory accounting schemes in addition to a system for calculating new carbon offsets.

Valuing Existing Carbon Storage

Rancher Meredith Ellis has been involved in one of 12 regenerative cropland and ranching pilot projects conducted by the ESMC, which is working with a number of big companies, including McDonald’s, General Mills, and Cargill, to develop protocols to account for carbon emissions reductions throughout the supply chain. Ellis volunteers her time with the consortium to not only better understand how much carbon her practices are storing in the soil, but also in the hopes it will lead to a way to reward good stewardship over time.

ESMC is also developing a way to compensate long-time regenerative ranchers, such as Ellis, who have already achieved lower emissions through regenerative practices via Scope 3 emissions reporting. Corporations can report their greenhouse gas inventories across three different categories, called scopes, using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, developed by the World Resources Institute and its partners. Scope 1 is the organization’s directly owned or controlled emissions; Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from power generation.

Scope 3, however, includes indirect emissions from the company’s supply chain—for example, the production of wheat or the transport of sugar. Food and beverage companies often have more Scope 3 than Scope 1 emissions. In fact, 93 percent of Pepsi’s emissions are Scope 3, says Reed. ESMC has created protocols that companies can use to report the additional tons of carbon removed or reduced from the atmosphere as a result of interventions the company’s producers have put in place. As part of their pilot projects, farmers are paid $15 per ton for each additional ton of carbon dioxide removed or reduced—which is also the going rate of the carbon offset market.

“I can’t say for sure what that value [for Scope 3 assets] will be,” says Reed. “It may be nominal.” Beyond market-based approaches, ESMC hopes to see the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) find a way to compensate early adopters of regenerative practices—those who have used those practices for five years or more—because they can offer technical assistance that newcomers will need, says Reed.

Gary Price, owner of the 77 Ranch in Blooming Grove, Texas, has been working with ESMC for the last three years. He’s hopeful their supplier emissions reporting approach offers a way to account for all the carbon he and fellow regenerative ranchers sequester on their land. “It doesn’t make sense to not reward good behavior,” he says.

Unlike ESMC, some companies are looking for ways to circumvent the additionality requirement altogether. Nori, for example, issues credits to producers who have made a verified practice change any time after December 31, 2009, for each ton of carbon dioxide they’ve sequestered since then.

“We just need to agree on a [transparent and predictable] performance baseline, and anyone meeting or beating that baseline gets credit regardless of whether they’ve been doing the practices for 5 minutes or 25 years,” argues Aldyen Donnelly, co-founder of the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. “If we are serious, we want everybody to find profit in a new way of doing things,” she says.

But without additionality, Nori’s credits are not certified by the most widely used third-party registries, such as Climate Action Reserve, Verra, and Gold Standard. Each credit or Climate Reserve Tonne (CRT) represents one metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions reduction or sequestration. Most offsets are listed in these registries, which track projects and set standards and protocols for carbon accounting. To date, all the existing registries have only issued around 5 billion credits since 2002. Around 50 percent of those credits haven’t been retired or used, says Donnelly, in part due to a roughly five-year lag time between when the emission reduction occurred and the credits are issued and available for purchase.

“It’s too long for a project owner to wait to recover the costs of adopting new practices,” she says. “And buyers deem them too old when they become available.”

“Everyone agrees, [many of] the carbon registries included, that the way we’ve done this in past will not allow us to scale up,” says ESMC’s Reed. She says there has been a flurry of activity to digitize and encrypt the process, while also bringing down verification costs to make it work without abandoning credibility.

The existing credits are also dwarfed by the annual emissions from the top polluters. Just 100 fossil fuel producers have emitted nearly 1 trillion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which is over half of the total emissions released since the Industrial Revolution began in the 1750s.

Additionality has created confusion among farmers and tension among the competing market endeavors. But Reed points out that ESMC aims to generate other ecosystem service credits—including water quality, water conservation, and biodiversity habitat—that will also benefit long-term regenerative farmers. And as markets develop, Reed adds, “we can’t just be focusing on new carbon sequestration and new emissions reductions. Sooner rather than later, we have to also protect those existing carbon stocks because every ton of carbon lost is harder and more expensive to put back.”

In the meantime, the additionality requirement (or lack thereof) has led to competition and even ever-shifting qualifications at some companies, which has made some farmers wary of the markets overall. Many are also uneasy with companies such as Indigo Carbon, which require farmer data in exchange for contracts (neither ESMC or Nori do).

When Iowa soybean farmer Chris Gaesser first began talks with Indigo, he was told that just over 3,000 of his acres would qualify for payments. As experts criticized the company’s methodologies, the company changed the guidelines for what qualified as a “new practice,” and Gaesser’s number of eligible acres was whittled down to 1,400, then 800, then 200. At that point, he says he had little incentive to spend the time and energy to get the data necessary to secure the credits. (And, he adds, some of these companies’ services only have value because of the data farmers give to them.)

“There’s not a lot of excitement about carbon markets,” says Gaesser. “It’s such a new thing and the regulations change so quickly. Everybody and their dog outside of agriculture feels like trying to get into the carbon market to get that money,” he adds. His father and business partner, Ray Gaesser, added, “everybody up the line wants their 15–20 percent cut and there’s little left by the time it gets to the farmer.”

Given the confusion and frustration, Gaesser expects growers will simply wait to see which carbon market best succeeds—but that will likely delay any large-scale transition to regenerative practices.

Rethinking the Market

The first voluntary carbon market in the U.S.—the Chicago Climate Exchange, which ran from 2003 to 2010—failed to gain traction because demand cratered after the U.S. refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Nori’s Donnelly argues that the whole offset system to date hasn’t worked, even as she acknowledges that she is one of many who have been desperately trying to make them work for 15 years.

Donnelly has been looking to past environmental successes for inspiration. “We did get lead out of gas, we did get sulfur out of diesel fuel, and we did get ozone-depleting substances out of refrigerants,” she adds. But all those examples involved governments regulating markets and placing caps on the individual pollutants—something that the U.S. has been unwilling to do when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.

In lieu of a cap on emissions, Donnelly advocates for regulations that mandate all suppliers of energy and chemical products—including fertilizer makers—and building products report and reduce their virgin fossil carbon content and losses in their global supply chain, at the rate required to achieve net zero by 2050. “This approach is consistent with every successful pollution reduction and energy efficiency success story in our past,” she says.

A cap is necessary for the carbon market to benefit both the environment and farmers, advocates say, because it’s the only lasting way to limit emissions. “You don’t have to worry about additionality in a capped system,” says Trexler. “Without that, you have to worry about the environmental integrity of every ton of emissions.” Further, he questions whether there has ever been a societal problem that was solved without policy and regulation. “I can’t think of any,” he says.

And farmers aren’t going to shift their practices without a significant incentive. “Without a cap, there is little likelihood that the price will ever rise to a level that shifts farmer behavior,” says Lilliston.

As Trexler sees it, a carbon tax would be more effective at cutting emissions. “Why aren’t farmers being taxed for the loss of ecosystem services if they are letting soil carbon disappear?” he asks. A carbon tax would include the environmental cost of a company’s products made by fossil fuels—and thereby encourage companies to make operations more efficient. But carbon taxes have proven unpopular—leading in some cases to mass protests—especially when it’s applied to a commonly used commodity, such as fuel.

Spurred by public pressure and increasing evidence of the climate crisis’ impact on their bottom lines, an increasing number of corporations are committed to reducing their emissions and there is a growing fervor to make carbon offset markets work. “This is the only investment we can make that mitigates climate change and creates more productive soil—there is nothing else that is mitigation and adaptation at same time,” says Donnelly.

Despite the urgency, Reed is working slowly to build the ESMC market in an effort to ensure it has integrity. Not only do companies need to avoid the risks of greenwashing claims, she fears any “producers who get burned will not come back to the table very quickly. That’s a huge liability for all of us in this space.” For that reason, carbon markets are just one of many tools that should be employed to address climate change, says Reed.

“We’ve got to identify the value of the land besides just producing food and fiber,” says rancher Price. The carbon markets offer a way to do that. “It’s a great opportunity for agriculture. I hope we don’t miss it,” he says.

Ellis agrees. She argues that if we can figure out how to ensure that markets pay for carbon sequestration or even practices that improve water quality and wildlife habitat, it will give ranchers something to be proud of and an additional way to make money besides subdividing and selling their land. “Sometimes I feel like, as usual, us little guys are going to get left behind,” she says.

And yet keeping “the little guys” on the land is key, as land prices soar, hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland is lost each year in the U.S. to development, and the lure to sell the ranch may be stronger than ever. “We can’t get this ecosystem back once it’s developed,” she says.

This story is part of a series of articles on regenerative agriculture produced with support from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.

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