Tom Philpott: Big Ag and Climate | Grist

Food production practices play a pivotal role in both climate change mitigation and adaptation - a greater role than is commonly discussed. With Waxman-Markey coming before the House Ag Committee, Grist's Tom Philpott has been posting a strong series of articles on the role of agriculture in climate and in U.S. climate politics.

From Philpott's "Big Ag: give us carbon credit, but don’t cap our emissions":

[E]vidence is mounting that industrial agriculture may contribute significantly more to climate change than was previously thought. A recent paper (pdf) published by the International Council for Science’s SCOPE offshoot concludes that emissions of nitrous oxide are likely significantly greater that then the levels assumed in earlier assessments. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent then carbon; and industrial farming, with its heavy reliance in synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, is by far the largest emitter of nitrous oxide.

From the paper Philpott cites, "Introduction: Biofuels and the Environment in the 21st Century":

Overall, approximately 4% of the nitrogen that human activity introduces into the environment ends up as N2O in the atmosphere (Prather et al. 2001; Galloway et al. 2004; Crutzen et al. 2007). Many life-cycle analyses have used the IPCC assessment methodology for estimating N2O fluxes, which tends to give estimates only somewhat over 1% of nitrogen fertilizer use (IPCC 2006).

From Philpott's "Will Big Ag plow under Waxman-Markey?":

A paper by Rattan Lal, director of the School of the Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University, estimates that U.S. farmers could capture 288 million tons of carbon in their soil every year—enough to offset about about 17 percent of total U.S. GHG emissions.

Other sources cite an even larger potential role for agricultural practices to mitigate climate change. Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute reckons [pdf] that “practical organic agriculture, if practiced on the planet’s 3.5 billion tillable acres, could sequester nearly 40 percent of current CO2 emissions.”

To move in that direction would require a tremendous shift in practices, Lal told me in an interview: a move to farming that explicitly seeks to build organic matter in soil. That means reduced tillage, extensive cover cropping, and “as much manure and compost as possible.”

From Philpott's "Waxman-Markey, meet House Ag Committee":

By all accounts, Thursday’s House Ag Committee hearing on the Waxman-Markey climate-change legislation went as expected: angry men blustered and fulminated and generally vented spleen. ... [T]he farm-states’ finest got down to business: demanding that the legislation be tailored to reward the industry they more or less unapologetically represent: the agrichemical firms that dominate U.S. agriculture.

The fight is essentially about who will control the role of agriculture in a cap-and-trade scheme. According to the incessant complaints of committee members, the legislation offers no opportunity for farmers to receive credits for offsetting carbon and reducing GHG emissions. That’s just false; the role of ag isn’t explicitly laid out, but farming projects are eligible for offsets. The catch is that judging the eligibility and value of GHG-saving activities would fall to an offset-review board within the EPA. The ag lobby finds that arrangement intolerable; Chairmen Colin Peterson (D.-Minn.), who has pushed the agribiz agenda on the climate bill with the force of a gigantic combine roaring through a cornfield, declared Friday that he doesn’t want that agency “to go anywhere near farmers.”