San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Farms could be model in climate change fight
Bay Area ranchers may offer Biden a blueprint in cutting emissions
In one of his first acts in office, President Biden said he wants farmers and ranchers to tell him how to fight climate change.
If he wants to hear from agricultural businesses already on the front lines of combating global warming, the Bay Area might be a good place to start.
On Albert Straus’ organic dairy farm in Marin County, an electric truck powered by cow manure feeds his 280 cows. Since 2004, he’s been using a methane digester, which captures methane from manure and converts it into enough electricity to power the whole farm. Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farms in Capay Valley (Yolo County), which sells at farmers’ markets all over the Bay Area, works with universities to implement sustainable practices such as reduced tillage.
Agriculture accounts for onetenth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental
Protection Agency, well behind transportation (28%) and electricity production (27%). But the sector is uniquely positioned in the climate crisis: Farms can do more than just reduce emissions. They can pull the excess carbon that causes global warming out of the atmosphere and put it back into the ground, a process known as sequestration.
“Not a lot of people understand how important agriculture is if we want to reach our climate and greenhouse gas reduction goals,” Redmond said. Her farm’s tillage practices are one way to keep carbon in the soil.
Straus Dairy Farm was the first in California to implement a carbon farm plan, with the help of the Marin Carbon Project, to reduce emissions and sequester more carbon.
“I’m creating a farming and food model that can be sustainable for the land, for the animals and for rural communities, and at the same time is providing highquality food for our local communities,” Straus said. “Livestock has an essential role in reversing climate change.”
The presidential request for help, laid out in a Jan. 27 executive order, illustrates the Biden administration’s belief in this potential. Involving the Department of Agriculture in climate policy means more incentives for farmers to adopt emissionsreducing practices that could even boost their earnings — always a concern with the industry’s oftentight profit margins.
“We think renewable energy, we see farmers, making American agriculture first in the world to achieve net zero emissions and gaining new sources of income in the process,” Biden said.
Biden’s order borrows language from a climatefocused executive order signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in October, which asked California farmers to work to store and remove carbon from the atmosphere as well as preserve the state’s biodiversity.
California was the top agricultural state in 2019, according to the USDA, producing more than 400 commodities, including over a third of the nation’s vegetables and twothirds of the nation’s fruits and nuts.
“The science is clear that, in our existential fight against climate change, we must build on our historic efforts in energy and emissions and focus on our lands as well,” Newsom said in a press release. “California’s beautiful natural and working lands are an important tool to help slow and avert catastrophic climate change.”
California’s farms are smaller on average at 328 acres than the nationwide average of 434 acres. But climatesmart practices can be scaled up — things like notill and cover crops are applicable to larger farms. Many conventional dairy farms in the Central Valley are installing digesters to reduce emissions and generate energy.
Farmers like Straus and Redmond want to push the conversation forward.
Straus, whose farm was the first 100% organic certified dairy west of the Mississippi River in 1994, is now working on a pilot project in collaboration with BMW Group for a small, tankbased methane digester. The revenue from the project would help cover the typically high costs of installing a digester. Once installed, farmers could actually profit by selling the energy to power electric vehicles through the partnership while reducing onfarm emissions.
“The idea is to make it an asset, not a liability, for farmers, and to make it easily expandable,” he said.
Straus also serves on the advisory board for the new Clean Economy Employment Now, or CLEEN Project, which seeks to provide federal leaders with job creation ideas. Redmond and her cofounders have been dedicated to organic, regenerative farm practices that have been proven to effectively reduce “the climate impact of agriculture,” since they opened Full Belly in 1985, she said. That includes things like using cover crops to restore nutrients in the soil, using compost to fertilize fields and working with researchers to evaluate the impact of newer practices, like notill.
Some practices have clear upsides, like producing better quality food, Redmond explained. But other times, it’s really just about being at the forefront of new ideas.
“You ask, ‘Well, how does (participating in research) benefit you?’ And I can’t exactly answer that, except that we’re very interested in sustainability and the future of agriculture in California, and it just sort of makes sense,” she said.
Still, implementing these practices can be timeconsuming and expensive, and both climate advocates and farmers stress the need for government funding and collaboration among the industry, climate scientists, advocates and public officials — especially since “climatesmart” practices look different on different types and sizes of farms.
“As early adopters will tell you, every opportunity has challenges,” Jamie Johansson, president of the California Farm Bureau, wrote in a message to members. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch. The goal of working lands should be to keep them working. For farms and ranches to meet their conservation goals, they must first meet their economic goals. That’s true sustainability.”
The California government has had several grant programs for climatesmart agriculture, which generated a lot more interest in switching over to these practices, said Renata Brillinger, executive director of advocacy group California Climate and Agriculture Network. In her ideal world, there would be even more grant programs to keep that momentum going.
Farmers will “move in that direction as long as it makes economic sense to do so, as long as they can stay in business while sequestering carbon and improving air and water quality,” Brillinger said. Newsom promised to keep investing in these programs in his latest proposed state budget.
Straus agrees. His “big, hairy, audacious goal” is for his dairy farm to be carbonneutral by the end of 2021. By the end of the decade, he wants to expand that model to the 11 other family farms that supply organic milk to Straus Dairy Farm. He thinks he can do it.
“On my farm, I test a lot of the technology and the practices, because farmers are very hesitant to change, are very cautious, and want to make sure that it’s proven out,” he said. “But if you’re successful, they are willing to join you.”