The Carbon Farming Solution: A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security
Eric Toensmeier
Language: English
Pages: 809
ISBN: 2:00363225
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Contributor note: Forward by Hans Herren
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With carbon farming, agriculture ceases to be part of the climate problem and becomes a critical part of the solution
Agriculture is rightly blamed as a major culprit of our climate crisis. But in this groundbreaking new book, Eric Toensmeier argues that agriculture specifically, the subset of practices known as carbon farming can, and should be, a linchpin of a global climate solutions platform. Carbon farming is a suite of agricultural practices and crops that sequester carbon in the soil and in aboveground biomass.
Combined with a massive reduction in fossil fuel emissions and in concert with adaptation strategies to our changing environment carbon farming has the potential to bring us back from the brink of disaster and return our atmosphere to the magic number of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Toensmeier s book is the first to bring together these powerful strategies in one place, including in-depth analysis of the available research and, where research is lacking, a discussion of what it will take to get us there. Carbon farming can take many forms. The simplest practices involve modifications to annual crop production. Although many of these modifications have relatively low sequestration potential, they are widely applicable and easily adopted, and thus have excellent potential to mitigate climate change if practiced on a global scale. Likewise, grazing systems such as silvopasture are easily replicable, don t require significant changes to human diet, and given the amount of agricultural land worldwide that is devoted to pasture can be important strategies in the carbon farming arsenal. But by far, agroforestry practices and perennial crops present the best opportunities for sequestration. While many of these systems are challenging to establish and manage, and would require us to change our diets to new and largely unfamiliar perennial crops, they also offer huge potential that has been almost entirely ignored by climate crusaders.
Many of these carbon farming practices are already implemented globally on a scale of millions of hectares. These are not minor or marginal efforts, but win-win solutions that provide food, fodder, and feedstocks while fostering community self-reliance, creating jobs, protecting biodiversity, and repairing degraded land all while sequestering carbon, reducing emissions, and ultimately contributing to a climate that will remain amenable to human civilization. Just as importantly to a livable future, these crops and practices can contribute to broader social goals such as women s empowerment, food sovereignty, and climate justice.
The Carbon Farming Solution does not present a prescription for how cropland should be used and is not, first and foremost, a how-to manual, although following up on references in a given section will frequently provide such information. Instead, The Carbon Farming Solution is at its root a toolkit. It is the most complete collection of climate-friendly crops and practices currently available. With this toolkit, farmers, communities, and governments large and small, can successfully launch carbon farming projects with the most appropriate crops and practices to their climate, locale, and socioeconomic needs. Toensmeier s ultimate goal is to place carbon farming firmly in the center of the climate solutions platform, alongside clean solar and wind energy.
With The Carbon Farming Solution, Toensmeier wants to change the discussion, impact policy decisions, and steer mitigation funds to the research, projects, and people around the world who envision a future where agriculture becomes the protagonist in this fraught, urgent, and unprecedented drama of our time. Citizens, farmers, and funders will be inspired to use the tools presented in this important new book to transform degraded lands around the world into productive carbon-storing landscapes.
important to millions of people in dry regions; with some development work, it could be an even more important carbon farming resource than it is today. Figure 15.11. Women preparing African locust beans for market in Burkina Faso. Photograph courtesy of the World Agroforestry Centre. African Oil Bean (Pentaclethra macrophylla) African oil bean is a large tree of West African lowland forests and savannas. This is one of the better candidates for tree beans to domesticate for the humid tropics.
Some barriers are mostly bureaucratic. For example, national and international policy frequently has no mechanism to understand or categorize agroforestry. Is it agriculture or is it forestry? This question matters because agricultural policy differs from forestry policy. Agroforestry is often managed by forestry ministries rather than agriculture ministries, or has no true home anywhere. As a result, farmers find themselves having to pay the higher loan rates that are applied to forestry
priorities. • Many of the social and ecological costs of our economy are not paid for by those who cause them. Economists call these consequences “externalities.” We need to put an end to the externalization of climate costs. A new economy must be rigorous about accounting for emissions and sequestration.52 Today the world’s richest 7 percent are responsible for 50 percent of emissions.53 Meanwhile the poorest half of the world’s population have almost zero emissions today, and many lack basic
13. IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, 515. 14. Murray and Jesseup, “Breeding and genetics of perennial maize,” 109. 15. Lombard and Leakey, “Protecting the rights of farmers and communities while securing long term market access for producers of non-timber forest products,” 235. 16. Wikipedia, “Plant breeders rights.” 17. Rai, “India–US fight on basmati rice is mostly settled.” 18. Lombard and Leakey, “Protecting the rights of farmers and communities while
distinct contexts: coastal areas and dry, salty deserts. Many other plant species are tolerant of salt, though not to the extreme that halophytes are. Irrigated agriculture in dryland regions has salted roughly half of current and former agricultural land, often resulting in its abandonment.2 There has been a lot of investigation into salt-tolerant plants as part of a search for suitable crops in these regions. Should sea-level rise continue as projected, salt-tolerant coastal species will be of