Tom Steyer wants to prove you can farm without destroying the environment. But like his campaign, it’s an expensive undertaking that’s had mixed results.
PESCADERO, California—The climate crisis is the trendiest topic for Democratic presidential candidates, and their trendiest idea is that agriculture can be a big part of the solution instead of a big part of the problem. They’re pledging to pay farmers and ranchers to capture more carbon in fields and pastures. They’re promising a new era of smaller and gentler “regenerative agriculture” to help reverse the damage conventional agriculture inflicts on the land and the atmosphere.
“We want to change the way people think about working lands,” Steyer said in an interview. “I mean, if we can show scientifically in the real world that this stuff really works and agriculture doesn’t have to be destructive, that would be priceless.” But there’s not much consensus about what regenerative agriculture even is, much less whether it can convert farms and ranches from planet-threatening carbon emitters to planet-saving carbon sinks. TomKat is a moonshot effort to change that.
Taylor’s day job is running Beneficial State Bank, a mission-driven financial institution the couple founded and funded to promote economic justice and ecological sustainability issues that Wall Street giants tend to ignore or undermine. She envisions TomKat as a similarly mission-driven challenge to agriculture’s corporate behemoths. "The way the world prosecutes its natural resource agenda is all wrong," she says.
“Our value add was not for little people,” Taylor recalls with a rueful laugh. “We’d bring kindergarteners out here and they’d just fall asleep.” The Green Revolution was real, saving perhaps billions of people from starvation, but its downsides were real, too. Today, agriculture uses 70 percent of the world’s fresh water and emits about one fourth of its greenhouse gases. Runoff from vast fields of chemically enhanced row crops as well as feeding operations crammed with pooping animals are creating massive “dead zones” in water bodies like the Gulf of Mexico.
The flip side of the argument is that grasses, trees and other plants are still the only reliable technology ever discovered for soaking up carbon and reversing the atmospheric mess made by fossil fuels. And the world’s rangelands, an undeveloped and vegetated area more than three times the size of the United States, present a tantalizing canvas on which to try to paint a carbon storage masterpiece.
“Microbes don’t have wings or legs, so their food needs to be down where they can get it,” said Biaggi, who worked for agribusinesses like Tyson and Cargill before embracing the regenerative path. “That’s when the magic happens.” When TomKat began its regenerative grazing program in 2011, native perennials had disappeared from all but eight of its 75 fields. Now they can be found in almost every field. Biaggi believes the new regime, by preventing cows from overgrazing their favorite grasses, is promoting better plant diversity, preventing soil erosion, and reducing the amount of hay he needs to buy to supplement the herd’s nutrition.
Unfortunately, greenhouse gases are a short-term threat to the planet. And if TomKat isn’t storing more carbon in its soils, it’s almost certainly emitting more greenhouse gases overall than conventional beef producers. Its herd puts on weight more slowly than cattle in industrial feedlots, which means they spend more time burping methane to produce a pound of beef. Its stocking rate of 17 acres per cow also means it’s using land much less efficiently than conventional U.S.
I recently visited a Colorado feedlot with Sara Place, the director of sustainability research at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and it was remarkable to witness what was in essence a fully optimized assembly line, manufacturing protein from raw material that happened to come in the form of 25,000 live animals with hooves and hides and voracious appetites. The owner explained that he uses precisely 10.23 gallons of water per head per day, that his finishing feed is precisely 72.
Deutschland Neuesten Nachrichten, Deutschland Schlagzeilen
Similar News:Sie können auch ähnliche Nachrichten wie diese lesen, die wir aus anderen Nachrichtenquellen gesammelt haben.
Tom Steyer raises paltry $2 million after personally spending tens of millions on his presidential bidBillionaire Tom Steyer raised $2 million in the third quarter of 2019, his campaign announced on Thursday, a paltry haul that pales in comparison to the more than $30 million the candidate has spent of his own fortune solely on television and digital ads for his presidential bid.
Weiterlesen »
Billionaire Tom Steyer raises $2 million for White House run
Weiterlesen »
Steyer says he would increase oversight over health care access to LGBTQ asylum seekersTom Steyer on financing a cure for AIDS: “We’re going to have to break, ultimately, the power of these corporations to own our government and to control what happens to us.” EqualityTownHall
Weiterlesen »
Tom Holland Cut Off All His Hair & Twitter Has FeelingsFans Have Gathered Together to Mourn The Loss of Tom Holland's Locks
Weiterlesen »
Tom Petty's Guitars, Guns and Music Stolen from Storage, Arrest MadeA storage unit loaded with Tom Petty's stuff got jacked, but fortunately cops didn't let the perp do him like that.
Weiterlesen »
Tom Holland Cut Off All His Hair & Twitter Has FeelingsFans Have Gathered Together to Mourn The Loss of Tom Holland's Locks
Weiterlesen »