Deepening public-private collaboration to accelerate growth in sustainable agriculture.

The Issue
In the past year, food security and economic crises have highlighted both the urgent need and the potential for developing sustainable agri-food systems. Over one billion people, or one out of six globally, do not have access to adequate food and nutrition today.  By 2050, the global population will grow to a projected 9.2 billion people, and demand for agricultural products is expected to double. In the intervening years, the agri-food system will face increasing constraints and volatility driven by resource scarcity and climate change, raising the risk of production shortfalls. While substantial gains can be realized through improved technologies, policies, infrastructure and investment, it will require an exceptional level of collaboration among stakeholders in the agricultural value chain including, individual farmers, consumers and entrepreneurs; governments and companies; civil society and multilateral organizations. And while many initiatives and processes are underway, few effectively tap both public and private-sector insights and capacities. Alignment around shared priorities and large-scale initiatives is therefore key to success on both global and regional levels.

A New Vision for Agriculture
The World Economic Forum’s Consumer Industries Community is championing an initiative through multi-stakeholder engagement in developing a shared agenda for action to meet food security, economic development and environmental sustainability goals through agriculture. The New Vision for Agriculture initiative engages high-level leaders of industry, government and international institutions and civil society– with support from leading experts – to define joint priorities, recommendations and opportunities for collaboration. Issues to be addressed will vary according to the region and forum, but may include:

 Leveraging public and private-sector investment for agricultural growth
 Boosting good stewardship practices of natural resources and preservation of biodiversity
 Developing agricultural markets through improved infrastructure and policies
 Driving economic growth through agriculture, including opportunities for small-scale farmers

Through a series of structured dialogues, engaging key public and private-sector actors, the initiative will provide opportunities to develop shared insights and priorities; provide advisory input and recommendations for focus and action by key stakeholders; and identify and support existing initiatives which offer promising opportunities for collaboration and scaling.

Developing emissions markets to encourage farmers in poor countries to store more carbon dioxide in soil should be a key topic on the U.N. climate talks agenda, global warming activist Al Gore said.

“I think that soil carbon conservation and recarbonizing of soil must be the next stage in this negotiating process,” former U.S. Vice President Gore told reporters on the sidelines of a climate conference at the United Nations.

Agriculturists can store more carbon in soil through techniques such as no-till farming that leaves crop residue on the ground instead of plowing it up and releasing the carbon into the atmosphere, or through crop rotations.

Soils can hold carbon for thousands of years when dead leaves, crop residue and other vegetation combine chemically with existing soil particles instead of rotting fully. More carbon is held in this way than in trees and other vegetation.

But agricultural techniques such as heavy plowing, the use of too much fertilizer, and the discarding of the practice of rotating crops have led to the depletion of soils and the carbon in them in many countries.

Gore said polluters and investors in rich countries could potentially help invest in projects promoting new and improved agricultural methods that retain carbon, such as no-till farming, in developing countries through carbon credits.

Similar offsets resulting from storing carbon in forests and soils are already available in voluntary carbon markets, including ones for domestic projects on the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Opponents of such programs say the science is still young on measuring how much carbon is stored in this way. As a result, the price for soil sequestration offsets has traditionally trailed the price of other offsets projects such as solar energy farms.

Others say measurements are improving and that the offsets are a huge potential market that could reward farmers and make the soil yield more and better food.

Gore said improving the soil in many poor countries through such offsets could help fight against hunger and malnutrition.

Vesco Agricultural Technologies has a developing nations initiative that can address this issue.

Developing Nations farmers face a wide variety of agronomic and economic conditions. No single solution has been identified and made available to, useable by or affordable to farmers in all regions and circumstances.

However, the scalable range of options made possible by the Vesco Terra-Glide™ technology has allowed the development of a range of machine sizes that bridges these problems.

Within the Vesco Terra-Glide™ family of technologies there is a combination that will provide the seeding solution to the needs of most farmers in developing nations. Our goal is to work with government agencies, NGOs and the UN to establish a framework that supplies this technology to the poorest nations of the world at no cost to the farmers by establishing the Vesco Terra-Glide™ technology in a verified offset project for no-till carbon credits sold and traded under the Chicago Climate Exchange and others as Soil Carbon Management Offsets through the newly established carbon offset credit programs.

For more information visit www.vescocanada.com

At the G8 summit this past weekend, leaders renewed their commitment to food security.  They stood by their pledge to spend (US) $22 for sustainable agriculture by 2012.

The commitment was made last year at the L’Aquila summit in Italy.  So far, about $6 billion has been allocated.

Quite delighted

Dr. Lindiwe Majele Sibanda is CEO of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), a member of the Farming First coalition.  Farming First represents about 130 organizations worldwide.

“We are quite delighted that there was time spent on deliberating and linking to the L’Aquila agreement,” says Sibanda, speaking from Pretoria, South Africa.  “And the good thing is that at least our world leaders have agreed that accountability is the way forward.  And the Muskoka framework is a big step forward.”

The framework makes the G8 process more transparent

“For once we know what is discussed behind closed doors,” she says, “And they’ve made a commitment that by 2011 there will be a report back on food security and health, which is excellent, child health.”

The farming community around the world is pleased with the L’Aquila recommitment, according to Sibanda.

“In the past we’ve had figures that are floated and there is no follow-up.  So for us, the fact that we now have a framework that talks about the initial commitment of $22 billion – the fact that to date only $6.5 billion has been disbursed – and the commitment that by 2012 the balance will be delivered – I think it gives us something to hold onto,” she says.

OTTAWA, ONTARIO–(Marketwire – June 23, 2010) - Today, the Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of the Environment, announced that the Government of Canada is delivering on its commitment under the Copenhagen Accord to help the poorest and most vulnerable countries with their efforts to fight climate change. As promised as part of the Copenhagen Accord, Canada will invest $400 million for international climate change efforts this fiscal year. This represents the 2010 portion of Canada’s fair share of the fast-start financing promised by developed countries under the Copenhagen Accord.

“This is an important announcement for Canada and for the global community,” said Minister Prentice. “Through this investment, we are working to help developing countries reduce their emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change. As countries begin to follow through on their commitments made in Copenhagen last December, Canada will continue to provide its fair share of the support promised”.

Under the Copenhagen Accord, developed countries committed to provide fast-start financing approaching US$30 billion for 2010-2012 that would help the poorest and most vulnerable countries adapt to the effects of climate change, including clean energy development and delivery, efforts to address deforestation and to enhance sustainable agriculture. Canada’s contribution is consistent with our traditional share of developed country donor pledges in the context of multilateral international assistance efforts—approximately 4%.

The Government of Canada is continuing to deliver strong action on the environment both domestically and internationally. As inscribed in the Copenhagen Accord, Canada has set an ambitious, realistic target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020, a target which reflects the importance of aligning with the United States. 

The Government has recently published draft regulations for regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, and will continue to work with the United States to do the same for heavy trucks. Furthermore, we have tabled new regulations requiring renewable content for gasoline and diesel fuel. Starting in September 2010, gasoline will be required to contain five per cent renewable content.

The global population is rising – it’s expected to top eight billion by 2030.

As a result, demand for everyday essentials is soaring, too.

No doubt you’ve heard the debate about how the world is striving to find adequate energy resources and beefing up aging infrastructures in order to handle the strain.

But what about items that are even more critical to basic human survival – namely, food and water?

I’ve discussed the world’s water issues here before. Today, we turn to the food industry. Because like water, with an additional two billion people on the planet in 20 years, we’re going to have to come up with ways to satisfy all the extra demand.

Longing for more land

The trouble is, there simply isn’t enough arable land available to grow all the extra crops necessary. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the world needs as much additional arable land as there already is in the United States, Brazil and Argentina.

Adding to the crunch is the ongoing mandate for biofuel production across the world. We all know about the frenzy for mass-produced ethanol from corn a few years ago.

With subsidies tossed around like confetti to farmers who planted more corn for ethanol production, the rush caused a trio of problems…

• It took massive amounts of corn out of the food production chain.
• It left less acreage for other crops like soybeans and wheat.
• The focus on biofuel production at the expense of food sent food prices soaring.

And although the fervor has died down from the giddy “this is the fuel of the future… let’s kick up production to warp speed” days a few years ago, one-quarter of the U.S. corn crop still goes towards ethanol production.

And now, emerging market nations are expected to take the food production baton in a big way…

Boom in the BRICs

Along with its fellow “BRIC” nations (Russia, India and China), Brazil is among the nations expected to “provide the main source of growth for world agricultural production, consumption and trade,” according to the annual Agricultural Outlook report from the United Nations and Organization for Cooperation and Development.

More specifically, the report states that agricultural output in the BRICs will grow by 27% – three times faster than production in major Western European economies. Breaking it down…

• Brazil leads the pack, with agriculture growth of more than 40% through 2019.
• The three other BRIC nations – Russia, India and China – are forecast to notch up 26%, 21% and 26% growth through 2019.
• The Ukraine is also projected to enjoy an agriculture sector boom, posting 29% growth through 2019.

Overall, the UN-OECD report estimates that global production will expand by 70% by 2050.

Supply-demand-price conundrum

However, with the population growing and land acreage shrinking, global food prices are set to rise.

While the UN/OECD report doesn’t project a food price spike, it warned that these factors, coupled with higher energy costs, will result in consumers paying more for food.

For example, crop and dairy prices are projected to climb between 16% and 45%. And that doesn’t take into account any rise in energy/commodity prices.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Increase no-till farming practices across the planet or face serious climate, soil quality and food production problems in the next 20 to 50 years. That warning from scientists appeared in the journal Science this week.

No-till farming helps soil retain carbon. Healthy topsoil contains carbon-enriched humus – decaying organic matter that provides nutrients to plants. Soils low in humus can’t maintain the carbon-dependent nutrients essential to healthy crop production, resulting in the need to use more fertilizers.

A lack of carbon in soil may promote erosion, as topsoil and fertilizers are often washed or blown away from farm fields and into waterways, said Rattan Lal, the paper’s lead author and the director of the carbon management and sequestration center at Ohio State University.

In no-till agriculture, farmers plant seeds without using a plow to turn the soil. Soil loses most of it carbon content during plowing, which releases carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere. Increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have been associated with global climate change.

Traditional plowing, or tilling, turns over the top layer of soil. Farmers use it for, among other reasons, to get rid of weeds, make it easier to use fertilizers and pesticides and to plant crops. Tilling also enriches the soil as it hastens the decomposition of crop residue, weeds and other organic matter.

Still, the benefits of switching to no-till farming practices outweigh those of traditional planting.

Since the mechanization of agriculture began a few hundred years ago, scientists estimate that some 78 billion metric tons – more than 171 trillion pounds – of carbon once trapped in the soil have been lost to the atmosphere in the form of CO2.

Lal and his colleagues estimate that no-till farming is practiced on only 5 percent of all the world’s cultivated cropland. Farmers in the United States use no-till methods on 37 percent of the nation’s cropland, which results in saving an estimated 60 million metric tons of soil CO2 annually.

“If every farmer who grows crops in the United States would use no-till and adopt management practices such as crop rotation and planting cover crops, we could sequester about 300 million tons of soil carbon each year,” said Lal, who is also a professor of soil science at Ohio State.

“Each year, 6 billion tons of carbon is released into the planet’s atmosphere as fossil fuels are burned, and plants can absorb 20 times that amount in that period of time,” he said. “The problem is that as organisms decompose and plants breathe, CO2 returns to the atmosphere. None of it accumulates in the soil.”

Lal admits that full-scale no-till farming practices are a short-term fix, but it’s one that will give researchers enough time to find alternatives to fossil fuels.

“There needs to be a global effort to adopt no-till farming practices soon. Governments need to mandate these practices or to provide financial incentives to farmers to adopt them,” said Lal, adding no-till methods may reduce a farmer’s annual crop yield by 5 to 10 percent, at least for the first few years.

It’s also tough to ask farmers who lack the necessary financial resources to switch to no-till methods, especially in African and Asian countries where no-till levels are the lowest, Lal said.

“No-till isn’t readily practiced in most of these areas due to the lack of available financial resources and government support,” he said. “Farmers often lack the seeding equipment necessary to drill through crop residue. And many farmers use leftover residue from the previous year’s crops for fuel or animal fodder. So the cultivated soil gets compacted or eroded by water and wind.”

Topsoil is also a lucrative commodity – an acre of it can bring in $1,300 for a farmer in India, where the first few feet of soil are often removed for brick making.

“No-till farming isn’t a substitute for finding alternatives to fossil fuels,” Lal said.

“No-till is definitely a short-term fix, but it may buy us up to 50 years to find alternatives to fossil fuels. If we don’t heed this warning, our planet may change drastically. There’s no other choice.”

Lal co-authored the paper with Michael Griffin, Jay Apt, Lester Lave and M. Granger Morgan, all with Carnegie Mellon University.

Clean Seed Capital’s focus is to identify solution-driven, sustainable, environmentally responsible, agricultural based companies that need a strategic partner to facilitate progress.

Agriculture has changed dramatically, post World War II food and fiber productivity soared due to new technologies, mechanization, increased chemical use, specialization and government policies that favored maximizing production.

Although these changes at the time had some positive effects and reduced many yield risks in farming, there have also been significant costs. Prominent among these are topsoil depletion, groundwater contamination and the release of carbon into our atmosphere due to heavy tilling of the soil.

A growing movement has emerged during the past two decades to question the role of the agricultural establishment in promoting practices that contribute to these social and environmental problems. Today this movement for sustainable agriculture is gaining increasing support and acceptance within mainstream agriculture. Not only does sustainable agriculture address many environmental and social concerns, but it offers innovative and economically viable opportunities for growers and the investment community.

 Clean Seed Capital Group provides strategic capital, business advisory services, and marketing strategies that yield both positive impact and significant investor returns from this rapidly growing sector.

 “We work in partnership exclusively with companies that can contribute to our vision of a sustainable future in agriculture and that will have a meaningful effect on the current system, we are confident that we are in a space that is emerging as a growth sector for investment and we look forward to working with companies that share our objectives” Said CEO Graeme Lempriere.

www.cleanseedcapital.com

As the United States looks to become more green, a program to trade carbon credits from farmland could play a role.

When carbon is emitted into the atmosphere, by vehicles or other means, it can be absorbed and stored by trees and other plants and may eventually wind up in the soil as organic matter.

No-till fields store carbon in the form of soil organic matter, which can be sold by farmers, providing them with an additional source of income.

“Carbon credits are currently a voluntary method used by organizations that want to offset their carbon emissions,” said Lenny Farlee, Purdue University Extension forestry specialist. “But it also creates an opportunity for farmers that may have no-till fields or landowners who replant forest trees.”

Carbon offset credits are sold through the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), which operates like a stock exchange. Offsets typically come from agriculture methane capture, no-till farming, grasslands and planting trees.

The CCX will accept a minimum of 100 tons of carbon at a time. Most landowners sell credits through an aggregator, comparable to a stock broker, who will combine multiple landowners’ credits together.

“An aggregator will lump several accounts together until it reaches 100 tons or more and sell the carbon to the CCX,” Farlee said. “This is really the easiest solution for farmers and landowners, because some people do not own enough land to sell 100 tons of carbon, and the aggregator can handle most of the administrative work associated with selling the credits.”

Carbon from grasslands and no-till farming is sold to the CCX at a fixed rate per acre. Carbon from trees also is sold at a fixed rate based on tree species, age of the planting and region.

As the voluntary program becomes more popular, the federal government is debating whether to make reduction of carbon emissions a mandatory system.

‘There have been legislative proposals in place for about a year,” Farlee said. “Part of the debate is over making the carbon emissions reduction system a carbon tax or a market-based offset and reduction system or whether to have a mandatory reduction system at all.”

Under a carbon tax, emitters might be charged based on emission rates above some established threshold. If an offset market system is used, those entities emitting carbon could be allowed to buy and sell carbon offset credits based on their carbon emission reductions and offset credits to meet a required total emissions target.

“Europe has installed a mandatory carbon reduction and offset system, and the price per ton of carbon offset credits has been between $20 and $35 a ton,” Farlee said. “It is hard to predict what the future will bring here in the United States in terms of legislation related to reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.”

METRO VANCOUVER — The Kwantlen Polytechnic University Senate last week approved in concept a new bachelor’s degree program in sustainable agriculture with an eye to starting classes in the fall of 2011.

The four-year program will combine a course load focused on human-scale and urban interface agriculture with intensive hands-on training and research, literally, in the field.

“This program will be unique in North America,” according to Kent Mullinix, director of Kwantlen’s Institute of Sustainable Horticulture, who added that students will not only be learning the principles of sustainable agriculture, but advancing the field with their own research as well.

To do that, the university will need a partner to step up with the land required to run the program.

“An important part of this degree will be experiential, so we will need to run experimental farms, teaching farms,” Mullinix said.

Kwantlen has been talking on and off for three years with the City of Richmond, the Musqueam First Nation and the Canada Land Corp. about creating an urban agriculture research centre on the Garden City Lands, a vacant 55-hectare (136-acre) plot of land on the eastern edge of Richmond city centre that is currently locked in the Agricultural Land Reserve. Those negotiations got a little simpler when the city bought out the portion of the site owned by the Musqueam and CLC for about $60 million in March. Richmond has long coveted the land for fields and community amenities as well as some form of urban agriculture.

“I think we have a tremendous opportunity,” said Richmond Coun. Harold Steves. “When we first started to talk about acquiring the [Garden City Lands] one of the things we were interested in was the Kwantlen farm school proposal.”

Richmond is demonstrating its commitment to preserving farmland by becoming the second largest owner of agricultural land within its municipal boundaries, said Steves. The city has already bought 119 hectares of farmland, some of which is already in use by Kwantlen programs, such as the Richmond Farm School at the Terra Nova Sharing Farm. Students began class in the one-year non-diploma program in March.

Steves reckons about 22 hectares (55 acres) of the Garden City Lands are suitable for farming with soil remediation. Much of the rest is bog.

“I’ve examined the soil and that land could easily be cleaned up and cultivated,” he said.

Mullinix defines sustainable agriculture as a way of “growing food on a human scale while minimizing outside inputs.” The most obvious outside input in commercial agriculture is petroleum, which includes the fuel required to run machines, vehicles for transport and the elements required to manufacture chemical fertilizers and pesticides. “The industrial agriculture model is sustained entirely by cheap fossil fuels,” he said.

“[Sustainable agriculture] is environmentally sound, economically viable and contributes to social equity,” Mullinix explained. Rather than commercial mono-culture – raising a single crop across thousands of hectares of land – the focus is on human-intensive, smaller-scale farms that grow a mix of crops and livestock, enabling farmers to practice “closed loop” agriculture that enhances the environment.

If that sounds a lot like the family farms that supplied more than 80 per cent of Canada’s produce before the Second World War, that’s no accident.

“The research is clear that mid-sized family farms are biologically more productive,” he said.

“This is not going backwards, but it is learning the lessons of our agricultural history,” he said. “We have a 10,000-year agricultural history, but only a few decades of commercial agriculture.”

Metro Vancouver is the perfect environment to advance the science of farming along the urban-rural interface, in which sustainable food production is integrated into the fabric of the city, Mullinix said.

Senate approval of the degree concept allows Mullinix and his colleagues to draft specific curricula for courses this summer with an eye to starting classes next year.

“The students who graduate from this program will have the knowledge and the skills to create this new agriculture,” Mullinix said.

By RANDY SHORE, Vancouver Sun