Land Core Submits Comments for Senate Agriculture Committee Hearing On Climate Change and the Agriculture Sector

On May 21, 2019, Land Core delivered the following testimony to the United States Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry: Hearing on Climate Change and the Agriculture Sector

Thank you for holding the hearing on this important topic and for the opportunity to submit these comments. 

As an organization, Land Core is working to build the missing infrastructure and market-based economic incentives that will make the rapid adoption and scalability of soil health possible across the United States. 

Broadly speaking, we believe it is critical not only to consider the impact that erratic weather and a changing climate are having on the agricultural sector, but also to highlight the positive and vital role that agriculture (specifically through the rebuilding of healthy soils) can play in proactively mitigating these impacts, to the benefit of our economy, society and environment. 

We believe soil health is a critical part of this conversation and will be instrumental in determining the future success of our nation’s farmers and ranchers. 

The government should consider its role not just in offering subsidies to producers for applying conservation practices that rebuild soil (such as minimal tillage, cover cropping, crop rotations, biodiversity and managed grazing) but also in creating market-based incentives and infrastructure that will encourage more producers to focus on building soil organic matter, a key indicator of soil health. 

While many organizations will continue to focus on the carbon sequestration potential and benefits of healthy soil, we want to underscore the importance of soil health in mitigating risk – an infinitely less politicized and controversial issue for farmers and stakeholders of all stripes. 

To illustrate how soil health helps to mitigate risk in agriculture, we can look at how even a 1% increase in soil organic matter on land results in up to 20 times the water-holding capacity of that land. With around 90% of crop insurance claims resulting from incidents of flood and drought, and approximately $10 billion per year of taxpayer money spent on crop insurance annually, we can understand the importance of proactively improving soil health in order to minimize these losses while allowing farmers to actually improve their bottom lines. 

This, of course, goes hand in hand with soil’s ability to purify water and recharge our aquifers, while maintaining and increasing our national food supply by ensuring that we reverse the alarming trend of topsoil erosion – according to the UN-FAO and USDA-ARS, we now have an aggregate 60 years of harvests left.

We should also consider the role of government to incentivize the creation of municipal and regional level composting systems, as a means of diverting the significant greenhouse gas emissions caused by food waste. Compost provides an essential source of nutrients and fertility that allows producers to more quickly build healthy soil. Through such systems, we can take what is methane-producing waste, and turn it into farmer profitability and a tool for land restoration. 

We also wish to highlight the important role for livestock operations to contribute positively to climate change mitigation while maintaining and growing their operations. For example, the practice of holistic management or multi-paddock adaptive grazing (rotating livestock, particularly cattle, from one field to the next, mowing and fertilizing the land, aerating the soil, and encouraging the re-growth of a diversity of grasses and other species) is an important tool to consider in preventing desertification on grasslands and rangelands, and in reducing the severity of wildfires, while providing a viable source of revenue to graziers and communities, as well as a source of nutrient-dense food. 

We should consider that these practices could be deployed not only in private operations but also on public lands (both state and federal), as well as along the sides of roads (increasing the permeability of soils adjacent to our valuable public infrastructure). The federal government should immediately look at the grazing requirements for all federal public land grazing contracts to ensure that we are preferentially leasing to those who are willing to undertake practices that increase the fertility, water-holding capacity, and fire resilience of the land, essentially de-risking the operations of ranchers and improving our public assets. 

Thanks for considering these comments and for the Committee’s support of this issue. 

Aria McLauchlan
Co-Founder and Executive Director
Land Core
aria@landcore.org