Aria McLauchlan speaks at UC Davis Catalyzing Adaptive and Resilient Food Systems Workshop
Catalyzing Adaptive and Resilient Food Systems was held in October 2020 by the UC Davis Climate Adaptation Research Center. This four-session workshop convened scientists, researchers, policy experts, local and state government, firms and communities to explore the challenges and opportunities associated with developing climate adaptive and resilient food systems in the US and beyond.
Land Core Co-Founder and Executive Director, Aria McLauchlan, spoke on the Adaptation & Mitigation Synergies in Agriculture panel, addressing the central role of soil health in building adaptive and resilient food systems.
Panelists Tim Crews, Head of Research at The Land Institute and advisor to Land Core, and Meredith Niles, Assistant Professor, Department of Nutrition & Food Sciences, University of Vermont, spoke to strategies for risk mitigation and farmer perceptions of risk, respectively.
These emerging opportunities to integrate soil health into our political and financial infrastructure can secure our food supply, revive our rural communities and safeguard our ecosystems. Land Core is proud to speak and work alongside colleagues whose innovative work will help to ensure change on the ground and at the institutional level.
Watch the presentation and catch the Q&A session.
In her remarks, Aria emphasized the importance of farmer-centered policy engagement for building a resilient agricultural system. Policy that is focused on creating new economic incentives, or creating infrastructure that will allow producers to participate in and benefit from the interest in resilient food systems, is more likely to be well received than policies, programs, and regulations that are mandatory, and that push the boundaries of a producer’s right and desire for privacy, especially around their data.
Economic incentives, including carbon credit markets, supply chain improvements, tax credits and value-added marketing, can only function if we can measure and verify the result. Land Core advocates for an outcomes-verified soil health program overseen by USDA that would create a common federal baseline for soil health indicators, applicable across multiple subsidies or market based programs. “The farmer shouldn’t have to take one test after another for each program,” Aria said in a recent interview with Ag Journal about the panel. “That’s just too much bureaucracy and paperwork.”
Empirical data is also key for measuring the risk reduction benefits of soil health practices, Aria noted. While there is broad scientific consensus that healthy soils are one of the most effective ways to mitigate the impacts of devastating events, such as flood and drought, agricultural lenders and insurers do not yet have a clear and effective way to quantify these benefits and incorporate them into their risk pricing.
Aria spoke to Land Core’s work building an actuarially-sound model of the risk reduction benefits of specific soil health practices on any given piece of land, being designed as a tool for lenders and insurers to de-risk their own investments while incentivizing the adoption of soil health management systems.
While ecosystem services markets are generally pay-for-performance schemes, which don’t kick in until after producers have transitioned and successfully sequestered a verifiable amount of carbon, the quantification in dollars of the resilience impact (ie. de-risking) of specific soil health practices may be one of the few private-sector tools that can justify the up-front investment in a farmer’s transition (which also supports access to carbon markets in the future).
Making the shift also requires adequate support for government agencies such as the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and Farm Service Agency (FSA), which already have staff in nearly every county across the country, to recognize soil health.
Demonstrating the statistical and empirical connection between improved soil health and increased profitability and resilience through these efforts can also help to build the case for crucial policy changes to issues like crop insurance and public lending.