We’re in for some climate chaos. The Copenhagen Accord means at least two to four degrees of warming over the next fifty years — and who knows how much “global weirding.” As greenhouse gases trap more heat, or energy, close to the earth, and that energy is used by large weather systems, which move faster and are more intense than ever.

This means more Category 5 hurricanes. More likelihood of Florida snow. My biggest concern about all this change? Eating. If crop yields drop 80 percent as they’re expected to, if we don’t adapt to a changing climate, I might get hungry.

So how do we produce food in a changing climate? How do we produce food with shortages of oil and fuel around the corner? Well we might start, like Joel Salatin’s family-owned Polyface Farm in Virginia, by decreasing inputs to the farm.

While 50 percent of the cost of most food comes from fuel to run the system, in Polyface’s beyond-organic, pasture-based system, only one percent of the cost is coming from fuel. That helps Joel Salatin sleep better at night.

The part that helps me sleep better is how resilient his system is to catastrophe. There is so much biodiversity, so much life, that it can withstand a lot of disturbance. Salatin grows his grass long and tall before bringing his cows in to eat it. And then the chickens follow the cows.

So when the rain comes, all those long grass roots hold the soil in place. When the cows come through the fields and eat the grass down to the ground, all the roots build the soil. And the cow’s manure is deposited right there. When the chicken follows the cow, it pecks in the manure, breaking it down into the soil.

All that organic matter holds water, as organic matter such as decomposing manure and grass acts like a sponge. In a dry year, the grass stays green, using water stored in the soil.

The most hopeful thing I can see is that farms like Salatin’s are the exception. As more farmers start doing this kind of work, results can only get better.

To hear Joel Salatin himself explain his farm’s resilience, go to 5:05 in the video below.

Article by Eliav Bitan appearing courtesy Celsias.

photo: WizardOne

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Climate change not only presents difficult challenges for the energy industry, but also raises serious concerns about food security as loss of topsoil and desertification reduce arable land around the world.  Within this climate, genetically-modified crops (GMOs) will play a crucial role in supporting increased development and population growth.

GMOs are organisms, such as plants and animals, whose genetic characteristics are being modified artificially in order to give them a new property.  Last month, Monsanto, the world’s leading seed producer, announced that it expects African countries to increase plantings of GMOs in order to boost food security and economic development in the face of climate change.  Africa is the only continent where per-capita food output is falling, which also raises concerns about introducing fuel-dedicated crops.  GMOs could increase yields for both food and fuel, but international and regional rules governing GMOs represent a significant barrier to increased international trade.

The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety is one of the first international agreements to regulate the transboundary transfer of GMOs.  The Cartagena Protocol relies primarily on the precautionary principle, which reflects the recognition that scientific certainty often comes too late to design effective legal and policy responses for preventing many potential environmental threats.  Questions about the downstream health risks associated with genetically-modified food have invoked this principle and led to a zero-tolerance policy in the EU.

The EU continues to regulate GMOs despite a 2006 ruling by the WTO, which held that the EU ban violates international free trade.  The EU’s stance has limited trade between the US, Canada, and Argentina, which together grow 80 percent of the biotech crops sold commercially (EU’s ban contributed to Mansanto’s decision to remove their seed cereal business in Europe).

Given biomass crops’ heavy dependence on fossil fuel and water inputs, genetic modification will play an important role in shoring up the biomass industry’s future competitiveness.  However, with the US and EU still sharply divided on the issue, the biomass industry must dissociate from the GMO/food nexus debate and reassure the public that genetically-modified biomass fuel crops will not endanger public health.  At the same time, the industry would benefit from increased penetration of GMOs used for food, which would increase the agricultural yield of existing arable lands making way for more dedicated energy crops.

This post originally appeared in Biomass Intel

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In the past few years, the Vertical Farm Project at Columbia University has become a minor cause célèbre in the worlds of urban planning and sustainable agriculture. Since this summer, it has been featured in The Huffington Post, The New York Times, Popular Science, and most recently Scientific American. The project’s founder, public health professor Dr. Dickson Despommier, has also been interviewed on the Colbert Report, which led to some polite ribbing as well as an explosion of traffic on the project’s website.

So what is it? Basically, you can think of the Vertical Farm as the ultimate in local food production: a one-block urban skyscraper, with each floor dedicated to producing a different food staple. For the bulk of the plant crops, controlled environment agriculture would be employed in order to maximize production levels per square foot. Lower floors would be used for raising domesticated animals such as chickens and cattle, and organic waste products from both animals and plants would be composted for electrical generation and soil amendment via methane digestion. This combination would – theoretically, at least – make a vertical farm energy and resource independent. The Vertical Farm planners claim that a single such unit could provide enough food for 50,000 people annually.

The real issue: land conservation
The idea of the vertical farm was impelled by concerns over resource conservation and food security. With the Earth’s population expected to reach 8 billion by 2025, modern-day intensive agriculture will be hard pressed to produce enough food without a major technological innovation. Most industry experts believe that innovation will come from the realm of bioengineering; however, that innovation has yet to arrive, and in any case intensive agriculture is not without major environmental problems of its own. And while the organic and local agriculture movements show some potential for solving these problems, one they cannot solve is the finite amount of readily available, arable land.

Enter the vertical farm. Despommier and his colleagues argue that the real crux of the issue is land conservation; even if we could switch the whole world to ecologically perfect farming practices overnight, there’s still the problem of a rapidly growing population in a limited area. The vertical farm would solve this problem by expanding farms upwards, rather than outwards. By moving food production far closer to the end consumer, Moreover, growing food indoors would allow for certain efficiencies not attainable by traditional agriculture. For instance, the use of hydroponics would allow for recirculation, enabling farmers to conserve massive amounts of water, and eliminating the problem of fertilizer runoff. Best of all, all of the technologies employed in a vertical farm – hydroponics, controlled environments, water recirculation, methane digestion, etc. – are already mature.

Some unresolved issues yet remain
The major obstacles to vertical farm development are mostly economic in nature. First, although Despommier and colleagues have argued that a vertical farm could be a profitable business, the level of risk is quite high. The capital investment ($150 million at the very least) is huge, and given the Byzantine nature of the food distribution system, it is not entirely clear how the goods would get to market. This in turn could make food storage into a problem, as the planners have thus far assumed storage needs to be minimal. Moreover, zoning restrictions ensure that a true vertical farm would have to be located in an urban center, which means competing with office buildings for space. It also raises numerous food security issues of its own – would a vertical farm have to require government-level security to protect against terrorist activity and other threats to the food supply?

There remain major environmental questions as well. Although the planners have claimed that a vertical farm would be a net producer of energy, this has not yet been empirically proven, and even Despommier admits that their energy usage estimates may be overly optimistic. It is clear that vertical farming is environmentally inferior to traditional agriculture in at least one respect: most plants in a skyscraper farm will necessarily have little if any access to sunlight. Providing 24-hour lighting in such a unit will require a tremendous amount of electricity; while the planners claim that this will come to 26.5 million Kw/h per year, there is good reason to think it could be actually be much more. A controlled environment will add considerably to that total, and even if the building is LEED standard the energy required for cooling and heating will show considerable variance depending on local factors. Greenhouse growing also requires a great deal of ventilation in order to be efficient, and it is not yet clear how best to design a skyscraper that meets this requirement. Finally, the planners’ assumptions for animal husbandry are closely modeled on industrial farms, which have come under intense fire in recent years for inhumane practices.

A final (critical) evaluation
Personally speaking, I love the vertical farm concept, but I am deeply skeptical that it will ever be successful, at least not in the ambitious form Despommier and his colleagues have envisioned. Controlled environment agriculture has always been an energy-intensive project, and I doubt that the additions of animal husbandry and methane digestion can make it energy self-sufficient. I also think the real estate costs and logistical challenges may be insurmountable. But the vertical farm has a spark of imagination behind it, and may ultimately inspire another, more feasible model.

Watch the interview with Dr.Dickson Despommier on the Colbert Report.

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This week, São Paulo is hosting the International Conference on Biofuels. Organized by the Brazilian government at the Hyatt Hotel, the event wants to encourage an international discussion on ethanol production and application worldwide. So far, the plenary session that called my particular attention was the Plenary Session III on “Biofuels and Sustainability” moderated by Marina Silva, the former Brazilian Minister of Environment. Some of the participants brought up a very provocative subject – the “Black Agenda”.

For Maria Foster, Director for Gas and Energy at Petrobras, the “Black Agenda” is an international lobby against international certification of Brazilian ethanol. In her opinion, this group is blocking worldwide commercialization of Brazilian ethanol because of oil companies’ concerns regarding the potential of ethanol on a global scale.

Why certification is important
Alicia Bárbacena, Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), highlighted the fact that it is very important to certify internationally all kind of products, services and commodities to guarantee their qualities and origination. Several standards testify for good practices, ethics and environmental friendly procedures of the production. Roberto Smeraldi, Director at Amigos da Terra (a Brazilian NGO), pointed out that ECLAC is trying to achieve a similar international standard to that of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

Conspiracy theories
Back to the Black Agenda. Talking to some of the participants after the panel, they were even more open about their concerns. Several of them believed in the existence of such a conspiracy to curb the promotion and commercialization of Brazilian ethanol as a new fuel option. Others felt Mrs. Foster attributes too much of the resistance to the oil lobby, and that critics are correct in highlighting food security, deforestation due to agricultural expansion and labor concerns associated with Brazilian ethanol.

Conspiracy theories fascinate us. However, is the real explanation behind the slow acceptance of Brazilian ethanol a justifiable ‘prejudice’ because of the social and environmental impact of ethanol production? If not which companies should be afraid of ethanol success – why would they not just acquire ethanol interests?

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