Agriculture is part of the solution to climate change, say farming leaders
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Farmers and industry leaders have been to the Copenhagen environment summit to promote farming as a green industry and rebuff criticisms linking meat-eating with climate change.
As many as 300 farming delegates from all over the world took part in a Agriculture and Rural Development Day, a fringe meeting, on Saturday, December 12, 2009.
Ian Backhouse, chairman of the NFU's combinable crops board, said that he was going to attend because he was concerned that recent calls to cut carbon emission by reducing meat consumption had unfairly branded farmers as big polluters.
"Our involvement in any of these conferences is to ensure that we don't unfairly get lumbered with the blame and secondly, any policies that come out of it are consequently common sense policies.
"We are one of the biggest possible solutions to the causes because we produce plants and plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere," he said.
Grazing animals are not a danger to the planet as long as they fed on what they are meant to be fed on, which is to say the green stuff that grows in meadows and such, called, yes, grass. Cattle, sheep, goats and others are not meat to eat grain. That's for chickens. When will we understand that.
Pigs, on the other hand, are great omnivores and, as the recycling system of the Zabbaleen shows, are great digesters of food waste. Unfortunately, that practice of feeding them so-called swill was outlawed in Britain after a Foot & Mouth Disease outbreak, calimed to be the result of something that was in the swill.
Ian Backhouse of the NFU also planned to promote using anaerobic digesters to cut emissions and create cleaner energy.
But he said he was concerned that farming was not higher up the Copenhagen summit agenda, and rightly so, I would hasten to add.
"It does not recognise that agriculture could be one of the big solutions to the whole climate change subject," Mr Backhouse said.
Then again, agriculture, especially livestock, has been targeted as something to be gotten rid off because of the pressure by the vegetarian and vegan groups and the animal liberation people. None of the understand that none of those animals would live were it not for the fact that they are farmed for food.
Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, slammed world leaders for once again leaving agriculture off the main Copenhagen climate change agenda.
"Agriculture should be something central, not peripheral to Copenhagen," said Mr Holden.
He said farmers could lock up carbon by tilling soil less and improving the fertility of the land, for instance, by using organic farming methods.
"We would offset 23% of total farming emissions from agriculture by harnessing the capacity of soil," he said.
"If all farmers switched to systems based on crop retention to build fertility, that would represent the biggest change in agricultural practices for 60 years," said Mr Holden.
Manure and compost is the way to go, as is leaving land fallow every four years and the use of crop rotation. This is being treated though as if it is entirely new an rocket science, which it is not. The way the Amish in the USA farm should be the best example as to soil health and productivity by using natural methods.
The fact that ever since the Second World War the CO2 load in the atmosphere began to increase is due to the fact also that we then began to use chemical “fertilizers” rather than manure, crop rotation, and leaving land fallow every four years.
The old system locked up carbon in the soil and also absorbed CO2 into the soil, as healthy soil does. However, the chemical fertilizers do not improve the soil and soil health. They do in fact the opposite. They destroy soil fertility and -health as they are a plant food only.
Time we got back to sense and to the older proper methods of farming and to small family farms and away from the huge multi-national agri-industry that is destroying land and everything else.
© 2010
