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Plants hold the key to removing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Can we make them more efficient carbon storers and feed the planet in the process?
<br>
-By James Wong
</h3>
<br>
<br>
<p>
When you consider the scale of the agricultural industry, which covers 1.5 billion hectares (5.8 million sq miles) of the planet's surface, you can sometimes lose sight of what is at its heart: plants.
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Cutting down rainforests and digging up peatlands to create swathes of new farmland might be a significant driver of climate change, and needs to be stopped, but innovating with crops can help to mitigate some of this.
<br>
<br>
Crops, like all plants, draw carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere during the process of photosynthesis, which they use to generate stores of energy from sunlight. Some of that carbon is fixed in the soil, where it will remain if left untouched. Plants are part of a once balanced system that saw carbon cycling in and out of natural reservoirs in the land, sea, atmosphere and living things. So, could farmers redress the balance by using the vast amount of crops and land needed to feed us; as carbon sinks that capture and store carbon in the ground?
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I asked Paul Hawken, the author behind Project Drawdown, which has modelled the 100 most substantive solutions to reversing global warming, why we need to rethink the carbon cycle. He says it is a misunderstanding to think of carbon as pollution – rather, it is part of a cycle that is out of balance.
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The carbon stored on Earth vastly outweighs the carbon in our atmosphere. There is more than three trillion tonnes of carbon in farmlands, grasslands, forests, mangroves and wetlands – that is four times as much carbon as in the atmosphere, Hawken told me, adding that if we are able to increase stored carbon by 9% on Earth, just on the land, we will have sequestered all the carbon that humans have emitted since 1800. Hawken raises an interesting point: terms like ''carbon offsetting'' and ''net zero'' are commonly used, but to reverse the effects of climate change we will need to go beyond that by storing more carbon than we emit into the atmosphere.
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And that doesn't include carbon stored in marine and aquatic systems. While visiting Portugal, I saw another innovator planting kelp forests to store carbon - and perhaps one day be used as a food source. Kelp, the largest species of seaweed, is a type of photosynthesising algae and not a plant.
<br>
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And what if we could make cows green too? Cow methane is not a problem with the animal, but the microbes in its stomach. You can suppress this microbial activity by adding small quantities of charcoal or seaweed to the cow’s diet – which has no impact at all on our health or the health of the animal.
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By cutting open sections of their leaves, kelp spores can be harvested, dried, cooled and sprayed onto gravel, which is then dropped into the sea. These stones, coated in kelp spores, then seed an underwater forest which only takes a few months to grow, quickly working to sequester carbon on the seabed.
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Kelp is also a threatened species, so this work goes some way to protect biodiversity, too.
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Kelp forests might look a little different to traditional farms, but seaweed is a natural source of the important EPA and DHA omega-3s, which are otherwise only found in animals. Kelp could one day be a very important source of low-climate impact nutrition.
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<br>
Returning to dry land for a moment, I also had the privilege of visiting researchers at the University of Illinois's Ripe project, which is experimenting with the way plants grow. Photosynthesis is a process that has evolved over millions of years. So, it's strange to think that we could make the process better, but that is exactly what Lisa Ainsworth, the deputy director of Ripe, and her colleagues are trying to do.
<br>
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The team here are modifying the genetics of plants to try to address more than one weakness in the way they photosynthesise – from boosting plants' efficiency, to increasing reaction times when they transition from shade to sun, and even altering the density of the leaves.
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For example, in a field of plants, only the uppermost leaves photosynthesise at maximum efficiency. The leaves lower down are in the shadow of the leaves higher up, and so they receive less sunlight and don't photosynthesise as well. In fact, the lowest leaves might even contribute to carbon emissions (like animals, plants also respire, breathing in oxygen through their leaves and ''exhaling'' carbon dioxide).
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By making the uppermost leaves less dense, more light will penetrate lower down, meaning a greater surface area will be photosynthesising efficiently – that's the idea, anyway. The advances the team are making are still works in progress.
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But it is an exciting time to be trying to fix the carbon cycle. There are opportunities for farmers to increase the amount of carbon that's stored in soil by taking a close look at what we grow and how we grow it.
<br>
<br>
In recent times, the term carbon offsetting has been used a lot, but what I know from speaking to experts is that it can be misused. The goal should be to leave as much carbon in the ground as possible, rather than to pay to continue to pollute as before, and plants will be key to achieving this.
</p>
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<br>
<h3>
Five food and agriculture experts share their plans for safeguarding our crops for future generations.
<br>
-By William Park
</h3>
<br>
<br>
<p>
Last year was incredibly difficult for those working in the food industry. But, where there is uncertainty there are also opportunities, and the pandemic has encouraged many of us to take stock of what we do. If we could reimagine our global food system, is there a way to make it more resilient should there be another global crisis? And if so, can we fix some of the other problems with agriculture, like mitigating its climate impact, at the same time?
<br>
<br>
Those were the questions we posed to five experts and industry leaders in the fields of food security and sustainability. They identified a common theme – farmers, and the choices we make alongside them as consumers, will have a meaningful impact on climate change. And in turn, better farming will improve global health.
<br>
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Farmers are important custodians of much of the world’s land. They manage “almost three-quarters of the land in England, producing food for people today and protecting land for the next generation”, says Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the UK’s Environment Agency. Globally, half of the world’s habitable land is currently used in agriculture. “A lot of responsibility for managing these issues falls on their shoulders, they need more support from wider society to make good decisions and keep going.”
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Howard Boyd identifies extreme weather – being made worse by climate change – as an example of how farmers are pushed to the limit. The UK, for example, experienced its wettest February on record in 2020, followed by the sunniest spring. In California and Australia, wildfires decimated enormous areas of parched land.
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“The climate emergency will increasingly shift us from one extreme to the other, and water, whether too much, too little, or its quality, will be a big concern,” says Howard Boyd.
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While the effects of drought on soil quality and risk of wildfires are more obvious, too much water brings its own problems. Increases in rainfall contribute to more pollution from farms washing into the wider environment, particularly in the dairy sector. The solution, says Howard Boyd, needs to be multidisciplinary, including financially incentivising sustainable farming practices, creating habitats for nature recovery and establishing new woodland.
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<br>
“When we think about innovation, we usually think about new technology, but I’m hoping to see a more integrated approach with the natural resources we already have,” says Howard Boyd. “The Environment Agency works with farmers to tackle the root causes of pollution and to help environmentally sustainable, and profitable, agriculture.”
<br>
<br>
For those farmers working in drier climates than Britain, climate change is resulting in land degradation – the quality of the land being farmed is decreasing. Land degradation affects almost half of the world’s population, as soil erodes away and nutrients are depleted. The challenge for farmers is to reverse this trend while feeding a growing population.
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“We are still degrading more land and we are still harvesting more water, so where are we going?” asks Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.
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“There is no continent in the world that is spared by climate change, by land degradation, by drought and by degradation of ecosystems,” he says. “Africa is probably the largest continent in terms of the amount of land that is affected by land degradation. But if you go to Asia, because of the size of the population, you have more people in Asia affected by land degradation than anywhere else in the world.”
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The good news is that there are solutions to land degradation, too, says Thiaw. “We can still restore degraded land into productive land.” Thiaw is inspired by high-tech offerings in other sectors, including the use of blockchain to track goods across the world, but believes land degradation could be solved with the comparatively low-tech “regenerative agriculture”.
<br>
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This style of agriculture encourages the use of cover crops ensuring the land is covered with one crop or other the whole year – and areas of tree cover, both of which help to prevent soil erosion by wind or rain, maintain water and help to sequester carbon in the ground through their deep roots.
<br>
<br>
“We don’t think it is enough to sustain the topsoil that we have now – we think we need to regenerate it because the world has lost about a third of its topsoil,” says Jeff Harmening, president of food producer General Mills. “And only the first few feet of soil on the Earth are responsible for all the food we produce.”
<br>
<br>
General Mills has set a target of transforming one million acres of farmland (an area a little larger than Yosemite National Park) using regenerative agriculture by 2030. It might sound like an enormous area, but there are 915 million acres of farmland in the US alone. For regenerative agriculture to have a transformative effect, it will need buy-in from masses of farms.
<br>
<br>
“One company the size of General Mills is big enough to make a difference but it is not big enough to make the difference,” says Harmening. “It is just a start but it is a good start and a big start to prove the theory of the case. If we do not get started now we are not going to like the result. We really can’t wait.”
<br>
<br>
Future global pandemics, similar to what we are living through now, could be more likely because of some existing farming practices. “The intensification of agricultural production has come with unsustainable exploitation of natural resources,” says Pierre Ferrand, an agroecologist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in the Asia-Pacific region. “This combined with the increasing impacts of climate change and global uncertainties, exposes communities to more hazards. Large-scale livestock production has been driving natural habitat loss and has pushed the agricultural frontier into wilder and less-arable lands, potentially contributing to creating the conditions for viruses circulating, mixing and spreading to humans.”
</p>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3>
Covid-19 has highlighted the pressures on farmers and distributors to meet ‘just in time’ deliveries.
<br>
- By James Wong
</h3>
<br>
<br>
<p>
I live in the UK where in the early days of the pandemic, grocery store shelves emptied long before we were told to stop going to the pub, schools closed and face masks became mandatory. The severity of what was approaching only hit home for some people when the rice and pasta ran out.
<br>
<br>
Other people around the world were far less fortunate than I was. In Africa, 73 million people across 36 countries are deemed acutely food-insecure as a result of Covid-19 by the World Food Programme, compared to half a million in Europe. The Democratic Republic of the Congo – already dealing with the effects of ongoing Ebola outbreaks – and South Sudan were among the worst affected by this sudden change in food supply.
<br>
<br>
Farmers in Africa have struggled to get hold of seeds, while in the US huge numbers of livestock were culled because of difficulty getting to abattoirs, and milk was poured down the drain. The pandemic has highlighted how fragile our food chain – from field to fork – really is.
<br>
<br>
But have we learned anything from the experience about food security? And how might we be better prepared next time?
<br>
<br>
I spoke to Riaz Bhunnoo, the director of the UK’s global food security programme, who says that in that country at least, the food system responded fairly well despite the headlines. Empty shelves were the result of logistics issues which quickly sorted themselves out, rather than actual shortages.
Meanwhile developing countries reliant on migrant labour faced more significant challenges with harvesting and getting food to market. Labour-intensive work, particularly around harvests, caused bottlenecks in the production line.
<br>
<br>
In Europe, asparagus was the canary in the coal mine. Widespread lockdowns and restrictions on movement across international borders meant big challenges for the usual army of seasonal workers who travel to pick, sort and pack fresh produce on farms across Europe. The UK, for example, relies upon at least 75,000 temporary agricultural workers, the bulk of whom come from elsewhere in the European Union. Hundreds of thousands more – many from outside the EU – are brought in to work in fields and vineyards in Italy, Spain, Germany and France. Farmers were desperate for local workers to replace the migrant labour gap – overall there was an estimated shortfall of more than one million seasonal agricultural workers in Europe.
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<br>
The asparagus harvest is early in the season – around May – before many other vegetables. Without people to pick them, the delicate vegetables risked rotting in the fields.
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<br>
Similar issues were experienced around the world. In Australia nearly half of the workforce on vegetable farms are temporary migrants and in the US, 10% are, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization. Canadian farms rely upon more than 60,000 migrant workers. In Brazil, farmers struggled with the coffee crop; in India, large seasonal workforces that move around within the country were unavailable due to the lockdown.
<br>
<br>
Manuwant Choudhary, a farmer from Samastipur in eastern India, says he was particularly hurt by the lockdown initially because his migrant labourers were not given dispensation to travel from Punjab for work. At one time, he had 20 acres of land ready to harvest on his small family farm, but no one to harvest it.
<br>
<br>
“But then I can’t even blame their absence for my plight,” says Choudhary. “Even if I had managed to harvest, I would have to store the grain until the lockdown was lifted. Transport is shut and the flour mills are closed.”
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<br>
“For four days after the lockdown – until the end of March – I was able to send 50kg of brinjal (aubergine) to the market, using local labour,” he says. “But as the coronavirus fears spread, they stopped coming.”
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Choudhary also had to compete with other employers for migrant labour. Usually a migrant farmer works the harvest season in the country before returning to cities to take up other seasonal work. Many were choosing just to stay in the cities.
To help the agricultural industry cope, governments were forced to step in – launching ambitious recruitment drives to find “agricultural armies” from within their own borders, or even flying in groups of workers from abroad who were afforded special rights.
<br>
<br>
But even in countries like Germany they had a real issue with getting migrant labour in, says Katy Askew, the editor of Food Navigator magazine. The European Commission made some provisions to try to keep the flow of labour moving. But these more affluent countries, she says, might choose to step up their reliance on mechanisation in future.
<br>
<br>
In New Zealand, engineers have been developing automated robots that might be able to take on some of the most repetitive and arduous parts of harvesting. Robotics Plus has built a prototype robot that can trundle through kiwi-fruit orchards while reaching up with its octopus-like arms to pluck the fruit from the canopy above and sort them by size. The company founder, Steven Saunders, has been testing the robots in his own kiwi-fruit orchard.
<br>
<br>
“The robots can pick 24 hours a day, if needed,” says Saunders. “It means human workers can be deployed elsewhere, which really helps with productivity.”
<br>
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He and his team are also developing robots capable of harvesting other crops, such as asparagus. “The trouble is that there is no universal way of harvesting fruit and vegetables,” says Saunders. “You need a bespoke picker for each crop – the way you pick an apple versus a strawberry or a blueberry is totally different.” (Read more about the robots that can pick kiwi-fruit.)
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<br>
Elsewhere, other companies are working on their own solutions. Florida-based Harvest Crop Robotics, for example, is working on machines that can automatically harvest strawberries while researchers at the University of Cambridge have built a robot for picking lettuce.
<br>
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But robotised agriculture is likely to be limited to only the wealthiest farmers while costs are so high. “The big barrier to the adoption of ag tech is of course farmers’ ability to invest, because farmers operate on really thin margins, so when you’re talking about the huge in advance capital expenditures, it’s going to be a huge challenge,” says Askew.
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We have also seen the difficulty of working under social distancing restrictions in the meat sector. Covid cases in meat processing plants have been high. These workplaces are incredibly hygienic but it’s thought that the loud noise in the plants forces workers to shout, expelling more viral particles. It’s also very difficult to do this job without being close to other people.
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Most food, around 90%, stays within the borders of the country or continent in which it is grown. But this doesn’t make it exempt from shortages. Much of the food chain relies on “just in time” systems – which is really just a way to stop the need for large warehouses packed full of goods. As with the flour shortage in my local supermarket, there was enough food – it just wasn’t in the right place. Food chains are highly precise networks that rely on getting products to stores with the minimum amount of delay. This keeps food fresh and means it is left sitting on shelves as little as possible. (Read more about how coronavirus is changing grocery shopping.)
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Urban farmers and local producers have proven their worth in lockdown. Some are using issues with the supply chain as evidence that the system is broken and that we should be buying hyper-local from micro producers. While there is certainly a need to reduce the footprint of the food we eat, some innovators are proving that you can be local and large. Underground farming shows there is space in big cities to farm at scale if you know the right places to look. What we should be doing is making better use of the land available.
And speaking of space, satellite technology has a place in the supply network, too. Using images from space we can measure the nutrient content of land either to identify new areas in which to farm more efficiently or react to deficiencies in farmland to treat the soil quickly.
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The most vulnerable people will of course have felt the worst impacts of errors in the supply chain. But Bhunnoo is optimistic that the pandemic could be a rare chance for change by thinking about how we make the food system not just more resilient, but healthier and more sustainable. “The pandemic’s given us a real opportunity to build back better,” he says.
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For me, one of the most frustrating faults in the food chain is the amount we lose in household waste. Of all the food thrown away, 70% could have been eaten and around 40% of all food goes to waste somewhere along the chain. It’s no good refining the process of getting food to our plates if we throw so much of it away in the end. To be more sustainable, we need to make the most of everything we produce – especially while one in nine people in the world go hungry. (Read more about how to avoid throwing good food away.)
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US company Apeel has come up with a way that will prolong the shelf life of fresh fruit and vegetables, meaning less food waste. Apeel studied the properties of fruit peels to produce a colourless and tasteless coating that can be applied to fruit and vegetables and dramatically increase their lifespan. It is even made from plant constituents like skins and pips that are frequently discarded during processing.
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Whether it’s robot fruit pickers, space scientists or underground farms, Covid-19 has taught us that where there are crises there are also opportunities. Food supply chains have existed for millennia, but they are now getting a very modern makeover.
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