Every Leading Democratic candidate supports a form of conservation
The gig is up on the last fifty years of chemical-and export driven food production.
Every leading Democratic candidate supports a form of conservation that can reduce greenhouse gases and create jobs in rural America.
With the chaos of the Iowa Caucus app and all the noise of the debates this was missed. Over the past year Democratic candidates the climate crisis and agriculture that could change the way our food system operates.
Every leading Democratic campaign now endorses an aggressive approach to conservation that could dramatically reduce greenhouse gases, improve water quality and enhance rural prosperity.
Candidates lined up to tour Matt Russell’s organic farm in central Iowa over the past year to learn about how a diversified cropping system involving livestock can suck carbon out of the air and sequester it in the soil to feed us better. Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren came up with plans that would restructure farm policy to direct funding away from subsidizing production and toward conservation.
Export markets for American ag commodities are falling apart. The world has been telling us through markets for years that we are growing about 30% too much corn and soy. Meanwhile, we are killing the Gulf of Mexico with excessive commercial fertilizer, which washes down the Mississippi River. California and Australia burn in part because we are spewing too much nitrogen – as problematic as CO2 for global warming – from our broken agrichemical system.
Increasing numbers of midwestern farmers who watched their fields wash away in last spring’s scouring torrents are showing up at field days offered by the Practical Farmers of Iowa, which preaches the gospel of making money on the farm by saving soil and reducing chemical costs. They watch the weather closer than anyone, and they’re ready to look into the old way of doing things – grazing in rotation with a diverse series of carbon-capturing crops – to find a way forward.
Candidates started to explore the topic at a rural forum organized in Storm Lake last March by the Iowa Farmers Union. The discussion intensified during the summer as a loose coalition of Iowans, led by the former agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack, pushed candidates to pay farmers for environmental services instead of insuring them for planting in a flood plain.
Bernie Sanders is all-in with the Green New Deal. Joe Biden, advised by Vilsack, came up with his own comprehensive plan. Buttigieg is now conversant in how microbial activity in the soil can reverse nitrogen loss to air and surface water.
Candidates embraced the idea that renewable energy – wind, solar, hydrogen – can not only ameliorate the climate crisis but also create high-paying technical jobs in rural communities hemorrhaging people.
You wouldn’t know it by the non-stop coverage of the percentage fractions separating the leading Democratic campaigns, or whether Sanders insulted Warren, or how Senator Susan Collins equivocated again after lunch. But, as the Amazon shrinks, our quiet revolution in agriculture policy might be the most important story of the news cycle.
The Amazon is shrinking, farmers are going bankrupt and crops are failing. Agrichemicals can’t fix this. Farmers are waking up to the deception of the agrichemcal industry. Climate change is a priority in Iowa this year. It’s encouraging to see this shift.
The Democrats in the House has passed important bills that would make significant change in how our government runs. The real issues getting rid of Trump,Trump’s incompetence, corruption, climate change, wellness are not on the debate stage.