At the 36th annual Ecological Farming Conference in California, which was held on Wednesday 20 January and attended by around 900 farmers and others, the emphasis of the opening comments had less to do with improving business and more about improving the world.
And for one speaker, his address to the organic farmers and others in the industry focused on how changing the way farmers grow may help save this planet’s oceans and Earth, itself.
“The largest contributor to [carbon dioxide] admissions is industrial agriculture,” said John Roulac, founder and chief executive officer of Nutiva, one of the world’s top-growing organic food manufacturers.
“People think it’s cars” that are the top contributors to carbon dioxide in the air, but greenhouse gasses released in the manufacturing of synthetic fertilizers for farming are bigger problems," Roulac said.
Add to that farms with nothing growing part of the year, he explained, so plants aren’t capturing that carbon in the air and using it to build their root systems and instill nutrients into the ground — a process called “carbon sequestration.”
Organic farming techniques tend to promote sequestration, as organic farms tend to grow more crops on their land over the course of a year, so there are fewer periods of bare farmland.
Roulac said no-organic or “conventional” farmers can adopt similar techniques or other methods — such as planting grass between rows of trees in orchards — to promote sequestration. And if enough farmers do this, he said, it could significantly slow damage caused by carbon dioxide to plankton — which provides about two thirds of Earth’s oxygen and sustains sea life.
It may seem a stretch to tell farmers they could help save the world, but organic farmers have believed they’ve been doing that pretty much as long as the organic movement has existed, said Amigo Bob Cantisano, who organized the first conference in 1980 in the meeting room of the fire station in the Northern California city of Winters.
Back then, only 45 people attended to hear a single speaker, as Cantisano — then working as a supplier for organic farmers — was looking for a way to get his customers connected and to share their knowledge of what then wasn’t a very well-known industry.
But in the late ’80s, concerns about the safety of a pesticide used on apples, gained national attention, and celebrities including Meryl Streep got involved, Cantisano recounted.
“All of a sudden it was a huge issue,” he said. “Grocery [store] chains called organic farmers because mothers wanted to feed their kids organics.”
And once the number of organic farmers rose to meet that increased demand, larger manufactures were next to seek out organic farmers to supply them with crops to make organic foods ranging from breads to milk, said Cantisano, adding that millennials who have become parents now are the driving force in the demand for organics.
As a result, organic crops, which comprised just .01 percent of California’s agricultural sales in the early 1980s, now comprise about 2 percent, Cantisano noted.
And not surprisingly, California is the leading organic farming movements, with sales of organic crops and livestock in the state totaling $2.2 billion in 2014 — nearly twice the sales of the the next largest producer, Washington state — the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports.
Certainly, 2 percent isn’t a big ratio compared to conventional farming, but the demand for organics isn’t showing signs of slowing down. Some at the conference noted that though many farmers aren’t ready to discard their chemicals and shift fully to organic farming, many are adopting some organic methods and using more ecologically friendly chemicals.
And some of these methods could be particularly helpful because of California’s drought.
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Source: www.thecalifornian.com