A1.6 Regenerative agriculture *
Support/educate farmers about regenerative agricultural practices, such as low-till, no-till, silvoculture/silvopasture/agroforestry, and treecropping.
Project Drawdown ranks this as the 11th most promising idea for reducing global emissions of the eighty they prioritized. (Their definition includes no tillage, diverse cover crops, in-farm fertility, no pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, and multiple crop rotations.)
They say farms are seeing soil carbon levels rise from a baseline of 1 to 2 percent up to 5 to 8 percent over ten or more years, which can add up to 25 to 60 tons of carbon per acre, and estimate that these practices could increase globally from 108 million acres of current adoption, to a total of 1 billion acres by 2050. In their modelling, this could result in a total reduction of 23.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide, from sequestration and reduced emissions, providing a $1.9 trillion financial return by 2050 on an investment of $57 billion.
This is well beyond their estimate for conservation agriculture, their label for more conventional no-till farming with crop rotations, which they estimate sequesters an average of half a ton of carbon per acre. (It still ranks 16th, because there’s a great deal of it in their model.) (They provide a number of references for both of these.)
The Forum for the Future’s led a collaborative process with stakeholders from across the American agriculture system to identify the key opportunities to scale regenerative agriculture in the US. Their recent report, “Growing Our Future: Scaling Regenerative Agriculture in the United States of America” identifies sixteen barriers to scale along with a seven-point-plan to help overcome them and drive transformational change, as well as lot of references to actual current efforts to shift the system through both policy & practice.
Diverse cover crops –
Carbon Washington has a flyer with a Washington cover cropping example at the end.
No-till planting –
Carbon Washington has a flyer about an Eastern Washington example. The Thurston Conservation District has a farm equipment rental program, and would like to add a no-till planter to it, but doesn’t have the money for it.
Multiple crop rotations –
Managed grazing –
According to Project Drawdown, which ranks this as the 19th most promising idea for reducing global emissions of the eighty they prioritized:
Improved grazing can be very good for the land and sequester from one-half to three tons of carbon per acre. This solution can sequester 16.3 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050. Note that this does not reduce the 10 gigatons of methane that are emitted on that grazing land today. Growth in adoption of managed grazing practices would need to rise from 195 million acres to 1.1 billion acres over thirty years. Estimated financial returns by 2050 are $735 billion on a $51 billion additional investment.
(They provide a number of references.) Carbon Washington has a flyer about an Eastern Washington example.