Rant ahead: Recently, 10 african american residents of Duplin County, NC, successfully sued #smithfieldfoods for $50mil, citing noxious fumes resulting from their industrial swine lagoons. This was a huge win for the #EnvironmentalJustice and #environmentalracism movements!
Today, the win was slashed to $2.5mil from 50, based on the "Agricultural and Forestry Nuisance Bill" (house bill 467)- which, as of last year, limits damages to ONLY property value loss, completely excluding loss of quality of life.
Sponsors of the bill were NC Reps Jimmy Dixon and @JohnBellNC. Guess who their top campaign contributors are? North Carolina Pig Council, and, you guessed it, Smithfield. Tell me, gentleman- who do you really work for? Seems obvious to me. Time to drain the actual swamp.
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I don't think we should be engaging soil C sequestration on working lands in the C offset market. Here's why:
1. It takes a lot of samples to accurately detect and quantify SOC change against large spatial heterogeneity. I talk about this in-depth here sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
2. Current MRV standards (e.g., CAR, Verra) aren't setting rigorous enough sample standards to meet these sample requirements. They require a minimum of 3 samples per strata, which is arbitrary & insufficiently powered to detect change & generate offsets on these landscapes.
3. C projects are using these protocols to measure SOC sequestration & generate offsets, thinking it's the gold standard, meanwhile preaching that they're using the best possible methods to collect samples and verify C offsets
Happy Friday - let's talk about sexism in academic culture. I've been afraid to be specific about it on social media + have mostly gone silent on here bc of it, but this week was my last straw.
Here's a few examples of blatantly sexist interactions I've had in the past >2 years:
1. When my WOP paper came out last year, I was attacked by white male twitter. I responded relentlessly to their critiques, but it mostly came down to white dudes who a) knew next to nothing about soil C, b) didn't agree with the paper, and c) couldn't fathom being wrong
1a. They collectively had larger followings than me & managed to rally their troops to aid in their attack. They posted multiple rounds of YouTube videos, back-of-the envelope calculations, & threads that were completely inaccurate. But it didn't matter - they had the following.
A long🧵on why policy (vs individual actions) makes more sense as a theory of change towards sustainable agriculture:
1. Policy created the problem. We can trace back origins of industrial ag to "fencerow to fencerow" policies advocated for by Nixon's Secretary of Ag, Earl Butz
2. This was largely to solidify hegemony of the US (among other things like trade aid) early in the industrial rev
3. This is not a simple supply/demand issue. Increased demand of beef did not lead to increased corn production and more beef via feedlots. Industrial policy did ^
4. All that 🌽 production (goodbye, Earl!) had to go somewhere, which is why we feed so much of it to livestock and have created numerous other outlets for its use, including ethanol, food preservatives/sweeteners, etc etc. More 🌽 > more + cheaper 🐄🐔🐖 > increased consumption
Let me be clear: when I speak on "regenerative agriculture"-I'm talking about a systems-scale change in our approach to agriculture.
Not just cover crops, compost, rotational grazing, ad-hoc on one farm.
The whole of regenerative ag is equal to more than its constituent parts
When I think of regenerative ag, I'm thinking of an entirely different food system.
- Rewarding multi-functionality vs just yield
- Rethinking ownership of land & resources (cooperatives?)
- Learning from those (largely indigeneous) folx who are already doing these things^
And even bigger, like:
- Ending perverse incentives for monocrops imposed by big trade orgs & deals
- Rebuilding the land-grant complex to not operate on such a knowledge deficit model driven by corporate interests
- Re-linking rural viability to regenerative production systems
- land use change is responsible for a large % of grassland related GHGs
- Overgrazing is associated with shifting grasslands from GHG sink to source
- "sparsely" grazed grasslands are an important C sink
But, it falls into familiar traps on grazing "intensity". Grazing management can be "intensive" while maintaining other "extensive" characteristics (landscape, low inputs, etc).
LOUDER FOR THE ONES IN THE BACK: grazing "intensity" is not synonymous with overgrazing!!!
Not to sound like a broken record, but we have a lot of work to do to disentangle ideas of "intensity" of inputs/irrigation, w/ "intensity" of management. My research has thus far shown positive soil C & overall CO2e impacts from "intense" grazing management - not vice versa.
- @whiteoakpasture was sequestering 2.29 Mg C/ha/yr, which lowered its LCA footprint by 80%
- when comparing this to commodity animal production, @whiteoakpasture had a 66% lower GHG footprint after considering soil C
- multi-species pasture rotation *did* require more land to produce the same amount of food compared to commodity
- however, this land was restored from degraded cropland (peanut/cotton)
- in short - this does NOT mean that MSPR = deforestation/land use change from native lands