It was a disappointing to be unable to get there in person due to a hiccup in paperwork. The good news is that hiccup is now resolved and for the rest of the year I should be able to travel as expected.
The first discussion at the Summit was a panel to explore how the US market is responding and adapting to the demands of a climate-centric livestock industry and a carbon net-zero road map.
As this was an Ag Tech summit, there was a focus on technology, as you would expect, data management, and blockchain. Products to reduce enteric emissions were naturally mentioned. Biogas digesters were another technology that were covered, which is a technology whose time has come as, of course, the methane captured is an increasingly valuable commodity.
There can be very few people who have not heard of Regenerative Agriculture in the past couple of years. It has become a topic of mainstream discussion in media that we would not usually expect to talk about agriculture at all. On the whole, coverage is positive and particularly in those more general public facing media.
In academic circles, there may have been a less enthusiastic embrace of regenerative agriculture. This may well have to do with the fact that academics who have spent an entire career promoting one paradigm find it harder to shift paradigms than people who have been less invested.
There are a number of leading voices who have been around for many years, and, of course, our own member the Savory Institute have been researching, practicing and teaching holistic management for decades, long before it became well known.
More recently, the Savory Institute has made the connection with the market through their Land to Market program, and answer the concerns of those who ask for evidence of better impacts through their Ecological Outcome Verification protocol.
Over the past few years, researchers have tried to understand some of the complexities involved in farming systems managed in various ways that can be defined as regenerative. Indeed, having a definition of regenerative agriculture is an important step in being able to talk about it with confidence. We should also bear in mind that one of the hallmarks of this approach is adaptive management of whole systems, and therefore any definition needs to be broad enough to encompass that.
Going back to that AgTech Summit discussion on climate-centric livestock, I was struck by how the tech approach skirted around the issue of soil carbon, and complexity. Jason Rowntree and colleagues recently reported in this paper: "current [livestock LCA] studies neither robustly consider complexity in diversified pasture-based livestock systems, nor consider the role of soil carbon (C) in GHG flux as well as land-use tradeoffs." Yet those considerations are highly important.
That particular study was only looking at one property but their comparison with conventional commodity production yielded this conclusion:
"We compared the production outputs, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, land footprints, and soil health outcomes to a conventional, commodity (COM) production system of each respective species. Our 20-year MSPR chronosequence of soil C and other soil health indicators shows dramatic improvement since establishment, sequestering an average of 2.29 Mg C ha−1 yr−1. Incorporation of soil C sequestration into the LCA reduced net GHG emissions of the MSPR by 80%, resulting in a footprint 66% lower than COM."
The paper also considers that Multi Species Pasture Rotation system (MSPR) requires more land to produce the same amount of food, but does so while improving the health of the land base.
Since GRSB released our Principles & Criteria in 2014, we have emphasised the importance of improving ecosystem health.
Our Natural Resources principle includes:
"This principle is based on the concept that ecosystem processes are managed through adoption of practices designed to sustain and restore ecosystem health throughout the beef production system.
"Such practices enhance biodiversity and provide ecosystem services including carbon sequestration; water recharge, filtration and conservation; resource use efficiency; managing for healthy soil conditions; and contribute to resilience, including the ability of ecosystems to recover from extreme climate and weather events while supporting continued use. This principle is achieved through continuous improvement across all criteria."
The criteria include:
1. Environmental stewardship objectives are attained through adaptive management, with activities monitored to achieve continuous improvement of measurable natural resource management outcomes.
2. Practices are implemented to improve air quality.
3. Net greenhouse gas emissions from the beef value chain are minimized on a per unit of product basis.
4. Native forests are protected from deforestation. Grasslands, other native ecosystems, and high conservation value areas are protected from land conversion and degradation.
5. Land management practices conserve and enhance the health of ecosystems and high conservation value areas throughout all sectors of the beef value chain.
6. Water resources (including quality and quantity attributes), are responsibly and efficiently managed to support ecological function and availability.
7. Soil health is maintained or improved through implementation of appropriate management practices.
8. The beef value chain contributes to the maintenance or enhancement of native plant and animal biological diversity.
From the beginning, GRSB has been looking for much more than purely technical fixes. While the above is not prescriptive, it clearly outlines positive outcomes.
I could write another newsletter focusing on our "Efficiency and Innovation" principle that would focus on technical innovations, but what I wanted to do was to show that our intention has always been to deliver on an increasingly healthy land base as part of our whole of chain sustainability approach.
I do not see any tension in the above with Regenerative Agriculture. I am sometimes a little disappointed to see some proponents of regenerative ag making statements suggesting that sustainability is about continuing to do the same thing or maintaining a current level of soil health etc. Our definition of sustainability is very much deeper than that, and accommodates regenerative agriculture very thoroughly.
Positive%20version.png)
