By Ruth Dusseault. Bay City News.
Oddly enough, it's hard to find a job fighting in the era of climate change. But the organic farming industry is one place where a person can make a living by making a difference.
Food systems account for 20 to 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to World Bank data. Reinventing agriculture could impact the future as much as the electric car.
At last week's Organic Grower Summit, hosted by Western Growers and the Organic Produce Network, more than 600 growers and industry leaders, mostly from California, gathered in Monterey to share problems, solutions and business cards.
Big issues included new technologies and new government regulations that could increase costs. Behind almost every discussion was the regenerative health of soil and its potential to fight disease, repel pests and capture carbon.
California leads the nation in organic agriculture, with more than 3,000 certified farms, according to 2022 figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA. In 2021, the state’s organic sales exceeded $14 billion. That’s the equivalent of $43 per person in the U.S. who buys organic products. In the Bay Area region alone, which spans Monterey to Sonoma counties, there are more than 1,550 organic producers generating nearly $1.4 billion in annual gross sales.
Gradually, more conventional farmers are adopting organic products and some are transforming their multi-generational farmlands. They bring entrepreneurial experience, innovations and capital to what was once a niche economy.
“I’m in it for the money,” said Carlos Amaral, a San Mateo County grower, who said he’s willing to put up with the higher cost of production because the buyer is willing to pay more in return. Today’s younger buyers, he said, are more environmentally conscious.
But by March 2024, organic prices could rise as new USDA rules for organic certification go into effect. The Strengthening Organic Enforcement (SOE) rule will set new standards for everyone involved in production. Every link in the supply chain—growers, distributors, shippers, and importers—will need to be certified organic.
“You’re making sure they understand how to keep things organic,” said Danny Lee, an inspector with the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “You’ll be sure they’re not mixing organic products with non-organic products, which may have different pesticides or other inputs.”
It will be more expensive, he said, but whether that is passed on depends on who is willing to absorb those costs and what end retailers are willing to pay.
The summit focused on the unique challenges of specialty crops, such as leafy greens, berries and carrots. They are different from staple crops, such as corn and soybeans, which are grown on a large scale using herbicide-resistant seeds and industrial harvesting methods.
Specialty crops are labor intensive and synthetic herbicides like Roundup are not allowed on organically certified farms.
“What I see is that we have an oversaturated market for weeding,” said Bart Walker, who runs an equipment rental company.
Walker was referring to the array of mechanical weeders on display at the summit. Rather than asking workers to do the back-breaking work of pulling weeds by hand, engineers have designed a variety of machines to do just that. Pulled by a tractor, rotating paddles, blades and tines disturb the soil between rows of crops and prevent weeds from taking root.
“What I’m excited to see is more lasers,” Walker said.
“It turns out that having people walk through the field and pull weeds with hoes and tools will damage some of the plant structure,” said Paul Mikesell, inventor of Carbon Robotics’ LaserWeeder. “When the weed is tall enough for a person to pull it out, the root structure is deep enough to disrupt crop roots as well.”
The LaserWeeder uses artificial intelligence to identify weeds when they are just budding. Costing $1.4 million, it uses flash photography to create thousands of high-resolution images of the soil as it crawls across a field. Onboard computers interpret the image information and send it to robotic mirrors on the back of the machine, which rotate to direct a laser beam. Weeds are eliminated in a cloud of smoke.
“It doesn’t harm the topsoil, it doesn’t harm the ecosystem and it’s also good for the environment,” Mikesell said.
For centuries, farmers plowed fields between seasons, but now they are told to use a tender touch. Exposing the top layer of soil to the air releases trapped carbon. Sunlight burns off important nutrients and good fungi that organic farmers use to fight pests and diseases. Carbon capture is a new role for farmers, as evidenced by two awards presented at the summit: an Ag Shark Innovator Award and a Grower of the Year Award.
Jason Aramburu is the founder of Climate Robotics and inventor of a small mobile biochar incinerator. Imagine a pottery kiln on wheels. It can move around a processing plant or be pulled behind a tractor. It digests waste, such as corn stalks, wheat, straw, and nutshells, and deposits biochar right there on the ground.
“Biochar is a very pure form of charcoal made from agricultural waste that we burn at a very high temperature and apply back to the soil,” Aramburu said upon receiving his Ag Shark investment award. He cited university studies showing biochar can generate 16 percent more crop production compared to fields without biochar. It has increased soil water retention by 51 percent and fertilizer retention by 95 percent, he said.
“If we do this on a large enough scale, studies indicate that we can sequester around 2 billion tons of CO2 annually in the soils of our farms,” Aramburu explained.
The USDA offers about $2,000 per acre per season to growers who apply biochar to their soil.
“Agriculture is considered the second largest CO2-producing industry, right behind fossil fuels,” said Rod Braga of Braga Fresh Farms, accepting the Organic Producer of the Year award.
“The pressures really come from the top down,” he said of the push for agriculture to adopt conservation measures. “I’m not talking about retailers. I’m talking about the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the European Union.”
Braga talked about ways agriculture has tried to become carbon neutral: using less diesel fuel, planting one crop on top of another instead of tilling it, and investing in carbon sequestration elsewhere to offset the carbon generated on local farms.
“Now they are talking about net zero emissions,” he said, referring to the theory of an economy that does not emit more greenhouse gases than are permanently removed and stored.
“How can we get to zero in agriculture without cutting down crops and starving millions? We can capture carbon while we farm,” Braga said. “We are still growing vegetables and other crops. We need to be the answer. More agricultural acres is what we will need in the world and not less.”
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