'It is essential both to purge fossil fuels and to perennialize agriculture. No two policies are more crucial to preventing ecological meltdown.'
that, they show, could achieve the greatest reductions of fossil energy use in agriculture. The quantity of energy contained in the fossil fuels used to produce feed grains for cattle exceeds by an order of magnitude the amount of energy contained in the beef that’s produced by those cattle and sold. And the production and delivery of fuel ethanol, from the cornfield to the gas pump, requires as much or more energy as the ethanol will supply to a vehicle’s engine.
of ethanol production, as the Department of Agriculture is requesting, Congress should flush ethanol completely out of ag policy.of total U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, so reducing emissions from the farm sector, important as it is, can go only so far toward driving total U.S. emissions toward zero quickly and steeply.
To use U.S. farmlands and forests as reservoirs for atmospheric carbon would help to reverse a massive loss of soil carbon that began long before the age of mechanized agriculture. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, native grasslands and forestlands across North America were plowed up to make way for corn, wheat, cotton, and other annual crops—replacing vast, biodiverse, perennial ecosystems with plantings of annual monocultures.
Accumulating enough carbon in the soil to mitigate climate change effectively will require switching from annual to perennial crops across most of U.S. farm country, to get soils even part way back to their robust state.
For example, a coalition called Farm Bill Law Enterprise, “a national partnership of law school programs working toward a farm bill that reflects the long-term needs of our society,” is arguing that perennial agriculture must be one of the highest priorities in the 2023 bill.
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