FERN’s Friday Feed: Bursting the cover-crop bubble
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Cover-crop hype vs. reality
FERN
“[A]s the hype for cover crops mounts, so does the scrutiny. New research suggests that cover crops may struggle to make a significant dent in agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions,” writes Gabriel Popkin. “A review from earlier this year found that only a third of published studies in which researchers compared fields that were cover-cropped with those that weren’t reported significant gains in soil carbon. And a study published last month illustrated one major reason why farmers may be reluctant to plant cover crops. Researchers, using satellite data, found that cash crop yields in the corn belt dropped significantly—on average 5.5 percent for corn and 3.5 percent for soybeans—on fields that were cover-cropped, compared to fields that were not.”
The goal: fewer honey bees, more native pollinators
BioGraphic
“On an April afternoon in California’s Central Valley, a pair of men stand before a strip of flowering bushes that runs between fields of trees heavy with the velvety green bulbs of unripe almonds. Syrphid flies rest in the blossoms of flannel bushes. Clouds of lacewings drift amid the shrubs.This hedgerow at Bixler Ranch represents a bet: If you encourage native pollinators, they’ll return,” writes Ashley Braun. “It’s part of a carefully curated network of largely woody native plants whose goal is to feed and house native bees and other pollinators as well as beneficial predatory insects. Bixler Ranch [has] pursued the hedgerows for a few reasons. One is cost: Farming historically is a thin-margin business. Farmers are always looking for ways to shave expenses. Amid rising costs and a changing climate, Turner sees cultivating healthy wild bee populations as a potential step toward reducing the farm’s reliance on rented honeybees.”
A tribe tries a novel climate strategy: underground greenhouses
The Guardian
“Near the southern border of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, a curved translucent roof peeks out a few feet above the dusty plains. It’s a blustery November afternoon and the last remaining greens outside are fading fast. But below ground, at the bottom of a short flight of stairs, the inside of this 80-ft-long sleek structure is bursting with life – pallets of vivid microgreens, potato plants growing from hay bales and planters full of thick heads of Swiss chard and pak choi,” writes Hallie Golden. “It is one of at least eight underground greenhouses that, over the past decade, have been built or are being constructed on the reservation — which has one of the highest poverty rates in the US. Some hope they can help solve the interconnected problems of the lack of affordable, nutritious food and the difficulties of farming in the climate crisis.”
Vermont, the land of … shrimp farming? Saffron?
The Washington Post
“There was a time when Vermont’s landscape was dotted with weathered red barns full of dairy cows, and every country store was chockablock with local maple syrup and candies. The barns are there still, as are their fading illustrations of cows, and the sugar maples still draw leaf peepers in the fall. But because of industry shifts and climate change, many of the cows are gone and the state’s biggest agricultural products are imperiled.” But, as Laura Reiley and Zoeann Murphy write, “a new generation of ‘agripreneurs’ — often young, sometimes first-time farmers, many women or people of color — are swooping in to try something completely different.”
Solving climate change will not ‘save the planet’
The Intercept
“When it comes to effects on wildlife, climate change is more like a mule, slow and plodding. Yes, a warmed atmosphere is projected to be a significant factor in the extinction crisis in future decades,” writes Christopher Ketchum, “but what’s destroying species today is habitat fragmentation and loss, overhunting and overexploitation, agricultural expansion, pollution, and industrial development. It isn’t climate change that caused a 69 percent loss in total wildlife populations between 1970 and 2018, according to a World Wildlife Fund study published this year. The cause is too many people demanding too much from ecosystems, or human overshoot of the biophysical carrying capacity of the Earth.”