Farmers blamed for pollution on a "huge scale"

[Kiwi Pete]

whatever the truth is about carbon given off by cultivation, the land will be able store carbon again when it is growing the next crop, an air flight releases carbon that hasn't seen the light of day since it was some plant growth from 100,000 years ago

The land won't store much carbon if we all keep putting dollops of urea and ammonium nitrate on it!

There doesn't seem to be much effort to stop both at the same time, because 'farmers as a whole' are greedy f**kers, victims of a problem they bought themselves, and brought upon themselves.
i.e. have lost any control, via oversupply, and now can't get off the hamster wheel.

Pleased to see, yet again, the problem is actually the NFU - for not rushing to defend recidivist offending against the environment.
Wonder why that is?
Is there actually any defence?
We all have access to information!

The most ironic point of all, is that you can plough and put on hundreds of units of N and still be cross compliant, but cut a hedge a day late and it's all for the sodding pigeon's nests

Selling it down the river, much?

 

[Global ovine]

All biological system leak, even the most pristine natural ecosystems. Modern equipment can measure to parts per billion. Emotion is more powerful than logic politically. Opinion is now more newsworthy than facts. Mix these and no wonder we have misconceptions, rural/urban divide, a proliferation of pressure groups with their single issues and generations removed from where food originates.
When bellies get empty, hunger focuses the mind to the value of food production. Every thing is cyclic, maybe the value of farming to civilisation will have its time again. The average Brit knew the value of food in the immediate post war years.
However in the meantime those who abuse civil expectations should be shown up and be seen to be condemned by those who strive to uphold society's expectations.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Good post, and good points made- firstly that no environment is perfectly self contained - but it is worth striving to achieve as little loss as is practically possible.
Bare earth is loss, no matter what is planned for it; it's a loss.

And secondly- we do need to be seen to be condemning the abuses by some.
Loudly!
Otherwise we'll all fall together.
All politics and emotives aside, this is the last environment we've got.

 

[Dead Rabbits]

Concerning the article.

The fines in the U.K. for non compliance really arent that bad compared to here. I often hear the US referenced as a place of "lax" rules regarding manure. According to this article your rules are much more lax than my home state. If you are found to be in non compliance it's a $10,000 per day fine. Plus if you are a dairy they pull your permit.

Also, interested to hear about how one becomes listed as "hostile". Your inspectors must be very meek individuals. Here they think they are little hitlers and will shut you down out of spite.

 

[dstudent]

How the hell can he even start to work that out?

Just to give some data, just above 37% of the world land area is agricultural land, that is 48,937,696.1 Km Sq. ' Every year, around 24 billion tons of fertile farmland worldwide is lost due to soil degradation, a third of the world soil is degraded (ELD , www.eld-initiative.org). In the UK alone, 2.9 million tons of tops soil is lost every year due to compaction and degradation (Defra). Setting aside the environmental consequences due to soil degradation, increase flooding, water pollution, as well as loss of fertility and productivity, etc, soils, after oceans, are major carbon stock holders, soils sequester atmospheric CO2, and therefore, have a major if not central role in climate control as in climate change and global warming.
The capacity of soils of holding 'carbon again' is very much limited if current intensive, chemical dependent systems continue, it takes between 100 and 1000 years for a few inches of top soil to regenerate (if at all).

Having said all that, I believe, that farmers seem to always get the short end of the stick, and are unfairly blamed, for simply doing what they have been told to do for the past 70 years or so, that is: increase productivity. I can understand after being on this forum for some time now, and reading as much as I could, of the hard place /rock situation farmers find themselves in,and why many get very much on the defensive. It seems to me that the very central role played by our governments, agri-companies, multinationals and big retailers, who have commodified food production and created a food chain system, predicated on the exploitation of fossil fuel and the environment, is constantly underplayed, and let's not forget the role of consumers who are the beneficiaries of this all system, and should definitely take much of the responsibility of what is going on with the environment as of now..At the end of the day we can all play the blame game, but how we all move on from this, is the key. IMHO

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Good post
I particularly agree with the 'doing what they've been told to do' part...

 

[Poncherello1976]

Pleased to see, yet again, the problem is actually the NFU - for not rushing to defend recidivist offending against the environment.
Wonder why that is?
Is there actually any defence?
We all have access to information

The problem is not the NFU, the problem is the leaking of the slurry or the dead chickens laid in a secret tunnel. I brought the NFU in to it because it looked like they were not involved in the piece on the news. If they did a piece on train drivers striking, would they run it without input from the RMT? If teachers went on strike, would they run the piece without input from the NUT? No they would not. So why run a piece about farming, good or bad, without apparent involvement from our union. Either they knew about it and did nothing or did not know about it. If they did not know it was coming up on the news, what are their press department doing? The NFU are OUR union and should be standing up for OUR industry. That is the point of a union. I do not mean defending the indefensible, but explaining the rules that we have to deal with and that these are isolated cases. If they were to do that then maybe I would be more inclined to join them.
What was shown on the news was scandalous and should not be allowed to happen, or gotten away with, but it tarred us all with the same brush when a lot of us are trying to do the right things for the environment. This is the balance that should be put on a news article.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Balance is almost never found within today's 'reporting'
But -
How many ploughing threads are alive and well on TFF today- just as an example?

I say let those farmers defend themselves!
Someone wants a quote for tons of fert- let them answer to the green brigade.
If I was the NFU, I'd be staying well clear of it....

 

[Princess Pooper]

2014 was supposed to be the implementation date of the EU water quality directive.....its all noroso members heard about until 2015 when all mention vanished.....since then the EU postponed it first until 2020....then to 2027 IIRC

Don't think you are right at that. Water Framework Directive is operational, it is just that it has constant revisions and planning periods (like NVZs). http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2017/407/pdfs/uksi_20170407_en.pdf

 

[Farmer Roy]

Just to give some data just above 37% of the world land area is agricultural land, that is 48,937,696.1 Km Sq. ' every year, around 24 billion tons of fertile farmland worldwide is lost due to soil degradation a third of the world soil is degraded (ELD , www.eld-initiative.org). In the UK alone, 2.9 million tons of tops soil is lost every year due to compaction and degradation (Defra). Setting aside the environmental consequences due to soil degradation, increase flooding, water pollution, as well as loss of fertility and productivity, etc, soils, after oceans, are major carbon stock holders, soils sequester atmospheric CO2, and therefore, have a major if not central role in climate control as in climate change and global warming.
the capacity of soils of holding 'carbon again' is very much limited if current intensive chemical dependent systems continue, it takes between 100 and 1000 years for top soil to regenerate (if at all).

Having said all that, I believe, that farmers seem to always get the short end of the stick, and are unfairly blamed, for simply doing what they have been told to do for the past 70 years or so, that is increasing productivity. I can understand after being on this forum for some time now, and reading as much as I could of the hard place /rock situation farmers find themselves in,and why many get very much on the defensive. It seems to me that the very central role played by our governments, agri-companies, multinationals and big retailers which have commodified food production and created a food chain system, predicated on the exploitation of fossil fuel and the environment is constantly underplayed, and let's not forget the role of consumers who are the beneficiaries of this all system. and should definitely take much of the responsibility of what is going on with the environment as of now..At the end of the day we can all play the blaming game, but how we all move on from this, is the key. IMHO

buy that man a beer

give yourself a ball rub mate, you deserve one

 

[Kiwi Pete]

buy that man a beer

give yourself a ball rub mate, you deserve one

Ummm check her profile, mate

 

[Farmer Roy]

Oops - my mistake
Sorry
But it makes sense that a voice of reason is female

 

[spin cycle]

Don't think you are right at that. Water Framework Directive is operational, it is just that it has constant revisions and planning periods (like NVZs). http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2017/407/pdfs/uksi_20170407_en.pdf

oh....perhaps we've complied but EU has given rest of the states 'more time'

looking it up again there are 'management cycles'....the one you quote will be the second one 2015-21....then there's a third 2021-27...i reckon they realised it was to difficult to get it done by 2014 so they've extended and split it up

 

[vantage]

Can any one here put actual OM content of their soils up.I'm a moderately intensive grass land dairy farmer,in a high rainfall SDA,use bagged N and reseed using plough or discs,due to stones.Looking at soil tests done over the last few years OM ranges between10% to 20% ,soil type is mainly sandy clay loam.How about you????

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Can any one here put actual OM content of their soils up.I'm a moderately intensive grass land dairy farmer,in a high rainfall SDA,use bagged N and reseed using plough or discs,due to stones.Looking at soil tests done over the last few years OM ranges between10% to 20% ,soil type is mainly sandy clay loam.How about you????

Just got soil tests back from Australia today. Average across half of my paddocks (can't pay $3000 to get all them tested) is 1.1% up from a year ago to 10.2%.
Sticky red clay, no N, 850mm rainfall, intensive beef and lamb finishing
Two ex-beet paddocks averaged 7%, that's the only tillage here since 2001, won't happen again

 

[Cowabunga]

A very well respected soil scientist

Think how many million / billions of tonnes of soil are cultivated every year !!! Lot more than planes - all that oxidisation is releasing massive qty of carbon to the atmosphere

Most is recaptured when the new crop grows of course. I would be more concerned with continued export of nutrients in the form of sold crops, unless a good regular rotation is followed, including livestock.

You do this, of course?

 

[beefandsleep]

Most is recaptured when the new crop grows of course. I would be more concerned with continued export of nutrients in the form of sold crops, unless a good regular rotation is followed, including livestock.

You do this, of course?

You are not the only one to see the irony in the hysterical reaction to the loss of soil organic matter which can be easily and cheaply replaced with a sensible rotation which includes grazing livestock by those who see nothing wrong with mining their soils having to replace nutrients sold off the farm with products mined and shipped halfway around the world. But they don't use a plough so that's all right, they have the warm virtuous glow that only a zero till disc drill can provide.

 

[Right-arm fast]

The long and short of it is we need to grow crops to feed people, there are probably too many people on the planet now for it all to be sustainable. We are all also doing things that emit carbon dioxide - air travel, cars, cultivations, steel production, electricity production etc. Imho it is not something we can control now since every country in the world is emitting things in to the atmosphere, some more than others. I wouldn't worry about it but i don't like the way we as farmers are blamed so often. Perhaps if people stopped eating we could stop growing/producing things to eat and plant some trees to absorb some of the co2 !

 

[Kiwi Pete]

current sulphur dioxide @ surface

carbon monoxide @ surface

carbon dioxide @ surface
(courtesy of earth.nullschool.net)

Agriculture may well be a large contributor, but look at where most of it comes out..
Topsoil loss is only part of our global pollution problem in the grand scheme of things.
Evidence here that the consumer is also not a very green shade of green.

 

[Farmer Roy]

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt...n-farms?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=producers

Can Anyone, Even Walmart, Stem The Heat-Trapping Flood Of Nitrogen On Farms?
Can Anyone, Even Walmart, Stem The Heat-Trapping Flood Of Nitrogen On Farms?
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August 21, 20174:34 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered

Dan Charles

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Anhydrous ammonia tanks in a newly planted wheat field. Walmart has promised big cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases. To meet that goal, though, the giant retailer may have to persuade farmers to use less fertilizer. It won't be easy. TheBusman/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption TheBusman/Getty Images
Anhydrous ammonia tanks in a newly planted wheat field. Walmart has promised big cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases. To meet that goal, though, the giant retailer may have to persuade farmers to use less fertilizer. It won't be easy.

TheBusman/Getty Images
The Environmental Defense Fund opened an office near Walmart's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., 10 years ago. It was part of a carefully plotted strategy to persuade the giant retailer that going green could be good for business. If it worked, it certainly could be good for the planet — Walmart's revenues are bigger than the entire economy of most countries.

"We really saw that working with companies could be transformative at a scale that was pretty unmatched," says Suzy Friedman, a senior director at EDF.

If you're looking for evidence that the strategy is working, there's this: Last year, Walmart unveiled Project Gigaton, a plan to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by a billion tons of carbon between now and 2030. That's almost as much carbon as what's released from the country's entire fleet of passenger cars and trucks in a year.


The Salt
What's The Environmental Footprint Of A Loaf Of Bread? Now We Know
The cuts will come from the company's suppliers: the vast galaxy of companies that make the products it sells.

Even before unveiling that pledge, Walmart had been calculating the climate price tags of those products, estimating the greenhouse gases that are released in the process of making each one. Laura Phillips, Walmart's senior vice president for sustainability, was startled to see the climate price of simple food items, like baked goods, that don't seem like they'd require burning a lot of fossil fuels.

"Why is that?" she wondered. "Why are we seeing bread have high emissions?"

Other food companies are asking the same question. Many of them, including General Mills and Kellogg, have made their own commitments to reduce greenhouse emissions. To get a better grasp of the task, they joined forces and set up an organization called Field to Market to measure and reduce the environmental impact of their operations.

Allison Thomson, the group's research director, says "it has been a process of discovery, mapping out the emissions and understanding that there's a huge footprint that comes from the farm."

That's right: on the farm. Not just factories or fleets of trucks.

Down on the farm, the most important greenhouse source is something that doesn't normally get a lot of attention. It's the fertilizer — mainly nitrogen — that farmers spread on their fields to feed their crops.

Nitrogen is the most important nutrient for plants. It's the fuel that drives modern food production. Every year, American farmers spread millions of tons of it on corn fields alone.

Manufacturing nitrogen fertilizer is energy-intensive, burning lots of fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide. What's just as damaging, and perhaps even more so, is what happens when it's spread on a field. Bacteria feed on it and release a super-powerful greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide.

These bacteria are naturally present in the soil, says Philip Robertson, a researcher at Michigan State University, "but once they get exposed to nitrogen fertilizer, they really light up" and pump out nitrous oxide.

If you add it all up, fertilizer is the biggest part of the global warming price tag of a loaf of bread or a box of corn flakes. According to one study, carried out by the consulting group Deloitte, greenhouse emissions from fertilizer are the biggest single piece of the global warming price tag for almost half of the top-selling items on the shelves at Walmart.

Yet it's a climate driver that Walmart can't easily control. "We don't make the product ourselves," Phillips says. "We would want to work with our suppliers" to reduce the climate cost of fertilizer.

In fact, even Walmart's suppliers, the companies that deliver meat and baked goods, don't control fertilizer use. Bakers just buy the grain that the farmers grow; meat packers buy the cattle that eat that grain. They're a step removed from the farmers who grow the grain and decide how much fertilizer to put on fields.

This long supply chain threatens to undermine the Environmental Defense Fund's carefully plotted strategy to enlist Walmart as a partner in environmental progress.

"That was a really big eye-opener," Friedman says. "This is a lot more complicated than we thought in the beginning."

"In the beginning, you had the idea that Walmart can just do it?" I ask.

"I think that even Walmart had that idea in the beginning," Friedman says. "We learned that you really need to engage the whole supply chain."

In the spring of 2014, though, way down at the other end of that long supply chain, a man named Matt Carstens was paying attention. Carstens was a fertilizer dealer; he worked, at the time, for a company called United Suppliers, in Iowa.

Carstens had been reading about Walmart's interest in cutting greenhouse emissions — specifically emissions from fertilizer applied to corn fields in the Midwest.

"It got pretty specific what they were targeting, and that kind of hit close to home," Carstens says.

He tried to set up a meeting with Walmart, but couldn't get anyone to return his calls. So he called EDF instead. The environmental group had been quoted in those stories he was reading.

Before long, he was on a flight to Washington, D.C., to meet with the environmental group, to hear their concerns about fertilizer use on farms.

"You can't help but sit back, as somebody deeply involved in agriculture, and go, 'We've got to understand this,' " Carstens says. "You can take two approaches at that point. You can try to fight it, or you can try to be part of whatever solutions are out there.

After those meetings, on the flight back to Iowa, Carstens decided that he knew some potential solutions: Technology like chemicals that farmers can mix with nitrogen fertilizer to keep it from washing away so quickly; computer programs that show farmers how much nitrogen is in their soil, so they don't add more than they need.

But an equally important part of the solution, he realized, was his own connection to farmers. Walmart and EDF didn't have that connection.

"They knew where the issue was, but how do you reach that farmer?" Carstens says. "Everybody wants to talk to the farmer, but the trusted adviser of the farmer is their ag retailer, in most cases." An ag retailer is a business, like his own, that supplies seeds and chemicals to farmers, along with advice about how to use them.

Carstens imagined building a business devoted to selling those solutions. It could work, he thought, if those tools put more money in farmers' pockets, by saving them money that they'd otherwise spend on fertilizer. "You can't go to the farm and just say, 'You have to do this, because,' " Carstens says. "You have to put it in a way that's economical or profitable for them."

After that, things moved quickly. While he was still working for United Suppliers, Carstens turned that brainstorm into a program called SUSTAIN, which sells those nitrogen-saving tools to farmers. In 2015, Land O'Lakes, an agricultural cooperative that spans the country, bought United Suppliers and adopted SUSTAIN as its own.

Land O'Lakes has promised Walmart that it will enroll 20 million acres of farmland in SUSTAIN by 2025, and Walmart is counting on it to help meet the goals of Project Gigaton.

Next: We go to Iowa to find out how farmers are receiving this message of better fertilizer management, and whether it's making much of a difference.

• walmart
• greenhouse gases
• fertilizer

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