By Jessica Kutz for The People Sentinel.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for South Carolina News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

It’s high noon on an overwhelmingly hot summer day in Allendale County, and the air conditioning is blasting inside Rachael Sharp’s truck. Looking out at her farm through the windshield, Sharp opens up one of many agriculture related apps on her iPhone. With the push of a button, her irrigation systems nearly half a mile away tremble to life, spraying water onto a vast field of soybeans.

That’s the future imagined by precision agriculture, an umbrella term for the new agricultural technologies transforming farming; artificial intelligence (AI), satellite imagery, cloud computing, remote irrigation, drones and self-driving tractors are becoming the future of agriculture. With billions of dollars of private and public investment behind it and the hope of it helping agriculture mitigate and adapt to the global climate crisis, precision agriculture makes bold promises. 

Locally, some farmers have described the rollout of precision agriculture as a welcome opportunity, while others experienced it as overbearing. But on Rachael Sharp’s family farm, precision agriculture is a mixed bag.

“We’re saving on input costs because we don’t put as much water, nutrients or fertilizers out and there’s not as much left in the environment at the end of the day,” Sharp said, her iPhone open to the Climate FieldView app, which shows her satellite-generated graphics of which parts of her farm need water. “But it spits out so much information that sometimes it feels overwhelming.”

Precision agriculture technology is being marketed aggressively to local farmers — at trade shows, in emails, and over phone calls — with the main promises being the ability to cut costs, get higher crop yields and optimize their farming techniques.


“We went to [a trade show] last year and I bet we saw 35 different people offering precision ag tools and products,” Sharp said. The previous year, Sharp said, only several people were selling precision agriculture products. “It was crazy overwhelming.”

For local farmers on shoestring budgets, these promises are enticing, as recent crises have forced American farmers to grapple with higher input costs on fertilizer, seeds and fuel, as well as unstable markets to sell their harvest. In 2022, American farmers dealt with a 50% rise in the cost of fertilizer after its main ingredient, natural gas, spiked in cost when Russia invaded Ukraine. As climate change worsens, increasing temperatures are forcing farmers to make decisions regarding what seeds to plant and when to plant them.

“We’re looking at planting a soybean [seed] that doesn’t take as long of a growing season,” said Rachael Sharp, noting her concern for what future temperature changes could mean for her farm. “We’ve adjusted to planting it earlier and getting it out of the field earlier because you’re not gonna have as much [growing] time. Our winters these past two years have been so mild, so the oats don’t have the fertilization they need.”

At a time of destabilization for local growers, precision agriculture’s tools offer a way to navigate the instability. Through the use of nodes, soil probes, sensors, drones and satellite imagery, precision agriculture collects data regarding soil chemistry, seed usage, crop damage, weather patterns and other variables. Then, using cloud computing, algorithms, and machine learning, these data are then analyzed to show farmers which areas of a field need the most, or the least, attention.

“In a sense, it’s like micromanaging a field,” said Michael Plumblee, Assistant Professor of Agronomy at Clemson University, who has been involved in the local rollout of precision agriculture. “Rather than treating everything across the field as the same, we identify different management zones within the field.”

Precision agriculture digitizes almost every step of the farming process, from tilling and sowing to irrigation and fertilization to pest control and harvesting.

“There’s enough precision agriculture technology now to make better actions with the limited resources we have, [since] we don’t have infinite water, infinite fertilizer, and infinite labor,” said Vicente Ossa, the marketing manager for WiseConn, a precision agriculture company that sold its automated irrigation system DropControl at a July trade show in Barnwell.

The global market for precision agriculture is expected to grow from $8.5 billion in 2023 to $14.9 billion by the end of 2028, according to a market research report by BCC Research. North America, the report says, has the highest market share in precision agriculture globally.

As climate change creates increasingly unpredictable growing seasons, warmer winters and threatens crop yields in the southeast, data analysis will become an important part of helping farmers make better decisions, according to Kevin Royal, the precision agriculture specialist at the Edisto Research and Education Center in Blackville.

“Farmers place their bets on what variety to plant based on what they think the weather’s gonna be like this year from the field conditions and from historic data, but that’s where the AI comes in,” Royal said. “Based on historic patterns and projected temperature changes, it gives you recommendations.”

Using data gathered from a field, artificial intelligence can be used to help farmers adapt to climate change and reduce a field’s emissions. For instance, targeted use of nitrogen fertilizer cuts down on excessive use; nitrogen fertilizer creates nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. 

Algorithms and machine learning are increasingly being used in farming operations as agriculture increasingly becomes an industry of data; by 2021, 87% of farms were using some form of AI. However, artificial intelligence itself is a growing emissions source, as the energy-hungry data centers that power artificial intelligence will consume twice as much energy in 2026 as they did in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.

The technological innovations of precision agriculture will play a key role in adopting the practices that keep agriculture on track to meet emissions reductions targets, according to a World Resources Institute report. Precision agriculture is being used to track and reduce energy usage, particularly from groundwater irrigation, which farmers are increasingly relying on as rainfall patterns become less predictable. By using less water in irrigation, Sharp has cut down on energy consumption; irrigation pumping accounts for 16% of all greenhouse gas emissions from energy use in agriculture, forestry and fisheries in the United States.

“In South Carolina, we spend a lot of money irrigating,” Jose Payero, an irrigation specialist at Clemson University who has developed an app that allows farmers to insert field data and energy variables. Payero led a demonstration on irrigation energy consumption at a farm field day in Blackville on September 12. “You can calculate what the cost is per acre, and the total cost for your farm, depending on your energy source,” he told a crowd of farmers.

Precision agriculture is also helping farmers confront local ecological issues. As previously reported by The People-Sentinel, booming populations of wild deer and pigs in the region have caused widespread damage to local farms, pushing local farmers into the red.

“Now they can actually figure out what percentage of that field has been damaged by wild pigs and how that may increase over time,” said John Mayer, a research scientist at the Savannah River National Laboratory, who has studied wild pig populations for decades. “That’s one of the major ways precision agriculture [is] able to help with the wild pig populations.”

In Rachael Sharp’s fields, wild deer have been a persistent issue, but satellite mapping now shows how parts of the field are more damaged by deer than others. “It sees things that the human eye wouldn’t see until probably much later, which has been helpful because by that point in time it’s too late.”

Although Rachael is joining farmers in adopting precision agriculture technology, other farmers, such as her 76-year-old father Don Sharp, are cautious. Despite the purported benefits of precision agriculture, its technologies are expensive to adopt, and Don Sharp shares the concerns of many local farmers about growing corporate control over small farms.

“I think in another 30 years small family farms will be out of business and corporations will own [their land],” said Don Sharp, who has been farming the same land since he was a teenager in the 1960s. At that time, there were roughly 3.5 million farms in America; now, there are 1.89 million farms in America.

Just getting precision agriculture into rural areas faces numerous challenges. Its technologies require high bandwidth speeds for uploading and downloading data collected from farms, creating a major barrier for local farmers; as with many rural communities across the United States, rural counties like Barnwell, Allendale and Bamberg counties have inequitable access to broadband.

“We need to double the food supply for the world in the next 50 years, but we’re basically out of agricultural land, so broadband will be essential for precision agriculture,” said Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at PennState.

But the lack of broadband in rural areas is beginning to change. In November 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which contains $42 billion in funding for a nationwide buildout of broadband infrastructure, called the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program.

“Last fall, we just got high speed internet through the infrastructure grants [and] we are so thankful for it,” said Richard Rentz, a farmer from rural Bamberg County. “It has been a game changer in a lot of ways.”

The deployment of broadband infrastructure on Rentz’s farm has allowed him to begin precision agriculture practices like variable rate seeding, which involves using data to plant seeds in areas of a field that have higher productivity.

“[Precision agriculture] has been saving us on everything,” Rentz said. “When you start varying lime and varying fertilizer, the payback is pretty quick, and even with variable rate seeding, the payback is relatively quick. … Certainly it saves on everything.”

For Tony and Steve Douglas, two brothers who farm in nearby Aiken County, lack of internet access has created numerous problems. While using automated steering on their tractor, which is connected online via cell phone tower, connection will frequently drop.

“You know how a signal is,” Tony Douglas said. “You be down in the bottom [of a field] and the cell service drops to your tractor and it messes up your rows. Then you gotta drive around and try to find a signal. It was really frustrating.”

Internet and broadband accessibility will be one of the biggest barriers for implementing precision agriculture, according to Royal.

“As we’re becoming more dependent on moving that data from the field to the cloud, wireless broadband is a big issue,” said Royal, who serves on a working group at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that encourages the adoption of precision agriculture. “Broadband can help or hinder your adoption of precision ag. In some places it’s great and in some places, it’s really tough.”

Farmers in America and in rural counties like Allendale are also getting older; the average age of an American farmer is 58.1 years old, and roughly 58% of farmers in Allendale are over 65, according to USDA statistics. Older legacy farmers like Don Sharp are less familiar with technology, and fear being left further behind; even 37-year-old Rachael struggles to understand the new technology hitting the market.

“A lot of people that are coming into farming now, they don’t know anything but using tech to make decisions,” Rachael said. “Fear shouldn’t be the reason farmers are adopting these technologies but it feels like it is.”

But learning gaps and an aversion to new technology is something that precision agriculture companies are beginning to adjust to. Development of new innovations in precision agriculture will only be as good as farmers’ ability to utilize them, Ossa said, so working with farmers to improve technological literacy will be a key step in moving forward.

“We had a client who was very old and not close to technology at all and didn’t have a smartphone,” Ossa said. “We were able to simplify it in a way that an everyday guy can use. He understood the value that we are bringing and got a phone.”

But as coordination between precision agriculture systems improves and artificial intelligence learns more about farms, the need for humans to make decisions about agriculture will continue to fall, according to Royal.

“With machine learning, you’ll eventually have a local bot or a service you subscribe to that’ll take years worth of data and help you build a more dynamic map of where your good yields can be or where your poor yields are projected to be,” Royal said.

Despite its acclaimed benefits, the Sharps have noticed that precision agriculture systems frequently fail to understand characteristics about their land that they have accumulated through decades of farming.

“They definitely overpromise and underdeliver,” Sharp said. “They tell you all these wonderful things it's going to do for you and that can be true, but we’re already trying to raise crops and a lot of farmers don't have time to sit down and learn. I think the Silicon Valley people think everybody knows as much as they know.”

For now, Don Sharp still keeps an inventory on pen and paper. Although he is not against utilizing precision agriculture, he worries of a future where the farming lifestyle continues to be pushed out of both agriculture and society.

“I always say that he who plants a seed beneath the soil and waits for it to grow believes in God,” Don Sharp said. “You don’t really have that type of farmer anymore. They’re a dying breed.”


Jessica Kutz wrote this article for The People Sentinel.


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A group of Pierce County residents is awaiting a response to a petition for a contested case hearing for the expansion of Ridge Breeze Dairy to grow four times its size.

Larry Brenner, owner of Vino in the Valley, said his home, land and business is about a mile below the hill where Ridge Breeze is located. He said it makes his land and tributaries, like the Rush River running next to his property, especially vulnerable to things like manure runoff and accidents.

"That river is where my grandpa's land flowed through, so the fact that I now have a piece of that river flowing through my property, it's very special," Brenner observed. "And boy, it's threatened."

Brenner pointed out the expansion could result in almost 80 million gallons of untreated manure annually, potentially affecting water sources and causing increased odor issues and noise from hundreds of manure trucks.

Jenelle Ludwig Krause, executive director of the group Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin, lives about 20 minutes from Ridge Breeze. She said the personal effects of environmental and health concerns compelled her to take legal action.

Krause's mother has terminal cancer and she lost her brother to depression eight years ago. She explained when she learned that these conditions could be caused by exposure to carcinogens like those used to treat manure, she was horrified.

"Manure contains large amounts of nitrogen which is a probable carcinogen," Ludwig Krause pointed out. "The odors that come from the manure can increase anxiety and depression, and this really hit me close to home."

Both Ludwig Krause and Brenner said fighting concentrated animal feeding operations is challenging due to federal and state support but emphasized the importance of local ordinances and community involvement in curbing their growth.

"On my own, there wasn't much I could do. I felt really isolated and powerless," Ludwig Krause acknowledged. "I contrast what happened then to what's happening now, and I'm just so deeply grateful and hopeful that when people come together, we actually are building power to be able to change the things that are around us and have a voice in the decisions that impact us. "

Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin said it expects the expansion will be paused until the contested case hearing is resolved. In the meantime, it will continue to work with local communities to get more operations ordinances passed to help better regulate the agribusiness.


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By Grey Moran for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Zamone Perez for Virginia News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Last August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food & Safety Inspection Service, the federal team responsible for ensuring the safe and accurate labeling of the commercial meat supply, issued letters to several dozen meat producers to inform them of antibiotics detected in beef. This isn’t an unusual finding — antibiotics are widely used on industrial animal farms — yet the meat sampled was on track to be sold as “antibiotic-free,” “raised without antibiotics” or a similar label promising that the animals were never administered antibiotics.

These letters, recently obtained by the advocacy group Farm Forward through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal that the world’s largest meat producers — JBS, Cargill, and Tyson — raised cattle that tested positive for antibiotics prohibited under USDA-approved labels advertising the beef as free of antibiotics.

“This strongly suggests that the US antibiotic-free beef supply is deeply contaminated and deeply deceptive to American consumers,” Andrew deCoriolis, the executive director of Farm Forward tells Sentient.

The USDA’s Food & Safety Inspection Service found that 20 percent of the samples under this label tested positive for antibiotics, raising questions about how widespread mislabeling is in the U.S. commercial beef supply. These findings were announced last August, but the names of the companies which tested positive for antibiotics were not made publicly available until recently, as part of a new report released by Farm Forward questioning the validity of this popular label.

“It does seem to violate the nature of the label,” says Keeve Nachman, the associate director of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Nachman is not concerned about immediate health impacts — consuming antibiotic residue does not cause an immediate illness, but contributes to the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria — though he is concerned about the broader lack of transparency around antibiotic use on farms and how that contributes to longer-term antibiotic resistance in humans and animals.

These faulty labeling practices result in a “mischaracterization of the magnitude of antibiotics being used in agriculture,” Nachman says. It’s been estimated that 70 percent of medically-important antibiotics sold in the U.S. — those used to treat human infections — are used to produce meat, dairy and other animal-sourced products. The difference between what’s presented on labels and actual use means the public may not understand the urgency. “It is going to mean that we don’t have the full appreciation of the pressure our agricultural industry puts on the ability of those drugs to resolve human infections,” says Nachman.

The World Health Organization calls antimicrobial resistance “one of the top global public health and development threats,” responsible for millions of deaths every year. The problem is only going to get worse, according to public health experts. The misuse and overuse of antibiotics — both in humans and farm animals (who often receive the same antibiotics) — leads bacteria to develop more resistant genes that then fail to respond to the medically necessary use of these drugs.

The USDA’s Food & Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) sent a total of 27 letters to offending meat companies, advising them to “conduct a root cause analysis to determine how antibiotics were introduced into the animal and to take appropriate measures to ensure future products are not misbranded.” FSIS sampled between one and four cattle carcasses per processing facility, which were randomly selected as part of a 2023 initiative. In the letters, FSIS stated that it would “not take immediate enforcement action in response to individual test results.”

“USDA is continuing to review policies and actions taken by the previous administration,” a FSIS spokesperson told Sentient in an e-mail, in response to questions about whether they intend to take any follow-up enforcement or policy actions. “FSIS remains committed to ensuring the safety of the nation’s food supply and protecting public health.”

deCoriolis points to the USDA’s lax oversight of this voluntary certification program, which requires that companies submit documentation to receive the USDA’s approval for use of this label. The USDA relies on self-reported information to validate these and many other claims, including humanely-raised and free range claims.

Meat brands are required only to submit written statements attesting to their process for ensuring antibiotics are not part of their meat supply chains. As deCoriolis sees it, the certification process is vulnerable to exploitation — companies can charge a higher price for meat sold as antibiotic-free but there is not enough oversight to ensure compliance.

“Despite the USDA knowing that this label claim is, in many cases false, they continue to approve the label without requiring testing to verify the claim,” continued deCoriolis. ”From our perspective, this is the USDA deliberately maintaining labeling policies that allow meat companies to mislead the public. And the effect of that is the USDA is giving meat companies a consumer liability shield to protect them from consumer protection laws.”

The Federal Meat Inspection Act (FMIA) and Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA) set the federal legal frameworks for meat and poultry product labeling, which refers to the language on the back or front of meat packaging in grocery stores. Previously, courts have held that if the manufacturer’s labels are approved by the USDA, they can be legally used for advertising — effectively giving the USDA the final say on what winds up on meat labels.

Following these test results, the USDA updated its guidelines to “strongly encourages the use of third-party certification to substantiate animal-raising or environment-related claims,” but the agency fell short of actually requiring third-party verification. The updated guidelines were announced in August under President Biden’s administration, and there has not been any further action in this vein under USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins.

Sentient reached out to every meat producer that received a letter to see if they had followed the USDA’s recommendations in conducting a root causes analysis to determine how antibiotics entered their food supply, or any other additional measures.

According to FSIS’s letter, inspectors identified monensin — an antibiotic that is banned in the European Union as a growth promoter in farm animals — in animal carcasses sampled at Swift Beef Company in Greeley, Colorado, a subsidiary of JBS USA, one of the largest meat companies in the world. JBS USA claims beef sold under its Aspen Ridge brand come from cattle that “have never received growth promotants of any kind.”

In an e-mail to Sentient, Nikki Richardson, JBS USA’s Head of Corporate Communications, wrote that “the product impacted in this instance was identified at the facility and never made it into the food supply.” She also wrote that JBS USA conducted an audit following this incident. No evidence of either statement was provided. Sentient asked if the company would be willing to provide Sentient with “the results of the audit, for the sake of consumer transparency,” but Richardson did not reply.

Similarly, FSIS detected monensin in an animal carcass at a Cargill facility in Fort Morgan, Colorado and tulathromycin (used to treat bovine respiratory illnesses) at a separate Cargill facility in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania. Chuck Miller, the global external communications lead for Cargill, replied that the company has not violated any regulatory requirements.

“Cargill complies with USDA and FSIS regulatory requirements to ensure safe and compliant products enter the market,” stated Miller, in an email to Sentient. “I would also like to reinforce that there has been no evidence that meat with antibiotic residue levels in excess of regulatory standards entered the food supply.”

Tyson did not respond to a request for comment. However, Tyson has scaled back on its previous pledge to raise beef without antibiotics, following previous public scrutiny of these labeling claims. 

There are shortcomings to FSIS’s testing program. The tests performed didn’t distinguish between selective antibiotic use to treat an illness and constant low-dose exposure to antibiotics administered directly into the animals’ feed. While both are prohibited under the labeling program, the excessive, chronic use of antibiotics poses a much more serious risk to public health, contributing to the development of antibiotic resistance. 

“If a cow is selectively treated for penicillin two years ago and gets harvested, that’s one thing. But if it’s been constantly exposed to a drug, over and over again, leading up to 30 to 60 days prior to the time it was harvested, that’s going to be a whole other level of residue,” says Marshall Bartlett, the co-founder of Home Place Pastures, a cattle and pig farm and processing house in Como, Mississippi. FSIS’s letters don’t indicate the level of residue. 

FSIS found that one of Bartlett’s cattle tested positive for penicillin, which is commonly used on small farms to selectively treat illnesses. He performed the root cause analysis as recommended, tracing it back to a nearby producer who sells him cattle, who forgot to tag that animal to indicate that it could no longer be sold under the labeling program. “The producer was very apologetic and understood,” says Bartlett. 

Out of all of the meat producers, Bartlett is the only one who said he performed this analysis and was willing to share the results. He hopes that the USDA expands and refines its testing for antibiotics use. “As far as we’re concerned, we’re really committed to transparency and figuring this out, trying to be an advocate for local farmers in our supply chain,” he says.


Grey Moran wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for Arkansas News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

It's no secret that industrial animal agriculture is draining our planet's resources and is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions - responsible for somewhere between 12 and nearly 20 percent of climate pollution. On a personal level, reducing meat consumption and adapting to a plant-forward diet are one of the most effective forms of climate action. When it comes to more systemic solutions however, lawmakers and development banks have favored interventions that tend to be tech-based, or human manufactured. These solutions, like dairy digesters that convert manure into biogas, or synthetic feed additives that reduce methane emissions from livestock, also tend to be hotly contested by a certain swath of environmentalists.

While such technologies promise to curb emissions, the reality is not so simple - and they also may do little to combat agriculture's stress on water, soils and biodiversity. These strategies often don't address issues like soil health or the deforestation of land - at least not directly.

A new report makes the case that the best way forward may lie in investing in nature-based solutions, rather than technological ones. The findings were published by The Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return Initiative (FAIRR), an investor network covering risks and opportunities in the global food system.

Investing in Nature Take Time, but Benefits Ecosystems

A nature-based solution uses natural techniques and ecosystems to address environmental challenges, such as planting trees or restoring wetlands to capture carbon.

The new FAIRR report is the "first of its kind" in developing a framework to attract investment for long-term climate solutions in a way that considers the whole planet holistically, Sajeev Mohankumar, senior technical specialist of climate and biodiversity at FAIRR, tells Sentient.

"Industrial farming produces more calories and produces more product per unit area because they are so efficient and their only goal is to maximize profit. But what we wanted to emphasize in this report is that that is not the only system of agriculture -- it also has to deliver for the animals in terms of welfare, human health and planetary health. That's where nature-based solutions come into play," he says.

FAIRR evaluated 22 on-farm interventions (12 nature-based, 10 tech-based) often cited to address agriculture's climate and nature risks. They found that nature-based solutions such as hedgerows (rows of shrubs that act as a carbon sink and reduce soil erosion) and silvopasture (integrating trees into grazing pastures) had a greater positive impact collectively on emissions reductions, biodiversity, freshwater use and the flow of nutrients across ecosystems. "Nature-based interventions can deliver 37 percent of the mitigation required to meet 2030 climate targets, along with significant nature co-benefits," the report states.

Nature-based solutions are touted as offering more holistic rewards, but can take time to show impact, which can be difficult to sell to investors. "I think there is a lack of knowledge in terms of connecting some of the financial returns to environmental outcomes," Mohankumar says. "This involves changing the behavior of farmers and tying them into a long-term contract...it takes a long time to yield benefits."

For example, technology like synthetic animal feed additives reduce methane emissions from livestock by roughly 10-30 percent, but offer few co-benefits for nature. Hedgerows, by comparison, reduce emissions but also have positive environmental benefits, such as reducing soil erosion and curbing nutrient runoff into water. On the other hand, hedgerows need to be planted in large quantities, and require a long timescale of up to 10 years to sequester significant amounts of carbon.

A Ticking Climate Clock Requires Thoughtful Solutions

Nature-based solutions have another added benefit: they tend to boost climate resilience, often in a more cost-effective way, according to a recent review of over 100 peer-reviewed articles. Sixty-five percent of studies found that nature-based solutions were better at reducing disaster risk, and 71 percent of studies found that they were more cost-effective than tech-based ones.

Currently, the majority of on-farm intervention investment flows toward technological advances, which, FAIRR says is "concerning." This is because tech-based climate interventions "are more likely to be aligned with intensive livestock production practices, and lead only to incremental emissions reductions relative to the long-term systemic changes from implementing nature-based interventions." In other words, these solutions cut down on emissions a little, without addressing the problems caused by industrial food systems, like poor animal welfare or water pollution.

Not every climate researcher sees a clear preference for technology or nature-based solutions. Sentient asked Richard Waite, director for Agriculture Initiatives, Food, Land and Water Program at the World Resources Institute (WRI), to take a look at FAIRR's research, with which he was not involved. Waite was a co-author of a 2019 report from WRI that recommended a suite of solutions to meet the challenge of feeding even more people on the planet - 9.7 billion by 2050 - without draining natural resources and driving up global temperatures to an unhealthy degree.

"This report looks at many interventions that are commonly cited when talking about reducing agriculture's impacts on climate and nature. It recommends more investment in nature-based solutions, while also noting that such interventions may lower food production," Waite tells Sentient.

"In our world of increasing food demand linked to agricultural expansion and deforestation," says Waite, "we must be very careful to assess any tradeoffs related to shifting to agricultural systems or practices that produce less food and require more land."

When it comes to food systems, tradeoffs can have significant consequences. For instance, shifting a factory farm to a regenerative beef operation could mean more space for farm animals to roam. That sounds like a better scenario for farm animals. But research has also shown that regenerative cattle ranches use twice as much land to produce the same amount of food. If Americans and other Global North populations were to continue to eat meat at even close to the same levels they do now, there is simply not enough farmland to shift all industrial farms to regenerative operations. And trying to make that shift would undoubtedly result in more emissions and more deforestation.

For Waite and WRI, a mix of solutions is key. "Our own research suggests that both tech-based and nature-based solutions will be essential to feeding 10 billion people by 2050, while protecting nature and the climate."

The Bottom Line

Fierce debates over climate solutions seem to be going strong, yet global temperatures - and food system emissions - continue to be heading in the wrong direction. If countries are serious about meeting their climate goals, they will likely need to consider comprehensive solutions that account for impacts to both climate and nature.


Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.


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