By Rachel K. Owen
This week, ASA, CSSA, and SSSA offered comments to the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) regarding implementation of funding received through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to support climate-smart agriculture and conservation that reflect the boots-on-the-ground realities facing producers enrolling and implementing conservation programs. We likewise were pleased to provide input from the scientific community on innovative means to quantify outcomes and tackle these challenges.
As the world’s population continues to grow, agriculture is being called upon to produce more while using an increasingly scarce supply of soil and fresh water, to steward the land for future generations, and to foster long-term environmental responsibility. On top of this grand challenge, agricultural production is threatened by weather variabilities caused by climate change, which produce conditions that exceed the tolerances of crops and livestock; increase favorable conditions for weeds, pests, and diseases; and increase weather and growing season variability. This will only become more extreme as greenhouse gas emissions continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. By embracing an integrated, systems approach that considers the delicate balance of relationships between the organisms that compose agricultural ecosystems, farmers are in a unique position to become climate heroes.
The first step toward achieving ecosystem balance is to decrease agriculture’s overall footprint. Making changes that reduce greenhouse gas emissions now will make it easier to offset, through sequestration and otherwise, emissions that cannot yet be avoided. The science is clear on which reductions will be necessary, and how they can be achieved, but there is no single solution, no magic bullet. Our nation needs are a collection of context-specific practices tailored for each region, each climate, each soil type, and each farming system.
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