theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Elizabeth Kirkwood on the very public decision by Britain’s top climate adviser, Nicholas Stern, to stop eating meat as a means of mitigating global warming. Strong stuff:
Why are we not outraged by what the meat industry and those who support it, which is, let’s face it, most of us, is doing to our planet? Why is meat consumption not stigmatised in the way that driving 4×4 gas guzzlers is?
Richard Harris visits Wes Jackson’s Land Institute, and also talks with plant breeder Lee De Haan.
As the silver-haired Kansan [Jackson] is fond of saying: If you’re working on a problem you can solve in your own lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.
Are those chickadees that we hear in the background of the outdoor actualities Black-cappeds or Carolinas? Kansas is a contact zone.
…under the pressure of endless human tinkering, cultivated plant varieties evolved too quickly for agricultural writers and lumbering printing presses to keep up…. See growing things as the earth’s software for which manuals can never quite keep pace. Rapid botanical change has been a constant feaure of the cultivated plant world since the beginnings of domestication.
—Stanley Crawford, “A Farmer’s Bookshelf [1993],” in The River in Winter, pp. 157-158
In response to “Burgernomics, indeed,” Leta asked me a good question: What’s the difference between eating chicken from a farm in Delaware and fresh broccoli from California’s Central Valley? (We live on the East Coast.) Isn’t trucking all that foliage cross-country less environmentally-friendly? Recent research by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews attempts to answer that question. Their results are also discussed in a post by Jane Liaw. In short, Weber and Matthews’ findings are that it comes out the same, but for different reasons.
The Carnegie Mellon researchers looked at the life-cycle impact, from production to retail, in equivalent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, for the production of food for consumption in the United States, where food is analyzed as 50 commodities grouped into seven USDA-style categories. They use a methodology, informed by the work of Wassily Leontief, termed input−output life-cycle assessment (IO-LCA). Input-output analysis accounts for the fact that some goods are produced and shipped around only in order to make other goods for final consumption: chickens have to be fed corn that was grown somewhere else, broccoli has to be irrigated with water that has to be piped from somewhere else, and so forth. The approach aggregates across the country, so it’s not going to account for regional differences in production or consumption (compare the work of Colman and Päaster on wine production). Beyond that, I am limited in my ability to critique the methods of the paper.
The first figure that stands out from the paper is 12,000. That’s the number of equivalent ton-kilometers of freight, per household, required to meet food-demand in the U.S. in 1997. You could think of this as a monthly truckload of 1 metric ton of food (and products that went into making the food) travelling 1,000 km (600 miles) around the country, ending up at the supermarket, to feed a “typical family of four.” (The paper omits the “last mile” of transportation from store to home.) But only 25% of that freight mileage is part of the “direct” tier, from farm to retail. The remaining three-fourths is used in intermediate production.
When the numbers are crunched by food category, things get more interesting.
Final delivery (direct t-km) as a proportion of total transportation requirements varied from a low of 9% for red meat to a high of around 50% for fruits/vegetables, reflecting the more extensive supply chains of meat production (i.e., moving feed to animals) compared to human consumption of basic foods such as fruits/vegetables and grains.
But we’ve still got to work out the GHG impact. The researchers assign CO2-equivalences for ten modes of transport, including rail, truck, ocean (by container or bulk), air, and oil and gas pipeline (fertilizer feedstocks gotta get there somehow). Due to transmission losses, natural gas pipelines are only as efficient as trucks.
Once this calculation is made, the relative unimportance of local transport in the total picture begins to emerge.
Total GHG emissions are 8.1 t CO2e/household-yr, meaning delivery accounts for only 4% of total GHG emissions, and transportation as a whole accounts for 11%. Wholesaling and retailing of food account for another 5%, with production of food accounting for the vast majority (83%) of total emissions.
Within food production, which totaled 6.8 t CO2e/household-yr, 3.0 t CO2e (44%) were due to CO2 emissions, with 1.6 t (23%) due to methane, 2.1 t (32%) due to nitrous oxide, and 0.1 t (1%) due to HFCs and other industrial gases. Thus, a majority of food’s climate impact is due to non-CO2 greenhouse gases.
Okay, so what about the chicken-and-broccoli question? The paper presents the relative GHG effect by the seven commodity categories, scaled by weight, retail expenditure, and (most importantly, I believe) calorie content. By any of these measures, red meat comes out with the largest carbon footprint, followed by the milk and cheese category. Scaled by food energy content, the chicken/fish/eggs group matches the fruit and veg group.
The authors’ take-away message is that even a small change in diet can have a significant impact, given some additional reasonable assumptions. Just switching your calories for one day a week out of red meat and dairy and into veggies has the equivalent effect of a completely “localized” consumption habit.
… [but] this is conversely true for households which already exhibit low-GHG eating habits. For these households, freight emissions may be a much higher percentage of the total impacts of food, and especially will be important for fresh produce purchased out of season.
They also consider briefly the upswing in food imports into the U.S. Since ocean transport is relatively efficient (more than ten-to-one better than trucking), they infer that globalization has less of a deleterious effect than some fear.
It’s also worth noting that Weber and Matthews’ work is only concerned with GHG emissions. Other differential impacts on the environment by food category—for instance, land use, water quality, acid rain, noise pollution, and smog—are not part of their analysis.
For the current issue of Scientific American, Nathan Fiala summarizes his own work as well as that of Susan Subak concerning the environment impact of producing beef, pork, and chicken—specifically, the contribution of livestock farming to greenhouse gases and hence to climate change. Some of the graphics include gratuitous elements or are poorly conceived, unfortunately something the magazine is becoming known for. But a key chart drives home the point: compared to vegetable production, growing meat makes a much bigger impact. While making a pound of potatoes entails generating 0.13 pound of CO2-equivalent gases, a pound of beef creates 57 times as much, 7.4 pounds of global warming gas. I would have preferred a closer apples-to-apples comparison that matched the various foodstuffs in terms of calories, and one that made it clear whether we’re talking food in the field or cooked, on the plate, but the force of the argument remains.
Fiala references the 2006 report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): Livestock’s Long Shadow. Going beyond livestock’s climate change effects, the report documents meat’s huge environmental footprint:
So it’s not surprising that the authors write in the Executive Summary:
The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity.
Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale and its potential contribution to their solution is equally large. The impact is so significant that it needs to be addressed with urgency. Major reductions in impact could be achieved at reasonable cost.
Via Birding Community E-Bulletin, Narasimharao Kondamudi et al. report the processing of used coffee grounds (10 to 20% oil by weight) into biodiesel, as explicated by ScienceDaily. The authors estimate that 340 million gallons of biofuel could be produced annually; the grounds after oil extraction remain suitable materials for garden fertilizer, feedstock for ethanol, and as fuel pellets.
Newly-published research by Shalene Jha and Christopher W. Dick indicates that traditional shade-grown coffee farms provide yet another ecosystem service: maintenance of genetic diversity of trees in the landscape. The paper studies Miconia affinis in Chiapas state, Mexico. The inference is that natural seed dispersers (birds and bats), harbored by shade-grown plantations, promote the needed gene flow, and that the farms knit together fragmented forest patches.
Jonathon D. Colman in his column Everyday Environmentalist posts a richly-linked article on shopping for sustainable coffee (unfortunately, a couple of the links are broken already). He makes the connection—noteworthy if perhaps obvious on a moment’s reflection—between climate change and the deforestation associated with sun coffee.
I got a chance to read Tyler Colman and Pablo Päaster’s white paper, “Red, White, and ‘Green’: The Cost of Carbon in the Global Wine Trade,” which is summarized in Colman’s post.
The authors perform a detailed analysis of the carbon footprint (in terms of greenhouse gas emissions) of the production and distribution of a bottle of wine for consumption in the United States. The independent variable in their computations is the location where the wine is produced—Australia, France, Argentina, or California. Although they also analyze the effects of different agricultural practices (organic farming as might be typical in the various regions) and other links in the chain (such as CO2 released by fermentation), it turns out that the predominant carbon contributor is the means of shipping the finished, bottled wine and the distance that it must be shipped. For instance, for delivery to Chicago, a hypothetical 750ml bottle of wine from the Napa Valley produces almost 4.5kg of carbon dioxide; 3kg is accounted for by truck shipment from California. By contrast, wine from France, which is shipped by relatively efficient container ship, produces 2.0kg; and even here, shipping accounts for more than half of the total. The other significant components include the production of bottles, land use, and consumption of oak for in-barrel aging.
The results enable the researchers to draw a “green line” across the Midwest and South: to the east of this line, it’s more emissions-efficient to consume wine shipped from France than trucked from California (or Washington, presumably). Of course, if you’re fortunate enough to live in a state that produces its own drinkable wine (like I do, in Virginia), an even better choice would be the local tipple. Buying by the 1.5l magnum also helps: as they say, “shipping wine is often really about shipping glass with some wine in it.”
Two other asides: First, a footnote gives the nod to the general sustainability of cork as a bottle closure. Second, the writers note that growing grapes requires a lot of water for what you harvest: 1.2 to 2.5 megaliters per hectare, or 550 kiloliters per ton of grapes. This is partly due to the fact that grapes don’t yield a lot of mass per hectare, compared to a crop like corn.
Good botany links this past couple of weeks.
First, Anne-Marie at Pondering Pikaia explains the difference between two families of succulents in You Can’t Milk a Cactus.
Second, at Botany Photo of the Day, guest bloggers Connor Fitzpatrick, Hannes Dempewolf, and Paul Bordoni promote the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species with reports on four examples: emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccon), laurel (Laurus nobilis), maya nut (Brosimum alicastrum), and sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides). The GFU’s mission is to “Promote and facilitate the sustainable deployment of underutilized plant species to increase food security and alleviate poverty among the rural and urban poor.”
Bobolinks and other migratory songbirds are getting clobbered by pesticide use outside of the United States, beyond the protections offered (such as they are) by federal regulations, as Bridget Stutchbury notes in an op-ed piece for the Times.
Since the 1980s, pesticide use has increased fivefold in Latin America as countries have expanded their production of nontraditional crops to fuel the demand for fresh produce during winter in North America and Europe. Rice farmers in the region use monocrotophos, methamidophos and carbofuran, all agricultural chemicals that are rated Class I toxins by the World Health Organization, are highly toxic to birds, and are either restricted or banned in the United States.
Stutchbury cites research by Rosalind Renfrew of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies.
What’s a consumer to do? Look for shade-grown, organic coffee, and organic bananas. Conventionally-grown bananas are typically produced “with one of the highest pesticide levels of any tropical crop.”
I found organic bananas at my local Giant Food next to to the conventionally-cropped fruit, shrouded in plastic bags to discourage price tag switching.
Your vegetable fun fact of the day: tasty Brussels sprouts (Brassica oleracea var. gemmifera) are cultivars of the same species that give us broccoli, cauliflower, collard greens, kohlrabi, kale, and cabbage. Eat your greens!
Starbucks is making strides in areas beyond finding creative, entertaining ways to separate you from your cash in its stores. Continuing to deepen its involvement with the agricultural sources of its drinks, the company is in the middle of a three-year partnership with the Earthwatch Institute supporting research into aspects of sustainable coffee production. The current project sends volunteers to member fincas of Coope Tarrazú, a co-op in Costa Rica. Using GIS technology, field workers are establishing baseline maps of resources (soil condition, water quality, etc.).
The volunteer effort supports the research of Karen Holl of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Holl’s research interests in Costa Rica include strategies for re-establishing forests in land that has been cleared for pasture.
…we have established 16, 1-ha sites in southern Costa Rica. We are testing questions about “applied nucleation” by planting islands of native tree seedlings to facilitate recovery and studying the effect of the amount of surrounding forest cover on ecosystem recovery. We are collecting extensive data on seed dispersal, seed fate, vegetation establishment, and seedling dynamics.
Also involved in the Costa Rica projects is Catherine Lindell of Michigan State University, who has published studies of habitat use by various bird species in Costa Rica.
The Birding Community E-Bulletin points to a press release by Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) that reports evidence of nesting activity by Long-billed Curlews (Numenius americanus) in fields of winter wheat.
Winter wheat acres have been increasing with continued success in Prairie Canada. Reduced pesticide input costs, the ability to spread the workload and improved marketing opportunities are factors in the crop’s expansion. These factors have contributed toward winter wheat providing superior financial returns compared to spring wheat alternatives. Producers involved in a recent DUC winter wheat program made $27/ac more on winter wheat than they did on spring wheat. The crop is of specific interest to DUC since it is seeded in the fall and remains generally undisturbed through the following growing season when most birds are nesting. It also provides a more attractive nesting habitat for ducks than spring-seeded cropland.
When the nesting-season starts for many species, winter wheat has already had a head start growing, and is ready to provide nesting cover for grassland birds early in the season. By the time winter wheat harvest begins, in mid-July in the Dakotas, for example, young birds nesting in the wheat fields are either developed enough to avoid harvest combines, or else have already fledged from the fields. In contrast, alfalfa, which reaches harvest height in May, is typically cut within the first 10 days of June – a dismal predicament for nesting birds and young in areas like the Dakotas….
U.S. farmers annually plant about 40 million acres in winter wheat. Across Canada, more than 1.2 million acres of winter wheat is grown. Is this great for birds? No, it’s a monoculture. Nevertheless, it is a somewhat attractive crop , and one that usually reaches a suitable height at the right time of year to benefit breeding birds. It is a crop that won’t be harvested until most nesting birds safely fledged their young. Winter wheat will never be a substitute for idled grassland, like CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) land, but if cropland goes into a rotation with winter wheat, there may actually be some benefits for certain ground-nesting birds. (It should also be noted that farmers usually don’t plant winter wheat in the same field in consecutive years.)
Very handsome image, along with interpretive links, of a Cork Oak tree from Portugal at Botany Photo of the Day. Cork harvested from the bark of this tree is an eminently renewable resource.