Planting Seeds - Food & Farming News from CDFA

Informing California’s Climate Scoping Plan – from UC Davis’ World Food Center

Introduction:

In February, the World Food Center hosted the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the Air Resources Board and the Department of Conservation. The goal of the workshop was to inform strategies in the agriculture and working lands sector for meeting California’s new 2030 targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions under the State’s climate plan.

The specific objectives of the workshop were:

  • State of research: quantification of GHG emissions from specific practices
  • Potential metrics for measuring progress other than GHG emissions
  • Priority gaps for future research
  • Implications of practice adoption for water and economic sustainability

In 2008, the Economic and Technology Advancement Advisory Committee, established by Assembly Bill 32, identified research and technology development investment opportunities to enable the State to meet its climate goals. This report showed possibilities for California agriculture to contribute to GHG mitigation, but required more ground-truthing of the practices and technologies in California contexts. Now in 2016, we report on more than 50 studies conducted in California that were stimulated by this landmark climate legislation and that provide evidence of practices in agriculture and rangeland management that can assist California growers and ranchers to mitigate as well as adapt to climate change. We note that the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s (CDFA) USDA Specialty Crop Block Grant program, along with grants funded by the California Air Resources Board (ARB), California Energy Commission (CEC), and California Department of Water Resources (DWR), have been critical to enabling the science that informs this report.

It is important to begin by putting California agriculture into context. Agriculture and working lands contribute only eight percent of California’s greenhouse gas emissions (ARB, 2015). Just over half of that is from livestock production, 23 percent is from crops, and 11 percent is from fuel use. Food production in California is very energy efficient compared to most other regions of the world. Further, as California produces more than half of the fruits, vegetables, and dairy consumed in the U.S. and thus plays an essential role in the security and nutritional quality of the U.S. food system.

It is also important to recognize other environmental regulatory drivers that will likely play a significant role in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from California agriculture in the future. These include stricter monitoring of nitrogen management to reduce nitrates in groundwater, with may lead to more precise nitrogen fertilizer use, thus reducing nitrous oxide emissions. The Sustainable Ground Water Management Act may impact the number of irrigated acres and promote further gains in water use efficiency, reducing carbon dioxide emissions associated with energy use in irrigation pumping. A number of new and ongoing state incentive programs also play a critical role in advancing state climate goals, including but not limited to SWEEP (State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program) and the new Healthy Soils Initiative, which seeks to increase soil organic matter in California farmlands, storing carbon while improving overall agronomic efficiency.

With over 76,000 farm and ranch operations in California, covering over 43 million acres of land, there are no “one size fits all” solutions. But as we outline below, there are numerous opportunities to both reduce GHG emissions and sequester carbon across diverse agricultural operations – small to large, organic to conventional, crop to livestock. Perhaps most importantly, many of these practices have co-benefits for water conservation, restoration and conservation of natural lands, or economics, which together with state investment in the resilience of California agriculture and working lands, can promote adoption of these practices.

Given the complexity of integrated and diverse agricultural systems, and the difficulty of measuring emissions across heterogeneous environments, combining at least two metrics could provide reliable measures of progress toward greenhouse gas reduction goals for the agriculture and working lands sectors. Among those that might be considered for further development include:

  • Participation rates in USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service programs, such as EQIP and Conservation Farm Plans.
  • Calibration and use of more precise GHG emission calculators including COMET-FARM, International Wine Industry Greenhouse Gas Accounting Protocol, and new dairy methodologies cited below.
  • Use of mapping, aerial, and satellite imaging to monitor adoption of practices such as cover cropping, riparian corridors, and rangeland stocking rates.
  • Surveys, sampling, and benchmarking protocols can be used to gauge management practice adoption. This could be done collaboratively with producer organizations, universities, non-governmental organizations.

Finally, we conclude by identifying priority research opportunities that would advance our understanding of the potential climate benefits of combining practices along with potential trade-offs or barriers to larger scale adoption.

Link to full report

 

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