The June 25 commentary by Bonnie Blodgett connecting agriculture and climate change was eye-opening and encouraging. However, sequestering carbon in soil by shifting to cover crops and no-till practices are not only embraced by organic farmers in Vermont, but were both mentioned by Monsanto's director of government affairs in the first few minutes of her talk at a recent climate conference.
The Citizens' Climate Lobby national conference in Washington, D.C., hosted 1,200 volunteers, and climate-change solutions were discussed by a variety of sectors. The Monsanto spokeswoman was part of a panel of corporate voices that included a vice president of Exxon Mobil explaining why the business community is so keen on a market-based plan to price carbon.
Using market forces — rather than a regulatory approach — the carbon-fee-and-dividend solution being discussed, moves the economy away from fossil fuels faster and with more impressive results, as detailed in an independent economic modeling study. The revenue-neutral plan appeals to a growing number of conservative leaders who like its win-win goals of job creation and lowering CO2 simultaneously, while honoring their pledge not to grow government.
Regenerative farming is just one of many strategies being adopted as the fossil-fuel industry, automobile companies, the Armed Forces and even agriculture-based corporations like Monsanto shift to low-carbon practices — because they recognize that a warming climate isn't just bad for our health, it's bad for business.
Suzannah Y. Ciernia, Northfield
• • •
As a retired University of Minnesota Extension educator, I am tired of being blamed for so-called soil degradation (robbing the land of its ecosystem). In her June 25 commentary, Blodgett says this happens because people unwittingly follow the advice of university extension services. She also adds the "farm bureau" as a culprit. Really? To my knowledge, the Farm Bureau has not had anything to do with sponsoring extension service work since the early 1930s. Blodgett goes on to try to link the early death of a Vermont woman at age 56 to the use of pesticides — a typical criticism of conventional farming methods that has little evidence to back it up.
I have personally taught many mandatory Pesticide Applicator Safety Training classes to farmers to protect both the applicator and the environment. Another whipping boy in Blodgett's article is the use of commercial fertilizers. Instead of degrading the soil health, they actually add to it by furnishing nitrogen for soil organisms that break down the increased crop residue that the nitrogen also helped to produce. Basic soil chemistry says that a plant can't tell the difference between a nitrate ion (the form that the plant can absorb for growth) from commercial fertilizer or one released from decaying organic matter.
And then drain tile, for some reason, also gets unfairly blamed. Research has shown that tile helps plants make maximum use of available water. Ask farmers, and they will tell you land must be tiled or yields suffer and they waste time and money when tractors and equipment get stuck. The Extension Service continues to work closely with local soil and water conservation districts and the National Resource Conservation Service on educational and cost-sharing programs to maintain the soil ecosystem through such conservation practices as no-till, strip till, cover crops, precision nutrient and pesticide management, buffers and drainage systems. Soil regeneration is at work in commercial agriculture through these practices, and we are feeding the masses, something that can't be accomplished going back to the labor-intensive methods with a "plow and a sow and a cow" agriculture.