By Hannah Smith-Brubaker, Pasa Sustainable Agriculture
This op-ed first appeared in the York Daily Record on March 5, 2021--
The historic cold snap that froze Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas not only left its residents scrambling for warmth and drinkable water, it also devastated farmers — especially citrus growers who lost most of their crops.
One citrus grower called it the ‘perfect trifecta’ having had to endure drought, then Hurricane Hanna and now the deep freeze of February. Some estimate 60 percent of the grapefruit crop was still on trees, along with 100 percent of Valencia oranges.
While most people think of climate change as making our planet ever warmer, and it is, the cold freeze in the south is actually more indicative that climate change is about extreme weather — more frequent and more intense storms, heat spells, and cold snaps — which can wreak havoc on farmers and farm production.
We Pennsylvania farmers have also been forced to adapt to a changing climate.
Together with my family, I farm in Juniata County on a 75-acre produce and pastured livestock farm. I also serve as the executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture.
For 30 years, Pasa has lifted up the vital work of sustainable agriculture farmers. Today, we are 7,500 members, many of whom are actively farming, inside of a network of close to 60,000 farmers and supporters in the Mid-Atlantic, New England and beyond.
In 2018, I and thousands of other farmers in our network experienced record-breaking rain and flooding events. Not long after, in 2020, farmers experienced prolonged drought.
The major crop failures and income losses from these two very different instances of severe weather led to the need for the government to provide disaster relief funding to farmers.
This is why I and other farmers were pleased to hear that Governor Tom Wolf has chosen to enter Pennsylvania into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the nation’s first multi-state market-based program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
We are poised to take a significant step forward toward Pennsylvania meeting its carbon emission reduction goals by 2025 and 2050, therefore ensuring that the extreme and unpredictable weather we’re increasingly experiencing doesn't get even more extreme and unpredictable.
Additionally, Pennsylvania stands to be the first of the states to both explicitly and comprehensively include agriculture-based solutions in its emissions reduction strategy, certainly a basis for pride.
Despite the clear and urgent need for RGGI, some members of our state legislature are attempting to block Pennsylvania’s participation in this program, a mere first step in mitigating climate change (the Initiative focuses only on carbon emissions, an area where farmers can play a significant role in mitigating climate change through soil carbon sequestration strategies, but doesn’t address the most potent and primary gases some farms produce: nitrous oxide and methane).
To its merit, RGGI could effectively fund and grow programs across states striving to work with farmers to build and preserve soil health — a foundational component of a climate-change mitigation and adaptation strategy.
Many states are passing soil health legislation to incentivize farmers to adopt more practices more quickly to address climate change.
Pennsylvania partners, including Pasa, are working on a soil health policy roadmap to outline the best way to fund and promote healthy soil practices.
A CO2 [carbon dioxide] trading program under the auspices of RGGI would be an ideal and logical place to incorporate and help fund these practices.
Since trading proceeds are invested in energy efficiency and renewable energy, farms stand to have the co-benefit of green infrastructure that improves their bottom line.
Solar grazing, for example, is compatible with pasturing sheep, chickens and other small livestock, as well as with apiaries and a number of crops without taking prime farmland out of production.
Fortunately, agriculture provides a diverse menu of options for investment like renewable energy deployment, soil carbon storage, plant carbon storage, equipment electrification, and building energy efficiency.
Agriculture is uniquely positioned to utilize funds from RGGI to increase carbon capture, increase renewable energy, and increase efficiency.
All this is to say, RGGI itself may only be a first step in the direction we must head to ensure a secure food system, but it’s a good option and we have to get started.
[For more information on RGGI, visit DEP’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative webpage.]
Hannah Smith-Brubaker is a farmer, the executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture and a former Agriculture Deputy Secretary in Pennsylvania.
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[Posted: March 6, 2021] PA Environment Digest
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