Make sustainability about facts, not perception

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most sustainable and virtuous of us all?

The different sectors within agriculture each like to promote their sustainability, even if no one can accurately define what exactly it means. Since agriculture is a target for greenhouse gas reductions, each sector wants to win the public perception battle.

In the grain sector, we hang our hat on direct seeding and minimum tillage. Gosh, we’re still sequestering lots of carbon each year even after decades of min-till. Or at least that’s what we like to be told.

We’re so darn virtuous we should be paid for all the carbon we’re taking from the atmosphere. Even if that isn’t actually recognized under international climate change accounting, big companies might pay us for our carbon sequestration so they can look like good guys in the battle against climate change.

Of course, we like to conveniently ignore that many areas use fall tillage to manage crop residue. If anything, tillage has likely increased in recent years.

As for fertilizer emissions, well we’re practically saints. No one spreads nitrogen on frozen ground, right? And with precision agriculture, we’re placing just the right amount of fertilizer on each square foot of land. Funny how we can do that when the vast majority of fields never even get a soil test.

You can’t blame the sector for promoting the positive steps being taken, but we shouldn’t exaggerate our progress.

Organic agriculture is embraced by many consumers based on perception and philosophy. If you use greenhouse gas emissions as a metric, conventional grain production might look better than organic.

Cover cropping is seen by many as a sustainability practice that should be adopted. The theory is that living roots throughout the year are good for the soil. In practice, a lot more research is needed into how to make this economically viable in the various soil zones.

Meanwhile, the cattle sector warns that if the beef breeding herd continues to decline, more pasture and grazing land will be converted to annual crops and what a disaster that would be for greenhouse gas emissions. So, according to this narrative, beef is good and grain is bad.

This is contrary to the climate activists who claim meat consumption worldwide must be dramatically reduced in order to save the planet.

Cow-calf producers advance the very logical argument that cattle use a lot of land that can’t be harvested any other way than through the mouth of a bovine. However, this contradicts the concern about pasture and hay land being converted to crop production.

Seldom does the mainstream beef industry want to mention the feedlot side of the business where cattle are fed a finishing ration rich in grain. The grass fed beef folks like to point this out as a way to show their system is more virtuous. However, because grass fed beef takes so much longer to finish an animal, most or maybe all of the sustainability benefits may be lost.

Meanwhile, the dairy industry pays for nationwide television ad campaigns to tell consumers its good news sustainability stories.

Biology is complex, particularly soil biology. Farming systems vary from one region to the next and from one farm to the next. Sustainability measurements and comparisons are difficult to make especially if you fail to define what parameters are most important. Perception is no substitute for empirical data.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, lipstick on a pig doesn’t make it a doll.