FaSTCoMPANY

These Cutting-Edge Farms Are Pioneering Ways To Reduce Their Water

In Kansas, “water-technology farms” are developing farming methods and technology to help cut water use by massive amounts. But it might not be enough for the local aquifer to recover.

[Photo: Jonathan Brinkhorst/Unsplash]

By Adele Peters       November 29, 2017

When farmers in Kansas began drilling wells to tap into groundwater in the 1940s and 1950s, they initially thought the water–coming from the massive Ogallala Aquifer, which sprawls over 174,000 square miles in eight states–was an inexhaustible source. Now, studies suggest that the aquifer will be 70% depleted in less than 50 years. So some farmers in the area are now testing technology to help preserve water, and agriculture, as long as possible.

“With the Ogallala Aquifer in decline, it’s not a matter of if it’s going to go dry, it’s when,” says Tom Willis, who owns a farm near Garden City in southwestern Kansas, as well as two ethanol plants in the state. “That puts a severe hardship on my company here.”

Willis wants the farm to last well into the future for his son, and the ethanol plants also rely on local crops to be economically viable. So he decided to participate in a three-year pilot project that the state calls water-technology farms. “I had a very much vested interest in saying, are there technologies out there that allow farmers to be just as productive as they have been, and yet reduce the strain on the aquifer?”

On his farm, sensors now measure how quickly water is drawn from wells, and sensors deep in the soil measure moisture. “To the eye, it may seem like you need to water, but the moisture probe will say you don’t need water yet,” he says. That technology is combined with a precision drip irrigation system that can use as much as 50% less water than standard irrigation. A weather system on the farm measures precipitation, humidity, and wind. He is also experimenting with planting different crops with lower water requirements–wheat, for example, uses far less water than corn.

[Photo: Henry Be/Unsplash]The farm also uses traditional low-spray nozzles, so Willis and advisors from Kansas State Extension can study how much the shift in technology helps. Willis’s farm is one of 15 water-technology farms in the state.

Farming is responsible for more than 90% of the water that comes from the aquifer. The water in it accumulated slowly over time, and agriculture has sucked it dry much more quickly. “It accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years,” says Keith Gido, a professor at Kansas State University. “So once we have the technology to pump that water out, once it’s applied to crops and it evaporates, then it’s lost. That pool of water that’s underground becomes depleted. Just normal rainfall is not enough to recharge the system.”

That affects not only agriculture, but ecology. In a recent paper, Gido and coauthors documented that across one part of the region above the aquifer, 346 miles of streams have already gone dry, and fish habitat has disappeared.

The challenge is large: the states that can access the aquifer have no coordinated plan to save it. And even if farmers implement state of the art technology to save water, they’re prolonging the inevitable: Wells will eventually run dry–many already have.

Still, the water-technology farms can help. “We’re seeing some real farmer champions,” says Daniel Devlin, director of the Kansas Water Resources Institute. “I think that’s leading to a wide discussion there in some areas where they’ve either voluntarily reduced their water consumption, or they’re trying to plan on how to do that. So I’m pretty encouraged. I’m really seeing action out there.”

In one county, he says, farmers voted to reduce water use 20% over a five year period. They ended up exceeding their goal, while maintaining profitability. And new technology, including remote sensing from drones, has yet to be implemented.

“There’s a bunch of stuff that’s going to be available,” says Devlin, who has decades of experience in the field. “I’m frankly surprised. I’m much more encouraged today than I would have ever thought I was five years ago, for example. I see many, many irrigators that really see the problem and they’re trying to make changes, trying to make the water last for more generations than we predicted it would.”

Willis is currently analyzing some of the data from the farm, and says that he–and other farmers–want to see proof that the technology works on large-scale farms like his. That’s one reason that more farmers haven’t already switched to systems like drip irrigation. “With margins out there, they can’t afford a crop failure,” he says. “They can’t afford the capital investment without knowing for sure that it works.”

About The Author

Adele Peters is a staff writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to some of the world’s largest problems, from climate change to homelessness. Previously, she worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley.

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Resilience

Building a world of resilient communities

Organic Agriculture for 10 Billion People

By Adrian Muller, from Food Climate Research Network            November 27, 2017 

This post is written by Adrian Muller, FCRN member and senior researcher at FiBL (Research Institute of Organic Agriculture) and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His post is based on the paper Strategies for feeding the world more sustainably with organic agriculture,(link is external) published in Nature Communications earlier in November. 

Organic agriculture can feed the world. The only question thereby being what “feeding the world” may mean. Today, it basically means high shares of animal products in diets and that a third of production is wasted. Projections for 2050 look similar. Does this make sense? No. And this is the entry point for organic agriculture to play a role in sustainable food systems and for contributing to food security.

How can we feed 10 billion people in 2050 while at the same time reducing negative environmental impacts of the food system, such as biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions? Today, we produce about 2850 kcal per capita per day on average globally, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization FAO. These calories come with a high share of animal products. In the FAO projections for 2050, this value is even higher, at well over 3000 kcal per capita and day, and this is supplied for a population that is 30 percent larger than today. Without further changes in food production, this would result in correspondingly higher environmental impacts as well.

Scenarios for future food systems

These values are absurdly high, but there is much room for improvement: imagine, which changes in feeding the world would be possible if we would not produce a third of agricultural output for the garbage can and if we would not use 40 percent of all croplands to grow feed for animals to meet our high demand in animal products. We definitely have enough to eat and there are clearly problems with distribution and access, but I will leave these considerations aside in this short blogpost.

We have to make use of this room for improvements if we want to feed the global population sustainably in 2050. Which role can organic agriculture play in this? Research has shown that it has advantages regarding soil fertility and lower environmental impacts when it comes to nitrogen surplus and eco-toxicity from pesticide use, but the commonly discussed downside is its lower yields.

Figure 1: Organic agriculture improves soil quality: soils under conventional (left) and organic management (right) after heavy rain (from the long-term systems comparison trial DOK; Photo: Research Institute of Organic Agriculture FiBL, Switzerland).

Another interesting question is what role grass-fed animal production may play, where there is no competition for cropland to produce feed or food, while greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram product are higher than for animals that eat concentrate feed.

Such questions can be explored with mass- and nutrient flow models. Such models provide insights into the bio-physical and agronomic feasibility of different scenarios of future food systems. Thereby, economic and social aspects are not addressed albeit they are clearly central as well. It is however legitimate to first focus on the bio-physical and agronomic feasibility and to understand those in detail.

Unavoidable trade-offs

We analyzed the role that organic agriculture may play in sustainable food systems by creating and deploying such a mass and nutrient flow model. The results of this work have recently been published in Nature Communication(link is external). We find that more cropland would be needed than in the conventional reference scenario, to supply the production as projected by the FAO for 2050. We also find, however, that the nitrogen surplus would be reduced significantly, with corresponding positive environmental effects. Furthermore, pesticide use would clearly be reduced as well and even greenhouse gas emissions would be somewhat lower than in the reference scenario.   This is the case for a food system with high shares of animal products in diets, and high wastage volumes.  This would change if we would feed animals with less concentrate feed and more grassland-based forage, and if we would reduce food waste and loss.

In a food system with, for example, 50% less concentrate feed, 50% less food wastage and 100% conversion to organic agriculture, land use would also be lower than in the reference scenario.  Further and more detailed results can be found in the paper linked at the end of this blogpost.

It is important to emphasize that these results clearly depend on a number of central assumptions such as the yield gap between organic and conventional agriculture, the impact of climate change on yield projections, the share of nitrogen fixing legumes in organic crop rotations, or the yields of grass-fed ruminants and from pigs and poultry fed without food-competing concentrates but fed on by-products from food production only. For our main results, we primarily adopted conservative values using higher yield gaps, for example. Results for lower yield gaps and results of sensitivity analyses regarding other key assumptions are reported in the supplementary material to the paper linked below.

In any case, trade-offs are thus always central when assessing the sustainability of agricultural production systems. The negative impacts from high nitrogen surplus and pesticide use can be reduced, if we are prepared to crop relatively more land (but this in turn would have negative impacts). Thus, which indicator may be the most important one?

Efficiency, consistency and sufficiency

Here, another result becomes relevant. Organic agriculture can play a central role if we refrain from focusing on agricultural production alone and adopt a food systems perspective instead. If we also address the consumption level, e.g. via the sustainability potential of reduced concentrate feed use and reduced food wastage, we can achieve improvements along all sustainability indicators and none of them needs to be judged as being more important than any other. In a food system with these changes regarding animal feed and wastage, dietary composition would clearly look very different, as the share of animal products would drop considerably. This would be so in particular for pigs and poultry that are predominantly fed on concentrate feed, and less so for ruminants that can eat grass. We emphasize that these statements refer to the global average and reductions are relevant in particular for high-income countries and future projections; in certain regions, increasing shares of animal source food in diets clearly still makes sense.

The food systems approach can be captured by three central concepts; efficiency, consistency and sufficiency. First, sustainable agriculture is often assessed with a focus on “efficiency”: how to produce more with as low as possible inputs and environmental impacts. This concept puts environmental impacts in relation to production volumes and gives guidance on improvements of single farm processes and production practices. It is however blind for aspects that become effective on an aggregate level only, such as in relation to the carrying capacity of ecosystems or cropland and water scarcity. Therefore, we also need to work with “consistency”. This concept stands for optimal resource use in a systemic context and for closed nutrient cycles. An example are ruminants that feed on grass.

Figure 2: Ruminants utilize grasslands and turn them into a source for food (Photo: Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/justanotherhuman/14564836544/(link is external)), Creative Commons).

Like this, it is possible to utilize these areas for food production, which would otherwise not be possible. Furthermore, these animals are then fed without competition on cropland areas for food or feed production. On the other and, such grass-fed animals are less efficient regarding greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram meat and milk. Thus, we also need “sufficiency”. This concept relates to the overall size of the system and its impacts. Sufficiency opens up the space for producing with lower yields or higher emissions per unit product while harvesting the benefits such as from reduced nitrogen surplus or pesticide applications, without increasing total land use or total greenhouse gas emissions. Sufficiency is often explained via “consumption reduction”, in our case here, this is the reduction of animal source food that is produced with concentrate feed inputs and also behavioral change resulting in the reduction of food waste and loss.

Conclusions

When working on and discussing sustainable agriculture, we need to address the whole food system including consumption and not only production. On the food systems level, we have to open up the needed space to deal with the unavoidable trade-offs. We do not have to rely on extreme solutions for this, but a wise combination of different promising complementary strategies is already able to deliver a more sustainable food future. In such a setting, organic agriculture can play a central role as one of these complementary strategies to move towards more sustainable food systems.

References:

This is a blog post based on the paper “Muller, A., Schader, C., El-Hage Scialabba, N., Brüggemann, J., Isensee, A., Erb, K.-H., Smith, P., Klocke, K., Leiber, F., Stolze, M. and Niggli, U., 2017, Strategies for feeding the world more sustainably with organic agriculture, Nature Communications”.

The paper is open-access and can be found here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01410-w(link is external)  and you can see a video by lead author Muller here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4daLqmureU(link is external)

A discussion of the Nature paper is posted on the FCRN website here.

For further discussion of the ‘livestock on leftovers’ approach, see Section 5.4.1 (pp 105-116) of the FCRN Grazed and Confusedreport.

See also the report Lean mean green obscene…? What is efficiency and is it sustainable? which explores and critiques different understandings of the concept of ‘environmental efficiency’ and as part of this discusses some of the ideas raised in Adrian’s blog and paper.