Category: Uncategorized

CHICAGO/WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) – Beer made from rice grown with less water, rye planted in the off-season and the sale of carbon credits to tech firms are just a few of the changes North American farmers are making as the food industry strives to go green.

The changes are enabling some farmers to earn extra money from industry giants like Cargill, Nutrien and Anheuser-Busch. Consumers are pressuring food producers to support farms that use less water and fertilizer, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and use more natural techniques to maintain soil quality.

Investments in sustainability remain a tiny part of overall spending by the agriculture sector, which enjoyed healthy profits in 2020. They may help to head off more costly regulations down the road now that Democratic climate advocate Joe Biden was elected U.S. president.

Some companies, like farm retailer and fertilizer producer Nutrien , are also opening new revenue potential for farmers by monetizing the carbon their fields soak up. The companies say technology is improving measurement and tracking of carbon capture, although some environmental activists question the benefit of such programs and how sequestered greenhouse gas volumes can be verified.

Sustainable techniques farmers are adopting include refraining from tilling soil at times to preserve carbon. Some are adding an off-season cover crop of rye or grass to restore soil nutrients instead of applying heavy fertilizer loads over the winter that can contaminate local water supplies.

A study conducted by agriculture technology company Indigo Ag estimated that if U.S. corn, soy and wheat farmers employed no-till and cover crops on 15% of fields, they would generate an additional $600 million by reducing costs, bolstering soil productivity or selling carbon credits.

Indigo has a partnership with brewer Anheuser-Busch Inbev NV, which plans to buy 2.6 million bushels of rice this year grown with less water and nitrogen fertilizer than conventional rice. Anheuser-Busch said that is up from 2.2 million bushels last year and accounts for 10% of its U.S. rice supplies.

Bill Jones, the brewer’s manager of raw materials, said farmers voluntarily growing rice with a lower environmental impact along the sensitive Mississippi River would be less disruptive to supplies than having local authorities require such practices by legislating changes to water and nitrogen use.

“We look at supply chain security. I see this gaining traction,” he said, noting that Minnesota and other U.S. states and conservation districts worried about polluting the Mississippi are already introducing limits on how much manure farmers can spread on fields. Arkansas farmer Carson Stewart used the program for the first time this year, earmarking his entire 340-acre rice crop to Anheuser-Busch. Depending on milling quality, his rice may earn up to $1.50 a bushel more than conventional rice, a premium of about 27%, he said.

10 MILLION ACRE SHIFT

While companies expect Washington and Ottawa to grow more committed to funding and regulating sustainable farming, industry sources and activists said widespread adoption remains far off.

“They come with high up-front costs,” said Giana Amador, managing director at climate-focused NGO Carbon180. “We’re seeing a huge differentiation in quality among all these corporate commitments. “In September, privately held Cargill Inc. said it would help North American farmers shift 10 million acres to regenerative practices during the next 10 years by offering them financial support and training.

Pushed by demand for greener foods from food companies that buy its products, Cargill has already signed up 750 farmers to green programs, representing 300,000 acres, said Ryan Sirolli, Cargill’s director of row crop sustainability. With projects like one that pays Iowa farmers to leave soils untilled or to create field buffers to prevent fertilizer runoff, Cargill hopes to cut 30% of its supply chain greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.

“We’ve done a lot to stop soil erosion. And we’ve had a reduction of 538 tons of CO2, which is the equivalent of taking 104 passenger cars off the road,” said Iowa farmer Lance Lillibridge, who estimates he will earn about $37 an acre in a Cargill pilot project this year.

Environmental groups and consumer activists are skeptical about such corporate sustainability pledges, noting that Cargill has not made good on its promise to eliminate deforestation from supply chains by 2020.

As more premium-paying buyers emerge, more farmers will be enticed into sustainable growing, said Devin Lammers, CEO of Gradable. The unit of input dealer Farmers Business Network matches farmers using sustainable practices with buyers such as Unilever, Tyson Foods and ethanol producer POET.

CARBON CREDITS

Some farmers are making money by verifying the amount of climate-warming emissions their fields soak up and selling carbon credits to polluting companies seeking to reduce their net emissions. Agribusiness companies call that a double win for farmers as their fields become healthier and they earn extra cash.

This week, Saskatchewan-based Nutrien said it was launching a sustainable agriculture program on 100,000 acres in the United States and Canada, with expansion planned later in South America and Australia.

Nutrien Chief Executive Chuck Magro estimated that farmers will earn an additional $50 per acre in profits under the program – $20 per acre for carbon credits and $30 per acre worth of higher crop yields.

The announcement followed Nutrien’s 2018 purchase of digital farming company Agrible, which helps farmers log reduced emissions and water use. Magro said in an interview that the aim is to enable farmers to use that data to sell carbon credits. He noted that previous efforts produced meagre returns that were not worth the effort for farmers who had to wade through hundreds of pages of documents.

Agriculture accounts for 3% of the global carbon credit market, but that looks to grow to 30% by 2050, Magro said. “We see carbon being the next big agricultural revolution,” he said.

Matt Coutts, chief investment officer of 100,000-acre Coutts Agro in Saskatchewan, plans to sell carbon credits through Nutrien for up to 10,000 acres per year of canola, lentils and spring wheat. He expects they could eventually generate at least C$75,000 in annual additional revenue. Ohio-based start-up Locus Agricultural Solutions helped Iowa farmer Kelly Garrett create 22,400 tonnes in carbon credits by verifying his fields locked in about 1.4 tonnes per acre from 2015 to 2019. Garrett received a check for 5,000 of those credits in November, after e-commerce platform Shopify bought them on the carbon trading marketplace Nori for $75,000.

“The ability to sell our carbon credits through the Nori system and help the rest of the world be more green is a wonderful benefit to our economy and our finances,” Garrett said.

Still, Nori noted that Microsoft Corp passed on a deal to buy most of Garrett’s remaining credits because they were not verified by on-farm soil tests. Nori deems individual soil tests too costly, and instead verifies its credits based on soil type, crops planted and other data, said Alexsandra Guerra, the company’s director of corporate development.

Microsoft declined to comment. Few North American farmers have gone through the vetting process Garrett underwent, which also limits supplies of the high-quality carbon credits that some buyers seek. Some critics say carbon saved from no-till farming can easily escape if the soil is tilled again. “Statements that soils can sequester all of our emissions and more are overstated … There’s no way we could make that shift fast enough to address the climate crisis,” said Tara Ritter, senior program associate with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. PAYING UP FRONT Despite those doubts, food companies are banking more on carbon capture and regenerative agriculture. General Mills offers farmers technical advice while other companies pay growers up front to adopt greener practices. PepsiCo, maker of Quaker Oats and Frito-Lay chips, pays farmers $10 an acre to plant cover crops over winter, which can reduce erosion and control weeds and insects.

This helps PepsiCo meet its sustainability targets and secure its food supply, said director of sustainable agriculture Margaret Henry. PepsiCo subsidized cover crops such as rye and radish last year across 50,000 Midwest acres and plans to grow the program further.

Henry pointed to an added benefit: Cover crops soak up excess moisture, making many fields ready for spring planting two weeks earlier than fields that lay fallow.” We want this to be a win win for the long term,” she said.

(Reporting by Karl Plume in Chicago and Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba; Editing by Caroline Stauffer)

(Bloomberg) — Roughly 40% of the world’s people live in farming areas facing large water shortages, and scarce supplies pose an increasing risk to food security as populations swell and the climate changes, the United Nations said.

About 3.2 billion people live in agricultural areas with “high to very high” water shortages and competition over resources is rising, the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization said in a report. Many farms that depend on rain are at risk as severe droughts become more common, and bigger global incomes are spurring demand for water-intensive foods like meat and dairy.

Of the total, 1.2 billion people — a sixth of the global population — are in areas with severely constrained water supplies, and the amount of freshwater available per person has dropped 20% in the past two decades, according to the report. Swaths of Asia and North Africa have been most affected, while small amounts of people in Europe and the Americas have seen extreme restrictions.

Agriculture accounts for 70% of the world’s freshwater withdrawals, and the UN called for better management to keep resources in check and boost agricultural yields. Earlier this year, CME Group Inc. announced its first futures contracts on water supplies in California, which has been afflicted by droughts and wildfire.

Almost two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to face water shortages by 2025, according to the bourse.

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

In an odd way, Donald Trump’s political performance in 2020 — an election he looks on track to narrowly lose — is far more impressive than his performance in 2016, the election he narrowly won.

Unquestionably, his 2020 results are more disturbing, for anyone who does not share his enthusiasm for the politics of personal and institutional contempt. It has never been more clear the large numbers of people who do share that enthusiasm, or at a minimum have no overriding objections. This, in turn, has never been more unsettling in the implications.

If the president manages through some combination of good luck and legal challenges to win a second term, ash-in-mouth Democrats and their sympathizers will ask Trump voters in a spirit of recrimination, “What the hell is your problem?”

If Joe Biden hangs on to his narrow lead, his backers can ask the same question of Trump voters in a spirit of reflection, and possibly even genuine curiosity. Democratic disdain for Trump is natural; disdain for his voters is more problematic. But there is no logical way to scorn Trump without being somewhat scornful of voters who cheered his ascent to power and were eager for him to keep it.

The Trump victory in 2016 was blurry, and therefore relatively easy for people to distance themselves from larger meaning. Hillary Clinton, the logic went, had singular vulnerabilities. There was Russian interference. Lots of Trump voters likely didn’t think he was going to win but were eager to use their votes to send a message of protest to the establishment of both parties. Plenty of people regarded his persona as a flamboyant put-on, and assumed he would embrace moderation and restraint in the event he was invested with real responsibility.

The 2020 results remain blurry but the central question on the table in this election was vividly clear. Is Trump’s norm-shattering governing style OK with you? Former president Barack Obama framed it sharply in at the summer convention: “That’s what’s at stake right now—our democracy.”

Here is an uncomfortable reality for Obama and anyone who agreed with his words. Trump is on track to grow his popular vote total by millions of people, not one of whom could have been under any illusions about what they were voting for. Unlike 2016, there is no way to dismiss this as a flukish accident of democracy, or an illegitimate manipulation of democracy. His support was a robust expression of democracy.

More discomfort: This was a bravura political achievement. Strip it—just for a moment only—from moral context, from the fact that crowded, maskless rallies during a pandemic are flagrantly irresponsible, that many of his words were remorselessly demagogic. In the midst of the coronavirus catastrophe, just weeks after that virus left him in the hospital needing supplemental oxygen, in the face of bad polls and mostly hostile news coverage, Trump raced across the country and came close to winning. He is a movement politician who, with his back to the wall, often demonstrates remarkable moves.

It is not possible, of course, to separate Trump’s political performance from moral context. The argument of the past four years hasn’t been about, say, marginal tax rates in which people may accuse their opponents of greed but in the end can easily split the difference. It’s not even like arguments about abortion rights, in which the differences aren’t easily split and the different sides often view each other with mutual incomprehension. But even in that case, adversaries are in violent opposition to each other’s views, not in violent opposition to the body of institutions, rules and prevailing ethical customs that cumulatively create a democratic culture.

Trump is in opposition to that. There are hundreds of examples but no need to dig through the archives. His overnight appearance at the White House early Wednesday was a fine example. He alleged “fraud” without evidence and asserted, with millions of votes in key states still not counted, “Frankly, we did win this election.”

The origins of Trump’s appeal stretch back decades, in the long-term decline of trust in most American institutions, from government, to Big Business, to the media. In recent years, in part through purposeful political marketing in which politicians and media figures on both ends of the ideological spectrum reap lavish rewards of publicity and money for extreme politics, mistrust has been refined into pure contempt. It was this environment that made Trump possible, and in which he prospered.

But a narrow victory for either side does not fundamentally alter the country’s political balance. This means that the environment that produced Trump-style politics will continue even if Trump is not president. It also means that the opposition party to any president will in many circumstances perceive implacable opposition as being in their interest. In such a dynamic it is better to keep policy disputes as weapons and shields in the ongoing ideological and partisan war than it is to resolve them.

For four years, Democrats have been caught in what might be thought of as the contempt conundrum. The only principled response to Trump’s shredding of norms and defiance of accountability is steadfast opposition. This, at times, can goad them into the same politics of insult and indignation in which Trump thrives. It was no accident that the opportunity to register a verdict on the Trump years inspired surges of new voting on both sides of the question.

The conditions that created Trump will end only when one party or the other achieves a decisive advantage with voters that carries them to unchallenged majority status across Washington and deep into the states. Democrats thought this might be the year that happened. Some 67 million Trump voters—several million less than Biden won but several million more than Trump got four years ago—said not so fast.

When Democrats ask Trump voters “What is your problem?” it is another way of asking themselves, “What is our problem?”

With the presidential election less than a week away, Americans are weighing the two presidential candidates and choosing which is best for the country over the next four years —if they haven’t already voted.

One way they can do that is by looking back on the first term of President Donald Trump and comparing the impact his policies have had on the country to previous administrations.

Trump’s GDP Numbers: Trump has campaigned as the best choice for the U.S. economy. Trump often uses the stock market as a scorecard for his policies, but the best representation of the real U.S. economy is gross domestic product.

Here’s a look at annual U.S. GDP growth during Trump’s presidency. The 2020 estimate comes from the Federal Reserve:

• 2017: +2.3%
• 2018: +3%
• 2019: +2.2%
• 2020: -3.7%

How Trump Compares: Overall, U.S. GDP growth has averaged about 0.95% during Trump’s first term in office. Here’s a look at how that GDP growth stacks up to his predecessor, President Barack Obama:

• 2009: -2.5%
• 2010: +2.6%
• 2011: +1.6%
• 2012: +2.2%
• 2013: +1.8%
• 2014: +2.5%
• 2015: +3.1%
• 2016: +1.7%

In his eight years in office, U.S. GDP growth averaged 1.62% under Obama, about 70% higher than Trump’s growth rate.

Here’s a look at average GDP growth rates under the last six U.S. presidents:

• Jimmy Carter (D): 3.25%
• Ronald Reagan (R): 3.48%
• George H.W. Bush (R): 2.25%
• Bill Clinton (D): 3.88%
• George W. Bush (R): 2.2%
• Barack Obama (D): 1.62%
• Donald Trump (R): 0.95%

In his first four years in office, Trump has had by far the lowest average U.S. GDP growth rate of any of the last seven U.S. presidents.

Overall, U.S. GDP growth was highest under Clinton and Reagan in this group. GDP growth was lowest under Trump and Obama.