Comment: Farmers key to climate solution, but at what cost?

Outback with Allflex

OPINION: George King owns and operates Coombing Park with his wife Melinda - a 3000 hectare cattle property located at Carcoar, 250km due west of Sydney.

Most humans see the atmosphere as too big of a problem to address.

Homo sapiens are responsible for the broad scale decline of every environment we have ever touched, we are the most destructive creature ever to walk the face of the earth, and no race of Sapiens has ever lived in harmony with the environment.

The rate of extinctions we are seeing now has never been experienced in the history of the planet. Desertification or ecological collapse is caused by biodiversity loss, biodiversity loss is caused by human management of the ecosystem

Agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent (Iran Iraq Turkey), 10,000 years ago, the pictures we see today of the Middle East is what ecological collapse looks like. One of the benefits of organic or village agriculture is the collapse if extremely slow.

Modern mechanical and chemical agriculture is extremely fast. Whereas the farmers from the Fertile Crescent could explore new fertile lands, now we have saturated the earth with agriculture and people.

Conservative estimates are our modern land management practices cause the loss of 75 billion tons of eroding top soil per year. That's 10 tons of top soil per human to produce 500 kg of food per year per person or a 20:1 ratio of soil loss to food produced.

The quandary is big business is making a fortune from "Climate Change", trading "carbon credits" for millions of dollars, shuffling credits and debits around earning more and more unearned money for businessmen without addressing the root cause of the problem which is desertification of the global environment. (Desertification encompasses biodiversity loss, soil carbon loss, broken water cycle, extinctions, erosion).

If we want to fix the global environmental problems it will have to be up to the farmers. Globally there are 570 million farms, 90 per cent family owned. Less than 2 per cent of the world's population is involved in agriculture. That is 98 per cent of the world's population depending on the 2 per cent farmers who have the ability to moderate the climate and food supply into the future.

For farmers to do this the world has to pay more for food. Society needs to accept this expense if they want stable environments and sustainable food supplies. The problem is big business won't profit from the farmers being paid more. Farmers manage 60 per cent of the earth's surface, 10 billion hectares.

Currently over 80 per cent of the food humanity eats comes from gardens and village agriculture rather than from industrial agriculture. Increasing the cost of food will not only help farmers stabilise the environment but will provide income for villagers to lift them out of poverty so as to avoid social unrest.

Raising the price of food will not only help the environment it will cut down on the enormous amount of wastage. Some well-placed government subsidies to help the at risk socio-economic groups.

A big environmental problem we face is selling food by weight. The nutritional density of food has been drastically decreasing since the industrial revolution when we started to put chemicals into the food chain.

We should be paying farmers on the nutritional density of the food produced, we have the technology to instantly measure this objectively. To get good nutritional density the food has to be grown in carbon rich biologically active soils.

To get carbon rich biologically active soils they have to be managed in a way that they are not eroding or dying. To get maximum weight gain or crop yield the best way is from soils which are effectively dying releasing the carbon and biology for the plants to take up.

We are on a collision course of rising population and decreasing farm land productivity.

Not a pretty way to go. The only way to fix the global environment is to pay the farmers to do it. While we are paying them and educating the farmers on how to do this we also need a global push to educate and empower women. Without exception when you educate and empower women the birth rates go down.

The world has to run much more livestock than it now does to restore the rangelands. Properly managed livestock is the ONLY tool we have to restore the brittle tending grasslands of the world. Properly functioning grasslands will sequester carbon from the atmosphere, restore the hydrological cycle, and re-store biodiversity and environmental stability.

The methane debate will no doubt raise itself here with the proposition of running more livestock. For millennia the earth has supported many more animals than we now do. Despite this methane level remained stable at some 700 parts per billion.

This is because when methane (CH4) is released from an herbivore grazing green grass it is mostly rapidly photo-oxidised into H2O and CO2 by hydroxyl radicals formed when sunlight interacts with the transpired water vapour.

Generally green grass can photo-oxidise 100 times more CH4 than that produced by the herbivores grazing that area. Healthy soils similarly contain many bacteria, methanotrophs, that actively oxidise CH4 into CO2 and H20 both of which can then be used to support further healthy plant growth. There is no methane issue from herbivores grazing healthy pasture.