Small Farmers. Big Change.

This article first appeared on-line in The Climate Neutral Campus Report.

By Rodney North, Marketing, Equal Exchange
Which is the greater tool in fighting climate change – the thermostat or the spoon? A bicycle or a fork?

Despite all the discussion of the causes and cures for global warming little attention has been given to two fundamental human activities ― farming and eating ― that are, in fact, responsible for more green house gas (GHG) emissions than all the world’s cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships combined.

Some might respond “oh great – even food is pulling us over the cliff.” But take comfort, for what this really means is that colleges and universities have even more opportunities to reverse course and help us cool and stabilize our climate. Also, many of the available options could deliver side-benefits such as healthier diets and lower costs.

 There are four major opportunity areas within the food-climate change nexus:

 First, put your school on a low-carb(on) diet, and reduce the “SUV” foods on your menus.

 Second, look beyond what your school eats and examine at how the food is raised or grown.

 Third, examine the logistics of food, such as food-miles, bottled water, minimizing waste, and more.

 Fourth, seize a teaching moment that can last four years.

 #1 Identify the “SUV” foods on campus

Most of us understand that fighting climate change is largely about energy, but most do not realize that we literally consume a sizeable portion of our energy diet every day in the form of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Though we think of meals in terms of calories instead of kilowatts or mpg your favorite lasagna has a climate change footprint that’s just as real as your water heater and probably bigger once you do a full environmental audit of the ingredients.

Essentially some foods are like Hummers™ while others are the edible equivalents of plug-in hybrids, or even mass transit. Two foods might both deliver 300 calories, but one might do it as much as 40X more efficiently than the other. Remember, all food is ultimately derived from sunlight, and some, like a peach from your backyard, represent a pretty direct conversion of solar energy into edible calories. Other foods, like your typical cheeseburger, have more complicated, less efficient paths to our plate. While there are many factors the biggest problem is with animal protein and with energy-conversion ratios. For example, one has to feed a typical chicken four calories of grain for every one calorie it will give you later on the plate. For eggs it’s about 6:1. For both dairy products and pork, 14:1. Then you have your monster truck of the menu, grain-fed beef at 40:1.

With every decrease in conversion efficiency there is that much more feed grain that needs to be sown, fertilized, harvested, milled and shipped to feedlots and hog factories to produce your meal. This is partly why livestock consumes more than 80% of the nation’s grain production. Given that conventionally produced grains require about 2 lbs of fossil fuel inputs (gas for tractors and trucks, natural gas to produce nitrogen fertilizer, etc.) for every 1 lb harvested you can see how your meal plan actually sits atop a substantial, but invisible, energy pyramid and why changes to the menu might deliver surprising reductions in your school’s total GHG footprint.

To stick with the car metaphor, some livestock are not only inefficient, but pollute as well. In this case the pollution consists of massive amounts of methane and nitrous oxide. These are serious green house gases because methane molecules trap 23 times as much heat as does CO2 and Nitrous Oxide 300 times as much. Due to their ruminant digestive system cattle are again the biggest concern because a single grain-fed cow produces up to 132 gallons of methane a day each. When multiplied by America’s 95,000,000 cattle this becomes a serious problem. However factory-style hog operations are also a significant source of emissions, largely because of their large manure “lagoons”. Consequently, in some calculations these emissions constitute as serious a problem for climate change as the hidden fuel bill that accompanies each hot dog or hamburger.

But before you embrace roasted chicken as the climate-change savior of our meal plan, remember that even it is still only one-fourth as efficient as the fruits, vegetables and grains on your menu, where there is no intermediary animal, and no feed-to-flesh conversion loss.

The above examples do not begin to do justice to the many nuances involved in calculating the exact GHG tally for a given food, let alone the many other essential food service factors such as costs or nutritional needs, but they do demonstrate that schools might make surprising strides by examining what’s being served in the dining halls.

#2 What’s the story behind your potatoes?

Even if the basic components of your school menus are fixed there is another significant opportunity by looking at how your school’s food was raised or grown. Some farms, just like some factories, are more efficient and produce less waste than others.

Looked at through a GHG lens organic farms are one example. They do not use synthetic nitrogen fertilizers (which are basically a pelletized form of fossil fuel) but rather use natural inputs such as manure and nitrogen-fixing cover crops and shade trees. The use of manure is a double benefit as it converts what is otherwise a problem into a useful farm input and an aid in building healthy soil.

But whereas organic farmers sequester carbon, and put it to work, conventionally managed farms typically release CO2 from the soil every year, especially when tilling. According to an UN/UNCTAD study these soil emissions are as significant a source of GHG as the methane emissions from cattle, and another study from the Rodale Institute estimates that organic farming, if adopted nationwide, could stop the CO2 seepage and capture 500 billion pounds of CO2 annually.

No-till farming methods, even when using chemical inputs, help, too. And some farmers combine both organic and no-till practices.

Similarly, the method for raising cattle can reduce their otherwise large GHG footprints. Specifically, grass-fed cattle can emit as little as 50% of methane of corn-fed cattle, as cattle stomachs have evolved for digesting grasses, not grains.

#3 Logistics – little steps that add up

So far we’ve covered the GHG footprint that is embedded in food itself, but what happens with food after its grown offers further opportunities.

Let’s start with a beverage, bottled water. Sure, water may not technically be ‘food’, but you need it, you consume it, and it can come with a side-order of either near-zero GHG or quite a lot. On average a 12 oz. bottle of water requires 3 oz. of oil for the pumping, refrigeration, trucking and for the bottle itself. Currently the average campus with 6,000 students will every month consume the equivalent of 100,000 12 oz. bottles of water. Weaning your campus off bottled water could be one of the easiest and fastest ways you can lower your school’s carbon footprint.

For many people the concept of “food-miles” and buying locally grown food was the first time they connected food choices with energy and global warming. Because it has been covered extensively in the popular media, and its appeal is self-evident, I will only add the following:

• Increasingly food service companies like Sysco are willing to accommodate requests to source more of their ingredients locally. One firm, Bon Appétit, specializes in sourcing local and organic ingredients.
  
• Depending upon the situation the climate change benefits of sourcing locally could be negligible-to-good, but are probably less significant than the opportunities listed above. In other words, the CO2 footprint of shipping beef is insignificant compared to the footprint of raising beef. For foods that start with light CO2 footprints, like unprocessed fruits and vegetables, sourcing locally takes on relatively greater importance.
  
• Keep in mind that distance doesn’t always directly translate into impact. For example, to move one ton of cargo one mile by container ship leaves a carbon trail less than one-tenth that of highway trucking. Therefore tropical products like tea and coffee may not be as bad as you might assume.
  

   

Some schools are fighting climate change, food costs, and the dreaded “freshman fifteen” all at once by painlessly reducing waste. Their trick? Dumping the tray. The logic is simple. Without the tray students carry much less food to their table, they eat less, and throw away much less. It’s subtle, almost imperceptible way to change behavior that is healthier for students, saves money, and can reduce food service costs up to 15%. That translates directly to a lower carbon footprint, even without any changes in menu or prompting by the administration. Where appropriate an a la carte pricing strategy should reduce waste, too.

#4 The Extended Teaching Moment

Maybe this goes without saying, but colleges and universities are not merely large institutions, but uniquely powerful ones due to their almost unique opportunity to shape a young person’s daily life as well as influence their behavior for years to come. That, combined with massive purchasing power and a trend-setting role within society, means that the new practices enacted on America’s college campuses will eventually be multiplied many times over.

Conclusion

This brief essay cannot possibly address all the variables that go into designing or serving the thousands of meals that are served on your campus every day. And what is ideal in Sacramento is probably wrong for Minneapolis. Plus there are a host of other food-related factors that deserve attention, including the obesity epidemic, animal welfare, and social justice for farmers and farm workers. Nonetheless, this essay will have done its job if it merely spurs you to add “food” to your climate change to-do list. This most quotidian of pleasures is probably more central to reversing global warming than you could have imagined.

Sources:

L. A. Harper, O. T. Denmead, J. R. Freney and F. M. Byers

“Direct measurements of methane emissions from grazing and feedlot cattle”

The Journal of Animal Science, 1999

http://jas.fass.org/cgi/content/abstract/77/6/1392

The International Trade Centre UNCTAD/WTO

“Organic Farming and Climate Change”, 2007

https://www.fibl-shop.org/shop/pdf/mb-1500-climate-change.pdf

National Organic Coalition

Letter to the U.S. House of Representatives committees on Agriculture, Energy and Commerce, and the sub-committee on Energy and the Environment, June 10, 2009

http://www.nationalorganiccoalition.org/NOC_Organic_letter_Final.pdf

David Pimentel and Marcia Pimentel

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

“Sustainability of Meat-based and plant-based diets and the environment”, September 2003, Vol 78, No. 3

The Rodale Institute

“Organic farming sequesters atmospheric carbon and nutrients in soils”

October, 2003

http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/ob_2

Terrapass

“Cutting Carbon From Your Diet”

http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/cutting-the-carbon-from-your-diet

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization

“Livestock’s Long Shadow”, 2006

http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Ruminant Livestock FAQ, 2009

http://www.epa.gov/rlep/faq.html#1

Marcio Visscher

“Meat is Methane”, Ode Magazine, December 2007