Climate change and drought:

Worldwide, farmers are increasingly facing challenges related to extreme drought and heat. In recent years, Emergency Funds have been made available to producers impacted by these pressures in industrial countries. However, drought recurrence indicates the need for both pre-emptive and longer-term solutions. 

Drought, devastating heat waves, natural disasters, and dried-up lakes have altered biodiversity and changed agriculture sustainability. As many of us have never seen it to be, a long dry period of almost two months, May and June 2023, dominated Michigan and other Midwest. 

Drought conditions continued to persist across the Midwest, raising questions not only about corn and soybean yields but also about how drought impacted soil quality and crop resilience, thus challenging farms' economics. Such weather uncertainty differs a lot from what I witnessed in drylands.  

In the midst of climate change, erratic weather patterns have made it increasingly difficult for farmers to plant and harvest crops as they usually would successfully do. Excessive droughts and strong winds can destroy cornfields and planted trees and contribute to soil erosion, making it increasingly difficult to cultivate crops and land suitable for harvesting produce in the first place. 

Climate change is already happening, and farmers are already affected by weather extremes. 

Therefore, Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) can help mitigate the negative effects of climate change on agriculture.

Soil Health  and the Need for Climate-Smart Agriculture:

Scientists and researchers have worked hard to enhance soil quality regarding soil functions and what they do. To improve soil quality, the soil’s dynamic and biological capacity must be improved. The soil quality concept was upgraded to combine the three integral dimensions of biological, physical, and chemical compounds to safeguard and enhance the vitality and productivity of soil through scientific research and advancement. Therefore, soil health is acknowledged as the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, humans, and animals.

While soil health is considered a finite and dynamic living resource, scientists and researchers continued working on broader integrated systems that serve inclusive, integrated ecosystems under current climate change. It is Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA). CSA is a relatively new holistic approach that seeks to create a sustainable and resilient agricultural system in the face of a changing climate. CSA aims to balance increased agricultural productivity, adaptation to climate change, and reducing negative environmental impacts. CSA has recently gained attention through legislation and increased funding to tackle the complex issues around combating and mitigating climate change.

Urgent action is needed to limit the temperature increase in the atmosphere to below 2°C. Carbon sequestration in soils and soil organic carbon (SOC) protection is seen as a promising approach to counteract this and maintain soil fertility (Minasny et al. 2017). Therefore, immediate action is needed to increase the knowledge and activity among farmers. This is the context of this posting on CSA. 

Yet conservationists and researchers may be asking, what do we need to do to make their program Climate Smart? The answer is that implementing a Climate Smart Initiative requires addressing the agroecosystem holistically to incorporate technology and delineate solutions to productivity, profitability, and environment, all while remaining within the lens of climate resilience and adaptation. In other words, CSA recognizes that agriculture contributes to and is affected by climate change, making it essential to adapt and mitigate its impact to ensure the well-being of communities and the environment.

CSA's core processes include adaptation, mitigation, and resilience. The main mitigation objective should remain to implement practices that help farmers and agricultural systems adapt to changing climate conditions and reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to climate change. A process emphasizes building the resilience of agricultural systems and communities to withstand and recover from climate-related distresses and stresses.

We aim to unlock soil as one of the world's largest carbon sinks. To do that, we must build trusted standards, tools, and technologies to help verify climate-smart agriculture.

The main objectives of Climate Smart Agriculture (according to FAO, 2014):

•  Sustainably increasing agricultural productivity which considers the economic, social, and environmental aspects,

• Adapting and building resilience to the changing climate, and

• Reducing and/or removing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) where possible.

Knowing that CSA is not a set of practices that can be universally applied. It is an approach that requires site-specific assessments. Sectors such as crop production, livestock, forestry, fisheries, and aquaculture can be climate-smart.

Climate-Smart Farming techniques

However, climate-smart farming techniques present a great competent and step forward to activate the CSA. Learning how to implement sustainable farming techniques has become more essential than ever before because the direct benefits of climate-smart farming are abundant. It can reduce the need to buy store feed for cows, help to improve the quality of the surrounding air and better overall human health, stimulate the growth of the farmland’s grass, and lower veterinary bills as everyone surrounding the farmland will be exposed to a healthier, outdoor environment. 

Climate-smart farming can also help reduce the need for fertilizer, so farmers won’t have to use their tractors as much. If farmers don’t use their tractors as much, they don’t have to constantly fill them up with gas, which is one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions that pollute the environment and aggravate global warming. This also results in farmers having additional funds that can be used to expand their existing harvesting capabilities. 

It is worth noting that CSA does not define any new farming practices. In fact, Climate-Smart Agriculture includes many practices that farmers already use:

• Conservation tillage.

• Cover cropping.

• Nutrient management.

• Agroforestry.

• Other practices to reduce GHG emissions.

Steering these practices toward production, adaptation, and mitigation goals is what makes them “Climate-Smart”.