Speaking/Workshops

Growing Local Products Can Help Reduce Climate Change

The food we grow contributes to climate change. Both the cultivation practice as well as the variety of crop impacts total ‘carbon credit’ footprint costs.

We can reduce impact by choosing varieties of crops that are adapted to local growing conditions, that don’t need chemicals to produce a good crop, that can be harvested manually or with low input technology and have ‘value’ for local markets. These varieties contribute positively to increasing the biodiversity of soil and plant life in a region and maximizing market opportunities in the area.

It’s time our climate change discussion discusses how the variety of a crop directly determines how much water, nutrients and energy will be required to take the seed through harvest and processing, the cost of producing the variety as a commercial hybrid seed and the true ecological cost of growing high input varieties globally. To reduce the environmental cost of producing food we require different types of crop varieties than high input agribusiness varieties.

A few short decades ago food was purchased locally. Today food can travel tens of thousands of miles. Even if it’s got an ‘organic’ label on it the carbon footprint cost of that food product may be very high. Tractors, chemicals, high input hybrid varieties of seed and packaging all contribute to the ‘value’ and ‘cost’ of the product.

In decades before high input chemical agriculture people grew crops without alot of inputs. Varieties adapted to a diversity of soils and growing conditions. The challenge of using old varieties is matching the variety to the bioregion; we can do this now with GIS and other technologies.

The old varieties are considered ‘obsolete’ by seed organizations that are pushing ‘new and improved’ varieties that provide royalties to companies that develop the varieties that require chemicals to produce the desired results. The old varieties are in the public domain and cannot be patented or ‘owned’ and therefore aren’t seen as ‘valuable’ by agribusiness.

Heritage varieties belong in the public domain and cannot be patented or ‘owned’ by corporations. Can we afford to not be growing these types of crops during these serious times of climate change? Let’s talk about it!

Main Points:

• Explore expanding the biodiversity of food crops in the region
• Consider the ‘values’ behind older heritage varieties
• Find unique marketing and ‘value adding’ opportunities with diversity of crops
• Develop a process to explore and test heritage varieties in a region