On Monday, June 26, Tom spoke at the opening reception of the 2023 State Environmental Protection meeting hosted by the Environmental Council of the States (ECOS). ECOS is the national, nonpartisan association of state and territorial environmental agency leaders and is led by Ben Grumbles, the former Secretary of the Maryland Department of the Environment. Tom was introduced by Kevin Atticks, current Secretary of the Maryland Department of Agriculture, and the former Executive Director of the Maryland Wineries Association.
Several people who reviewed or heard Tom’s comments regarding the nexus of agriculture, health, the environment, and social justice suggested that he share them.
Thank you, Kevin, and thank you, Ben.
It’s a privilege to be here with you tonight. I am deeply grateful that you are willing to take time away from your lives and your families to come to Washington for this meeting.
As the consequences of climate change intensify, it must sometimes feel like you are in the middle of a never-ending bucket brigade putting out the fires, but we need you to persevere. Only you, only government, can underwrite the investment, coordinate the stakeholders, and ensure equitable distribution of the costs and benefits at the scale needed to avoid the looming cataclysm.
This mission, your mission, is crucial.
You will hear more about climate-smart agriculture tomorrow. Many of these vital projects aim to rapidly implement agroecological practices like cover cropping, composting, livestock integration, and agroforestry that sequester carbon, enhance biodiversity, and restore ecosystems. These are essential if we are to keep the planet within its habitable boundaries.
We know these tools work. At Dodon, for example, we’ve used them over the past decade to increase soil organic matter by 10-fold. We’ve planted 1600 trees, many of them traditional food sources, and created acres of meadows and hedgerows.
The result has been better resilience to increasingly extreme weather, like the 4-inch downpour we had when Ben visited a year ago. We’ve also reduced insecticide use by 70% and fungicide use by a third, and we’ve increased the nutrient density of our crop. The organic matter alone represents nearly 3000 tons of sequestered carbon dioxide.
As you know, agriculture, at least as it is currently practiced, may be the main threat to the very ecosystems on which it depends, but it is also the industry most affected by climate change. Most fruits, nuts, and vegetables consumed in Maryland come from California’s central valley, the desert southwest, and Chile. We may want to think about moving some, perhaps all, of this production east, where water is more available, and shipping is less dependent on a canal that is now 40% below its normal levels. Everyone who eats has a stake in the outcome.
The challenge is implementing these new approaches as time runs short. This is why your role is so crucial. It requires a collaboration that hasn’t been happening nearly enough. A few weeks ago, for example, a local news site hosted a panel on climate change that included six Maryland cabinet members, some of whom are here tonight. Unfortunately, the Secretary of Agriculture was not invited, a glaring oversight.
So, Ben, thank you for leading the way by inviting Secretary Atticks, and me - a farmer - to this meeting. You’ve set the stage for creating a comprehensive blueprint for agriculture that produces healthy food in a way that restores ecosystems and mitigates racial inequities. It’s what I call agriculture’s triple aim.
One place to start this radical transformation might be for each state to convene a high-level commission reporting directly to the Governor on equity, health, and the environment. Kurt Vonnegut wrote the task statement in his 1988 Letter to the Future. The commission might be led by the “Secretary for the Future,” also a Vonnegut proposal.
One goal of this commission would be to resolve the conflicts that will inevitably arise as agencies concentrate on their own narrow objectives.
There are many conflicts already. For example, with a few exceptions, climate-smart agriculture focuses on how we grow, not what we grow. But climate-smart grains used to feed cows will still result in methane production, and when used to make corn chips and Cocoa Puffs, they will still be the ultra-processed source of exponentially increasing rates of obesity and diabetes that disproportionately affect people of color.
Ultimately, the purpose of the commission should be to restore common sense to a preposterous agricultural landscape that shackles farmers in a system that pays only a third of the true costs of food, that responds to the carbon sequestration on my farm by imposing higher property taxes on value-added operations, and that incentivizes chicken nuggets and Twinkies instead of fresh produce for children in poverty. Is it any wonder that suicide rates among farmers are three and a half times the national average?
So, thank you again, Ben, for paying a premium for the seven kilograms of sequestered carbon dioxide represented in each bottle of Dodon wine you purchased for this wonderful reception. We could not afford to do what we do if our customers were unwilling to pay for it.
Choosing between healthy food, the environment, and social justice is a false choice. We can accomplish all three if we work together to blend agriculture’s experiential wisdom with modern environmental science, an effort that requires meaningful discourse among all stakeholders.
Fortunately, we have some good examples. In my industry, which is at the forefront of the detrimental effects of climate change, The Porto Protocol is an international peer-to-peer learning network seeking to find workable solutions to the challenge. Established five years ago, it now has more than 300 members in sixteen countries across the industry value chain. Their tagline? “There is no competition in the climate effort.”
Future Harvest, a regional regenerative agriculture association with more than 700 members, is another exemplary organization that trains beginning and experienced farmers to grow vegetables and graze livestock using climate-smart techniques.
Finally, I hope we can look beyond shiny new technologies for solutions. As the chemist Leslie Orgel said, “Evolution is cleverer than you are.” Don’t misunderstand; I’m not a Luddite. I love our precision sprayer, and I can’t wait for an affordable electric robot to ease the burden of floor and canopy management. CRISPR offers enormous potential to improve the quality of food. But if we do not fix the system in which they are used, these technological treasures will be nothing more than seeds on a barren landscape.
In contrast, over the last three and a half billion years, nature has designed elegantly complex, self-regulating systems that can serve as templates for the future. Janine Benyus of the Biomimicry Institute talks about encountering an engineer crying as he contemplated a mangrove. He had worked on desalination for over thirty years, yet he had only just recognized that these trees use solar power to remove salt, sequester carbon dioxide, and discard oxygen as a waste product.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Why did no one tell me?”
Thank you.