Farmers are a climate crisis casualty. They are among the most impacted by the crisis, and also among the most critical to solving it. We are seeing incredible crop losses due to greater weather extremes - more heat, more floods, more droughts, and also due to expanding pest pressures. The food system is also a climate crisis culprit. The food system is responsible for one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions (agribusiness driven deforestation, energy-intensive factory farms, processed food packaging and processing, food waste and transportation, etc.). The industrial food system is dependent on the very fossil fuels that are driving this crisis—and many of the same companies are implicated. As renewables like solar and wind are taking off, energy companies are moving into industrial agriculture, investing ever more into fossil-fuel dependent fertilizer production. Industrial meat is also a huge part of the problem, because so much farmland is being diverted for animal feed and grazing, because factory farms are so energy-intensive, and because ruminants like cattle produce the heat-trapping greenhouse gas methane through digestion. Three-fifths of agricultural land is used for cattle, which provide only 5 percent of the world’s protein.
Despite all of this, food and farming is a major part of the climate solution. We can transform how we farm and protect vital regions like rainforests from deforestation. We can reduce emissions and keep carbon on the ground and in the soils - not in the atmosphere. Organic and agroecology farming methods produce healthy, abundant food while building healthy soil, and produce more resilient farms that are better able to withstand extreme weather.