How Can Farming Help Address the Climate Crisis?
In nature, plants transform the sun’s energy into food that provides a foundation for life. We humans are fueled by this transformation either directly (we eat the food) or indirectly (we eat the animals that have fed on this energy). It’s a clever cycle: it’s inherently abundant. But the industrialization of agriculture, picking up pace in the past generation, has flipped the natural abundance of farming on its head. Instead of producing energy, industrial agriculture consumes it, through the addiction to fossil fuel-powered machinery and petroleum-based agrochemicals. Industrial farms are often considered highly efficient, but only because these wasted inputs and devastating outputs—including the impact on climate change—are not accounted for. (See Table 3: The Core Differences between Climate-Crisis Agriculture and Climate-Friendly Farming). Unlike industrial farms, small-scale organic and sustainable farms rely on people power, not heavy machinery, and depend on nature, not manmade
