Climate and Soil Health Initiative
Growing solutions and resilience to climate change
AFT is committed to catalyzing a New Conventional Agriculture: one that is broadly climate-neutral or better, diverse, resilient, soil health-promoting, equitable, and environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable. To do so, we are elevating the role of farmers, ranchers, and the land they manage in adapting to and mitigating the effects of extreme weather. From policy leadership and coalition-building to research, training, and on-the-ground demonstration projects, we are working to scale up soil health-promoting agricultural systems. We work to ensure a prosperous and resilient future for farmers and the land that sustains us.
For America’s farmers, climate change is a daily reality. The climate crisis threatens farmers’ ability to nourish a growing human population while protecting our nation’s air, water, soil, and biodiversity. To keep planetary warming well below 2°C as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, conserving farmland, and emissions reduction are essential to mitigate extreme weather and increase climate resiliency.
According to the latest U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory, agriculture is responsible for approximately 10% of U.S. emissions. The majority of these emissions are due to either nitrogen emissions from synthetic fertilizer applications or methane emissions from animal agriculture. AFT is tackling both of these issues through various projects (see below) and exploring ways to build stable carbon in soils, which removes carbon from the atmosphere.
AFT supports farmers in adopting soil health practices that reduces emissions, permanently protecting their farmland with a conservation easement, and hosting Smart Solar systems. The good news is that the systems of practices that reduce net emissions also improve farmers’ bottom lines and build on-farm resilience to extreme weather while providing many ecosystem services, or co-benefits, for society. This includes water quality and quantity, biodiversity, and increased climate adaptation and resilience.
Bottom line? At AFT, we believe farmers and ranchers have been, and will continue to be, an essential part of the climate solution.
AFT is leaning into our role as educators and bridge builders in both projects. We are convening peer-to-peer networks and designing training that draws on our soil science, social science, on-the-ground implementation, and beyond expertise. We are creating resources for others to use.
Additional projects include:
Advancing sustainable biochar production to use as a climate-smart tool in the soil health management systems toolbox. Several biochar resources, including an application FAQ, guidance for joining our biochar projects, and the recordings of the ongoing Practical Biochar Implementation webinar series, are available on the Farmland Information Center by searching “biochar.”
Our Conquering Cover Crop Challenges from Coast to Coast project is underway, showcasing new methods to encourage cover crop adoption.
We partnered with the USDA Agricultural Research Service and Regrow to use a computer-based model to simulate cropping systems with and without soil health management systems from 2022 to 2072 using climate projections. We also used satellite imagery to explore standard soil health practices in New York and Illinois cropping systems and how quickly they change over time. Check out our reports and blog post.
We are building a collection of state reports that use our CaRPE tool to estimate how much each state’s farmers can contribute to climate mitigation goals and provide policy recommendations to get there.
AFT is working to advance policies that support farmers in adopting more practices that build resilience to and mitigate climate change in the 2023 Farm Bill.
Interested in the greenhouse gas benefit of avoided farmland conversion? So are we! We’ve completed a case study for a farm in Illinois, and we are developing a method for calculating this for ag conservation easements in the lower 48 states.
Our report, “Combatting Extreme Weather on U.S. Cropland,” focuses on the significant potential of no-till and cover crop practices to increase soil carbon sequestration and reduce nitrous oxide emissions for a net reduction in GHG emissions.
Watch for new publications on the Farmland Information Center, and sign up to be notified in this interest form or when we publish something new by emailing us at [email protected]!
Our Strategies
We look to communities, organizations, governments, broader society, and individuals to shape the future of our New Conventional Agriculture. We need everyone at the table – from small to large farms, individual farmers and ranchers, and industry – to take bold actions that make a difference for our climate future. At AFT, we take a holistic approach to support all farmers, ranchers, and the land they manage—all scales and types of operations—to improve the ecological, social, and economic conditions of farms, ranches, and communities. Our work centers on supporting farmers and ranchers in the field, quantifying and analyzing the impacts of their actions, and developing and advocating for programs and policies that will catalyze an agriculture-wide shift toward these actions.
These approaches are interwoven throughout our three key strategies below to help the agricultural community solve and build resilience to climate change:
