Pa. farmers dig into soil — & its ability to trap carbon — as a solution to climate change

This story was produced as part of Climate Solutions

This story was produced as part ofClimate Solutions, a collaboration focused on community engagement and solutions-based reporting to help Central Pennsylvania move toward climate literacy, resilience and adaptation. The York Daily Record is a Climate Solutions partner. StateImpact Pennsylvania convened the collaboration; other partners are Franklin & Marshall Center for Public Opinion, La Voz Latina, Sankofa African American Theatre Company, Shippensburg University, Q’Hubo News, and WITF. 

Introduction

Will Brownback stood in field C10, surrounded by tomato plants. As far as the eye could see, the leafy green plants rippled lightly in the wind as the summer sun beat down on them. The leaves shielded the growing, green fruit underneath.

Thousands of customers are awaiting those tomatoes. It’s a list that includes Wegmans, two farmers’ markets in Washington, D.C. and 1,700 Central PA households — members of Spiral Path Farm’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. 

Climate-Smart Resiliency Tactics

But the success of this crop — and about 50 other vegetables grown on the 300-acre organic vegetable farm — largely depend on two things:  the weather, and climate-smart resiliency tactics.

“We just experienced the driest May and beginning of June that I’ve ever known — that my father has ever known — it was scary dry,” said Brownback, second-generation farmer/owner of Spiral Path Farm, in Loysville, Perry County. 

Tomatoes may be the literal fruit of his labor, which is focused on climate-friendly sustainability happening under the surface, directly in the soil. Brownback believes his soil-centric focus is the reason his tomatoes are thriving —  despite that dry spell — and will ultimately be tasty.

The Soil Health Benchmark Study

Brownback is one of about 200 “citizen scientist” farmers participating in the Soil Health Benchmark study organized by Harrisburg-based Pasa Sustainable Agriculture. The study, launched in 2016 with Brownback as one of the first participants, is helping farmers learn how sustainable agricultural practices can impact and improve their farms’ soil — not only to make tomatoes tastier, but to help them adapt to and even mitigate climate change.  

Weather Extremes and Farmers

As Pennsylvania experiences weather extremes, including warmer and wetter weather attributed to climate change, perhaps no one is more attuned to those trends than farmers, who called for resiliency tactics and sparked Pasa’s initial launch of the Soil Health Benchmark Study nearly a decade ago. 

Farmers who test soil and keep records have data as the climate changes, said Hannah Smith-Brubaker, Pasa’s executive director.  

“It gives them a baseline and a place to start, so those farmers who have been in the study year-after-year are starting to see, ‘In heavy rain years there are dramatic changes in my soil,’ and then knowing what to do as a result of that — which is the report they get back advising them,” she said.

Expanding the Study

Most of the participants, like Brownback, are in Pennsylvania. But the study — already the largest of its kind in the nation — is poised to grow beyond the Keystone State.  

Pasa, a nonprofit, was awarded a $55 million USDA Climate Smart grant to help Mid-Atlantic/East Coast farmers across a 15-state footprint adopt sustainable farming practices that reduce or sequester carbon emissions, or prepare to be climate resilient, by expanding its Soil Health Benchmark Study, over the next five years. It’s part of the Biden administration’s $3 billion USDA Climate Smart Commodities grant program, which sets the goal of sequestering — through climate-smart ag practices — more than 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, an amount equivalent to that produced by 10 million gas-powered vehicles annually. Carbon is one of the leading greenhouse gases responsible for climate change.  

Climate-Smart Practices

“We know a lot of farmers already have climate-smart practices on the ground, but just need financial support and technical support to expand those practices,” said Smith-Brubaker.

Pasa, originally founded as Pennsylvanians for Sustainable Agriculture 30 years ago, guided farmers such as Brownback’s father through the process of being certified organic. Soil health and climate-smart practices are the latest evolution of Pasa’s purpose.

Measuring Soil Health

The Soil Health Benchmark study helps farmers measure and monitor their soil in three areas: physical attributes such as soil texture, biological components such as organic matter and respiration and chemical properties like nutrients. 

All three, together, paint a holistic picture of each farm’s current soil health and establish benchmarks, including human-induced climate change impacts. U.S. soils have lost between 30 and 60 percent of their original organic matter, and it’s being lost faster than it’s being recovered, said Pasa’s

SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

1. Which SDGs are addressed or connected to the issues highlighted in the article?

• SDG 2: Zero Hunger
• SDG 13: Climate Action
• SDG 15: Life on Land

2. What specific targets under those SDGs can be identified based on the article’s content?

• Target 2.4: By 2030, ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production, that help maintain ecosystems, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding and other disasters, and that progressively improve land and soil quality.
• Target 13.1: Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries.
• Target 15.3: By 2030, combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world.

3. Are there any indicators mentioned or implied in the article that can be used to measure progress towards the identified targets?

No indicators are mentioned or implied in the article that can be used to measure progress towards the identified targets.

4. SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

Behold! This splendid article springs forth from the wellspring of knowledge, shaped by a wondrous proprietary AI technology that delved into a vast ocean of data, illuminating the path towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Remember that all rights are reserved by SDG Investors LLC, empowering us to champion progress together.

Source: ydr.com

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