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Illinois Dust Storm Disaster Is a Warning for Agriculture

The Equation

As climate change continues and farming areas get hotter and drier—as expected in the Southern Great Plains and Southwest—erosion could increasingly take the form of dust storms when bone-dry fields are plowed. Fertilizer runoff can also affect urban communities downstream. All the time.

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Farmers Can Adapt to Alternating Droughts and Floods—Here’s How

The Equation

Industrial agricultural practices such as tillage (plowing) and leaving fields bare between growing seasons degrade soil structure, reduce water infiltration, lower water storage capacity, and increase runoff (the flow of water across the soil’s surface).

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Climate savior or ‘Monsanto of the sea’?

Food Environment and Reporting Network

They sell the wild and cultivated seaweed dried, and use the less delicious, more abundant kinds to fertilize the saltwater farm they’re reviving nearby. As climate change intensifies, people are “panicking,” said Kristen Davis, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth system science at University of California, Irvine.

Science 52
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Federal Climate Policy: Agriculture Resilience Act Re-Introduced

CalCAN

The plowing of agricultural land during the 19th and 20th century released vast stores of carbon dioxide , only a small part of which has since been returned to the soil. The previous National Academy of Sciences study on links between human and soil health has been deleted, as it is already under way.

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Can Biden’s climate-smart agriculture program live up to the hype?

Food Environment and Reporting Network

These practices include reducing or eliminating tilling of soil, planting “cover crops” that grow during the off-season and are not harvested, improving how farmers use fertilizer and manure, and planting trees. Others say science has yet to prove that climate-smart practices truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “We

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A pillar of the climate-smart agriculture movement is on shaky ground

Food Environment and Reporting Network

And they raise the risk of additional acres being plowed up to compensate for the lower yields. The Nature Conservancy, Project Drawdown and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine have all based optimistic claims of cover crops’ potential benefits largely on this study. percent for corn and 3.5