Capitalizing on Climate Smart Agriculture
By Lara L. Sowinski, Group Editor, CropLife Media Group
Climate-smart agriculture is defined by the World Bank as the “triple win” of increased productivity, enhanced resilience, and reduced emissions.
This means producing more food with higher nutritional value that is more able to withstand drought, pests, and climate-related risks, while simultaneously lowering emissions for each calorie or kilo of food produced, avoiding deforestation from agriculture, and identifying ways to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
During the 2023 VISION Conference, hosted by Meister Media Worldwide’s Global Ag Tech InitiativeSM, climate smart agriculture was a prevailing theme of the program and the focus of a panel discussion moderated by Vonnie Estes, Vice President of Innovation for the International Fresh Produce Association.
Estes pointed out that climate-smart agriculture also aims to boost farmer incomes, which is significant because so often growers and producers are expected to make financial and other investments to support sustainability initiatives, yet don’t receive proportional benefits in return.
Panelist Peter Wells, Strategy Director for Elevated Foods, said his company puts growers and producers first and works with them to identify new methods, processes, and technologies that promote climate smart agriculture throughout their organizations. Secondly, Elevated Foods runs tests, monitors and measures, and refines methods and processes to ultimately help growers and producers enter new markets and find new outlets for their products, as well as attain price premiums and other opportunities.
Wells summed up climate smart as “doing more with less and being more efficient,” which leads to greater profitability and reduced input costs.
“Climate smart agriculture is just smart business,” he emphasized.
At JV Smith Companies, many climate smart concepts are implemented because “they make business sense to us,” agreed fellow panelist Matt McGuire, Chief Agricultural Officer. “If we use less water, that’s a cost savings. If we can use less inputs, that’s a cost savings. [Overall], our cost per unit is going down.”
“We want technology to enhance the productivity of our workers, not necessarily replace them,” explained McGuire.
Technology is a critical enabler for climate smart agriculture, he said, but adds that it is a tool to help, not eliminate people resources.
For instance, JV Smith Companies uses Carbon Robotics’ AI-powered weeders. Each weeder can do the job of about 35 people. Those people can be redeployed to do other tasks, such as harvesting and various packhouse work, including “cutting, peeling, and sticking a head of iceberg lettuce in a bag every five seconds” — something that robotics manufacturers have yet to achieve, McGuire said.
Whether it’s an investment in autonomous weeders or any other capital expense, there must be a measurable ROI.
Farmers are accustomed to buying a plow or disc and handing it down to the next generation, and the generation after that. “They never get rid of it,” McGuire said.
By contrast, a lot of ag tech will likely be obsolete in three to four years, he noted. “We have to pay for it, use it, and be prepared to throw it away,” implying that the capital outlay must not exceed the labor and other costs it’s intended to offset.
S2G Ventures’ Jinchen Zou, Associate, Food and Agriculture, rounded out the panel.
“From an investor’s perspective, we’re seeing climate smart agriculture … to be the next big frontier in agriculture,” she said.
Utilizing practices such as low tillage or no tillage, reduced fertilizer usage and/or alternative inputs, and cover cropping can support healthier soil and higher yields. “Ultimately, climate smart agriculture should be better for farmers and growers, and for the planet. That’s why we’re excited about it, and we’ve got investments in these areas,” Zou said.
However, Estes raised the issue about the confusion in the industry, including the symbiotic relationship between climate smart agriculture and carbon markets, as well as who gets paid, when, and how.
“It takes a couple of years for the ROI to make sense. Your productivity in the first couple of years isn’t necessarily matching what you’ve seen before, so there’s definitely a cost to making this transition,” she added.
“It’s definitely not figured out,” Zou replied. “My view on carbon markets as it relates to soil health and agriculture is that it can be an effective way to finance some of these transitions to regenerative agriculture or climate smart agriculture because farmers are taking an added risk.
In the meantime, S2G is tracking some of the largest agriculture and food companies that have publicly made commitments to regenerative agriculture and is monitoring their progress.
Zou said from a technology investment perspective, she thinks a lot more standardization needs to happen, particularly with regards to financial aspects, including who gets paid.
Wells lists cover crops, low-till and no-till, enhanced efficiency, and nutrient management programs as examples of on-farm practices that are being changed or adapted as part of the USDA’s administration of its climate smart agriculture grants.
“At the end of the day, we’d like growers to be the ones who are getting most of the value,” she said.
Although technology underpins so many aspects and activities of climate smart agriculture, from data collection to automation to improved forecasting and analysis, tech is not the sole focus. Elevated Foods’ Wells sees the USDA grants as “kind of like a government-backed incubator to accelerate the adoption of climate-smart practices in which technology is not really involved, per se.”
Under the program, the USDA has identified companies like Elevated Foods, which play a role in the food value chain (and received a $20 million climate smart grant) to incentivize them to invest in producers to “de-risk” the process of changing methods to become more climate-smart, Wells explained.
“For example, if we were working with JV Smith Companies, we would actually pay them a cost per acre or some other measurement in order for them to change their methods,” and move towards a climate-smart model, he said..
“I think the producers have the hardest job of all and it’s very important for the government to get behind them because they’re taking on all the risk to change everything at the front of the supply chain,” Wells said. “I may be biased, but I do think it’s a wonderful program.”
