for later reading:
Farming techniques to lower greenhouse emissions (including NO and methane).
LINK (PhysOrg)
Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory participated in a study that shows innovation in technologies and agricultural practices could reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from grain production by up to 70 percent within the next 15 years.
a lot of this is about using new strains of seeds, less fertilizer (instead of dumping it, where excess fertilizer runs off into the environment, micromanage small amounts as needed).
A lot of American farmers already do this. But a lot of what they propose requires computerized farming that is not available for poor third world farmers, and of course, it requires a lot more work to get out the crop. So does this mean robots? Electric motor tractors/tillers etc.?
They just posit these as green, no emission, but forget that the electricity has to come from somewhere, and the pollution from the batteries to run them. Not to mention that they are too expensive for small farmers in much of the third world.
Our farmers are subcontracted with us because we help with getting seedlings, (we still plant seedlings by hand, but automized planters are the future), with their tillers (evolving in recent years from waterbuffalo to handplows, a large rototiller), with the harvester/thresher for harvest that is still being done by hand in a lot of places. If you are a small farmer, you need a coop or a subcontract with a larger farmer/corporation for farmers to do this.
We had land reform a couple of decades ago, where our family's traditional land was given to the families who had long worked the land. But as things changed, the more affluent farmers now sent their kids to finish school, and the kids migrated to the city or overseas to get jobs. Now some of the older farmers are retiring and none of their kids want to go back to living a traditional way. But since there is a legal limit on how much land each person can own, we are limited in how much land we can buy back and much of our land is farmed from people from the Visayas, a poorer area, where we have family ties to recruit them.
But essentially the future might be consolidating the fields and using machinery and more modern techniques: GM seed, herbicide, fertilizer.
But since we are organic, we still use labor intensive weeding/tilling, meaning more work for the farmers, organic fertilizer, and analyze the soil to supplement minerals that are lacking in some areas. So our rice is more expensive than cheap imported rice. This is important fact to realize, since cheap rice is important if the poor are to have food to eat in the large cities. (the government imports a lot: a problem because if they import too much, it lowers the price and hurts local farmers, and sometime when too much is imported, the stored rice isn't sold and has to be disposed of).
And yes, we have started the dry technique on our fields.
Actually, rice farmers here in the Philippines (including our farmers) already have implemented some of these policies, i.e. dry rice farming, where less flooding of the rice paddies means less methane from rotting vegetation.
the flooding is a traditional way to keep down the weeds: the rice seedlings are planted in the mud, but the water prevents new weeds from growing, and by rotting the vegetation and weeds produces both a way to fertilize the fields and lots of evil methane that causes global warming.
so stop natural rotting vegetation for fertilizer?
The trick is to micromanage flooding to get fertilizer but not methane.
by flooding off and on, you can cut the methane production.
That is how China cut their greenhouse emissions.
Paddy fields account for around 20% of human-related emissions of methane — a potent greenhouse gas.
Farmers normally flood rice fields throughout the growing season, meaning that methane is produced by microbes underwater as they help to decay any flooded organic matter...
(scientists) found that draining paddy fields in the middle of the rice-growing season — a practice that most Chinese farmers have adopted since the 1980s because it increases rice yields and saves water — stopped most of the methane release from the field.
the bad news? it increased the release of another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.
China has done this in much of their rice land, and as I noted, the Philippine Rice institute is also teaching farmers how to do this.
So far the covid hasn't affected our ability to farm, but it has made it more expensive to ship and sell our rice in Manila. For awhile it was slow and chaotic, but things are improving
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