Editorial | Agriculture in the age of climate change

When this newspaper last year challenged the College of Agriculture, Science and Education (CASE) and its president, Derrick Deslandes, to assume intellectual leadership of propelling Jamaica’s agriculture into the 21st century, we did not specifically add the proviso that this transformation should pay heed to the crisis of global warming and Jamaica’s obligation to contribute to its mitigation.

While the people at CASE ought not to need The Gleaner’s warning about the perils to earth from spewing greenhouse gases – including from agriculture – into the atmosphere, we nonetheless place the matter on the agenda for their attention and, as a specialist agricultural training institution, robust public discussion. Other training and research institutions, such as The University of the West Indies, the University of Technology and Northern Caribbean University, must join this dialogue.

Global context apart, the question of how a subset of the agriculture sector, animal farming, contributes to global warming, and what innovative solutions may be applied, was brought into focus recently because of remarks by Dr Deslandes in his role as chairman of the Jamaica Dairy Development Board (JDDB), relating to the steep decline in Jamaica’s milk production in recent decades.

At around 12 million litres annually, Jamaica’s output of milk is less than half of what it was three and a half decades ago. Indeed, the island’s dairy herd of 12,000 cows is a third fewer than what it was in the early 2000s.

There are two major factors behind this decline. First, in the 1980s, US food aid to the island under America’s PL480 programme led to an inflow of cheap milk powder, weakening the competitiveness of Jamaica’s relatively small-scale dairy farmers. Then followed globalisation and the further liberalisation of markets. Farmers faced even greater competitive pressures, causing many to fall out of the dairy business. It did not help, too, that Jamaica’s leadership in the 1950s and 1960s, in cattle breeding and genetics, retreated with the retirement of researchers like the renowned Dr Thomas Lecky.

Audley Shaw, the agriculture minister, was seemingly at the point of exasperation last week when he spoke at the launch of an initiative to upgrade the genetics of Jamaica’s livestock. Despite many interventions by the JDDB over the years to lift milk production, he lamented, little has changed. Part of the reason, he felt, was the slowness of the dairy sector to adapt to new technologies.

OVERHAUL

Maybe Mr Shaw is right. In which event, one of Dr Deslandes’ solutions is for Jamaica to completely overhaul how dairy cattle are reared. Pasture grazing should be eliminated.

He said: “Grazing is a waste of time in many respects ... . You are focused on grazing animals and every pasture you pass, the cows... (are) under shade and not eating because the sun is hot. Our pastures are not the best, so when the cows are grazing, the energy that they should be using to make milk, they are instead using it to find shade ... . Whether you use a hybrid model or a zero-grazing model, you have to move in that direction.”

Perhaps Dr Deslandes is on to something. However, he and his researchers at CASE, and those at other institutions, must now deepen this analysis, providing data on the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) produced by Jamaica’s dairy farms, and how this might be impacted if Dr Deslandes’ proposals were implemented. They should also, more generally, suggest innovations to reduce greenhouse gases from Jamaican farms.

A focus on agriculture is not merely whim. Of the estimated 59 gigatons of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere last year, around nine gigatons, 15 per cent, were from agriculture. A large portion of this was methane, mostly from farm animals like cows, sheep and goats. Cattle, though, were the biggest polluters, accounting for nearly half of agriculture’s CO₂e. Beef cattle, by some estimates, produce nearly 60 kilogrammes of greenhouse gas for each kilo of food they supply. For dairy, the ratio is over 21 to one, while for lamb and mutton it is closer to 25 to one.

AT-RISK AREAS

While the Caribbean is responsible for no more than two per cent of global greenhouse emissions, the region, with its mostly small island states and coastal cities and towns, is among the world’s most at-risk areas for the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels, prolonged droughts and violent storms. Which is why it makes sense for the Caribbean, including Jamaica, to seriously think about innovative techniques in agriculture. In some cases, this might mean upgrading and adapting old approaches to fit current circumstances.

With regard to Dr Deslandes’ observation about cattle seeking shade in hot pasture, for example, some old grazing fields in Jamaica’s north shore parishes have trees planted a reasonable distance apart, thus allowing enough sunlight for grasses to grow, while providing shade for cattle. It is an approach to dairy pasturing that seems to be gaining traction in some countries.

Further, in arid regions of the parish of St Elizabeth, in Jamaica’s southwest, farmers used to cover their fields with grass to maintain moisture. No-till farming, which maintained nutrients in the soil without, or limited use of, artificial fertiliser (also emitters of greenhouse gases) was also employed.

The issue is whether these and other techniques can be innovatively repurposed for the 21st century, while allowing Jamaica to enjoy food security and reduce its US$1-billion food import bill. We suspect that there is a lot of money to be made in this field by innovative entrepreneurs working with agricultural scientists. This, indeed, is a case for CASE.