Agricultural News
New Southern Plains Perspective Blog Post Features Winning 4-H Speech by Madeleine Pope
Mon, 08 Aug 2022 09:56:52 CDT
Two things that I really like doing—writing about conservation/climate smart agriculture practices and bragging on my kids. Today on this blog I am going to do a little of both.
First, the bragging part. My 12-year-old Daughter Madeleine won first place this week in the natural resource’s speech contest at the Oklahoma State 4-H Round-up. She is a natural when it comes to public speaking and communications! I am very, very proud of her (and all of my other kids too by the way).
Next—the climate smart agriculture part. Over the years I have dragged this poor girl (along with her brothers and sisters) to numerous meetings, farm shows and seminars where they have either helped me set up and run booths, listened to me speak about things like soil health, climate change and conservation or helped me with demonstrations ranging from running rainfall simulators to doing the bread and flour demonstration that is part of the soil health curriculum that the USDA Southern Plains Climate Hub helped put together.
As fate would have it, all of this exposure has allowed an impressive amount of knowledge concerning all things related to ag and climate to seep into Madeleine’s brain. So much so that she sat down and wrote an impressive 4-H speech on the subject of climate smart ag and how it can provide a way forward to help farmers and ranchers not only deal with the extreme weather challenges that climate change is throwing our way, but also give them a chance save money while potentially increasing yields.
With all the talk about climate smart ag flouting around the ag ecosystem this week, I had planned on writing a blog today about the very subject areas Maddy covered in her talk. Since she won the 4-H natural resource speech contest at Stillwater this week I felt it only fitting to instead post the text she put together herself. Great job, Maddy!
Here is her speech……
Climate Change is here-but there is a way forward
Madeleine Pope
Lomega 4-H
Climate change. Just saying these two words can cause quite a stir.
If you mention our changing climate to certain people in certain circles, you can be sure to hear all kinds of opinions as to what is and is not happening, everything from “climate change is all a hoax” to “the world is coming to an end.” And while it’s true that politics and ideology more often than not determine what people believe about climate change, the evidence is clear—the climate IS changing and farmers and ranchers will face and are facing serious challenges caused by the extreme weather that climate change exacerbates. Luckily, however, is that there is a way forward that can both help us adapt to climate change while helping our bottom lines.
Hello. My name is Madeleine Pope with the Lomega 4-H club, and I would like to talk to you today about how climate smart agriculture can help farmers and ranchers address climate change while improving their productivity and profitability.
If you take a step back from all the noise surrounding the issue of climate change and you soon realize that it’s really just another natural resource challenge facing our country. And we’ve seen these kinds of challenges before, the most noticeable example of this being the crisis caused by extreme soil erosion during the dust bowl of the 1930’s.
During the “dirty thirties” a natural process, soil erosion, was “sped up” by the combination of extreme drought and farming practices better suited to regions of the country with higher precipitation rates. Soil erosion has always happened and always will happen. During the dust bowl, however, human action caused this natural process to accelerate to the point of extreme desertification. In the same way, the climate has always changed and always will. Today, however, human action has knocked the carbon cycle ‘out of whack’ in the same way the farming practices of the 1930’s increased soil erosion to the point of an extreme crisis.
Luckily, through the actions of the USDA Soil Conservation Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service or NRCS, in partnership with state conservation agencies and local conservation districts like my own local Kingfisher County Conservation District, farmers and ranchers were given the financial and technical assistance necessary to control erosion and turn back the tide of dust.
Working together through voluntary, locally-led programs, agriculture producers and the conservation partnership were able to come up with solutions that stopped what was then the greatest man-made ecological disaster of modern times and they did it with practices such as conservation tillage, terrace and water way construction and grass plantings for livestock on highly erodible land-practices designed not just to help the environment, but to also help the bottom line of farmers and ranchers. We can address climate change in the same way.
In 2015 the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science reported the findings of a study that said that with extensive adoption of climate smart farming and ranching practices the agriculture industry in the great plains could be a net zero emitter of green-house gasses while increasing overall crop and livestock production. In a similar study, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported just this year that agriculture and forestry alone could provide over a quarter of all greenhouse gas reductions necessary to hold back catastrophic climate change by adopting conservation practices that not only reduced emissions levels, but also addressed other concerns such as soil erosion and non-point source pollution.
What are these “magic practices” that these studies and governmental panels are suggesting? Well, they’re not radical changes—they are things most of us are familiar with and that some of us are already applying on the land—things that fall under banner of soil health and regenerative agriculture.
Practices such as no-till, cover crops, improved pasture management and grass plantings on highly erodible ground are hardly earth shattering, but by adopting them, agriculture producers can do a lot of good, and not just for the environment.
Studies by Oklahoma State University have shown that just by converting to no-till, farmers can reduce their diesel use on average by 3 gallons per acre per year. That means less money out of their pocket to produce the same crops on the same land. In addition, research from Kansas State University shows that by increasing organic matter farmers can increase the soils water holding capacity, resulting in as much as 25 thousand gallons of water available per acre over the course of the year for growing crops and forage. This means that by using the same agriculture practices that reduce soil erosion, farmers and ranchers can also increase their ability to withstand extended droughts-all while reducing greenhouse gas levels.
So, you see, by doing those things that we know address soil erosion, we can fight climate change as well as help bettering prepare our farms and ranches for extreme weather, and we can do it all while reducing our overall costs.
The Challenge of climate change is real. The good news is that there is a path forward, and its one we all should want to take.
To visit the Southern Plains Perspective website and see other blog posts and podcasts, click here.
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