What Is Climate-Smart Agriculture?
Climate change is turning the lives of farmers upside down. Drastically different weather patterns, shorter growing seasons, droughts, and pests pose daunting problems for smallholder farmers around the world-especially in the tropics-and could eventually lead to the disappearance of some of our favorite foods. Since those who depend on the land for their livelihoods are often the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, training farmers in climate-smart agriculture techniques is critically important for global food security.
Climate-Smart Agriculture: The Basics
The Rainforest Alliance works with farmers around the world to promote sustainable farming practices that increase the productivity of arable land, thereby reducing encroachment on forests and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. These climate-smart techniques improve productivity, increase resilience against droughts, torrential rains, and changing growing seasons. Climate-smart agriculture is not a new way of farming, but rather a management system that identifies the risks posed by climate change and the best farming practices that address those challenges.
Here are some of the strategies we focus on in our climate-smart farming trainings:
Water Conservation
Access to freshwater is vital to any farm. Since agriculture consumes roughly 70 percent of the world’s freshwater, water conservation is an urgent need in areas where water is becoming increasingly scarce. Through our training and certification programs, the Rainforest Alliance emphasizes water conservation practices such as planting a buffer of trees and bushes along streams and rivers to prevent erosion and contamination from crop runoff. We also train farmers to treat wastewater caused by crop processing before it is released back into waterways. The wastewater treatment system in this video, built for a Rainforest Alliance Certified™ coffee cooperative by our staff in Rwanda, demonstrates how responsible water use supports the health and well-being of communities.
Composting
Composting organic matter keeps soils rich in nutrients and more resilient to climate change impacts like droughts. Composting also reduces or eliminates the need for chemical fertilizers, which can contaminate rivers and streams. Compost can be made of any number of materials, including food waste and plants, which means it can help farmers cut down on waste. Healthy soil leads to more abundant crop yields-Rainforest Alliance Certified farms regularly report yields that are 1.5 to 2 times higher than non-certified farms-thereby reducing pressure on farmers to expand their growing area (and generate more emissions) by cutting down trees.
Pulling Weeds by Hand
Pulling weeds by hand instead of using chemical herbicides is more labor-intensive in the first year or two-but it is better for soil health and can ultimately lower a farmer’s operating costs. Mahendra Peiris, the manager of the Rainforest Alliance Certified Hapugastenna Tea Estate in Sri Lanka, has lowered emissions and boosted crop yields on his estate through a program of selective manual weeding, in which workers uproot noxious weeds (which are later composted) while allowing beneficial weeds to grow and restore nitrogen to the soil. Farmers using these methods, which are promoted through our training and certification programs, have not only nixed the expense of chemical herbicides and fertilizers; they have also boosted crop yields without clearing more forest because their soil is now more fertile.
Organic Fertilizers
Organic fertilizers encourage crop growth without introducing potentially harmful chemicals to farmers, soil, plant life, wildlife, and water. The result is richer soil and crops that are more resilient to climate impacts. Rainforest Alliance trainers in the Lampung province of Sumatra, Indonesia, teach local coffee farmers how to make an organic liquid fertilizer made of compost, animal manure, and other organic materials. Similar to composting, ingredients in organic fertilizers can utilize matter that would otherwise be considered waste.
Soil Conservation
Soil conservation leads to greater productivity of arable land and therefore reduces the need to clear forests. Approximately 80 percent of deforestation is caused by agricultural expansion, and that conversion from forest to cropland produces a significant amount emissions. Planting on contours, such as hills or natural terraces, may look like large-scale landscape architecture, but it is actually an effective method to cut down on soil erosion and maintain clean water sources. The Rainforest Alliance incorporates this practice in trainings in Rwanda and other countries.
Integrated Pest Management
Instead of using harsh pesticides and herbicides that threaten the health of the entire ecosystem, integrated pest management involves using as many preventive and natural methods as possible (such as introducing natural enemies to the targeted pest). Agrochemicals are used in small quantities, and only as a last resort. The UK branch of the Pesticide Action Network evaluated agricultural certification bodies and gave the Rainforest Alliance top honors and a citation for having the most detailed health protection requirements for pesticide use.
Agroforestry
Growing food and raising livestock often involves clearing land-and losing one of our best allies in the fight against climate change, forests. One way the Rainforest Alliance tackles this problem is to promote agroforestry, the practice of growing forest-friendly crops (like coffee and cocoa) under shade trees. In West Java, Indonesia, for example, a Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee cooperative called Klasik Beans considers reforesting an integral part of farming. “We don’t plant coffee in the forest-we design our farms to become forests,” one cooperative member said. The Klasik Beans cooperative includes 516 farmers whose land covers 548 hectares (1,354 acres).
Originally published at https://www.rainforest-alliance.org on June 17, 2019.
