Evil Almonds? California's Drought Villain Is a Climate Change Hero

(Photo: David Gomez/Getty Images)

The crop everyone loves to hate stores a whole lot of carbon

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/07/07/almonds-carbon-climate-change?cmpid=tpfood-eml-2015-07-11-ads

JUL 7, 2015Willy Blackmore is TakePart’s Food editor.

More than half a million acres of California farmland will be left bare this year, a vast expanse of arid dirt that is both a symbol and a symptom of the four-year-long drought, considered to be the worst in 1,200 years.

Not the almond farms, though. Water will continue to flow to most of the state’s 1-million-plus acres of No. 1 cash crop (not counting marijuana). With at least 25 years of potential production in each tree, farmers can't afford to simply shut down an almond orchard without millions of dollars of their investment and future revenue drying up right along with the trees. So they are going after every available source—groundwater, chiefly—to keep the taps on.
It appears to be a gross abuse of resources: Why should water go to keeping thirsty, hedge-fund-backed, foreign-bound nuts alive while other farmers are unable to grow the more water-efficient crops that feed the nation? But that’s an oversimplification on a number of levels—the “don’t blame almonds” essay is becoming a genre unto itself—including subterranean ones. While those 500,000-some acres of fallow land are losing soil fertility and releasing stored carbon, California’s maligned almonds, as well as other perennial fruit and nut crops, are sucking up CO2 and keeping it in the soil. According to one carbon life cycle analysis of the industry, with proper management and a credit system, the state’s almond industry could sequester more carbon than it emits. Do we need to reimagine the infamous nut a climate change savior?

So, Why Should You Care? Agriculture plays a complex role in climate and climate modeling. If the world’s cropland is farmed with little regard for carbon production, the 14 percent of overall emissions that agriculture accounts for could help push humanity toward the climate catastrophe of a two-degree-Celsius rise in global average temperature. Conversely, careful management of farmland could turn agriculture into part of the solution. Instead of pumping out greenhouse gases, farms need to be planned and managed in such a manner that they capture and sequester carbon in both plants and the soil. One of the key ways of achieving that goal is to transition away from annual row crops and toward perennials—like almonds.

FULL story at link.