Climate change and food nutrition? - Blog 2

Hi everyone,

  Happy new year! This evening I'll be sharing my opinion on an article recently published claiming to link climate change to reduced food nutrition. Food nutrition is very important to me as a farmer producing food for all of you and as a human who aims to live the healthiest life possible. This article had many similarities to some literature from a former University of Missouri scientist that I have been reading recently, so naturally I was very interested and believe it is very important to share with all of you. Now before you read my opinion here is a link to the article, go read it now.  https://nypost.com/2017/08/04/climate-change-is-making-our-food-less-nutritious/ .

               Did you read it? If not read it or this will not make much sense. First, I must say that I agree wholeheartedly that nutrient levels in food are dropping, and have been dropping for decades. Also, increased CO2 does make for more growth and larger plants,more food to feed the world right?(Always good to think positively) . However, I believe that the decreased nutrient contents of the food is not fully because of the increased CO2 but because of a lack of soil health due to poor farming practices on both conventional and organic farms. Not all farms there are good ones on each side of the spectrum doing well. Below i'll offer a very brief idea of what we are dealing with from a nutrient and management standpoint just to give an idea of why I disagree that simply because we have more CO2 that we must have lower nutrition as a consequence.

             First i'll talk about what we are looking at when it comes to nutrients in the soil. Many factors affect nutrient uptake in plants, here I will discuss a couple of the major ones. First, we must have mineral nutrients available in the soil in order to have a nutritious plant producing high protein(read nutritious) vs solely carbohydrates.  For plant growth we need a minimum of 16 macro and micro nutrients, however for human health the number is more in the 25-30 range depending on whom you ask. That means that the farmer/gardener must ensure that those are either naturally in the soil or must add them. This is one reason why I like to use rock powders as they contain 30-70 individual minerals. Once the minerals are in the soil not only must they be present but they must be in the correct ratios, while plants are very resilient and can handle very adverse nutrient regimes and still look fairly good, in order to produce highly nutritious food, which is the reason for this discussion, we must have them in balance. Which means we need about 7 times more Calcium than Magnesium, and about 4 times more magnesium than potassium, etc. NOTE - I am keeping this post very basic to just include necessary information, if you have questions please ask below. This balancing can take several years and a bunch of capital in order to achieve. On our vegetable plots for example in the first two years we have applied nearly 7000lbs of mineral amendments on our 5/8 of an acre. That is an extreme example but just goes to show that even if a farmer knows what to do depending on the soil condition present it may be economically unfeasible for him/her to do what is right.                Just having the nutrients in the soil is not enough, assuming we have them in a balanced proportion in the soil is only the first part, the more important part is how do they get from soil into plant, and therefore into us. This happens in a very simplistic sense through the release of hydrogen from the plant roots causing soil acidity and therefore the trade of hydrogen ions from the plant for nutrient ions from the soil(interesting note - the hydrogen is actually a waste product of plant growth, nature never wastes anything). The process is however greatly enhanced by organic matter which chelates the nutrients into larger compounds and moves the nutrients into the plant up to 100x as efficiently according to some studies. This organic matter is created by the breakdown of plant materials. The amount that becomes stable long term organic matter is dependent on several environmental factors along with plant species, farming practices concerning tillage, etc. Minerals can also be released by climatic forces such as rain events which weather the rock powders releasing minerals. All this to say it is a very complex process which can be greatly effected by the farming practices applied to the land and I am just giving the briefest overview I can to explain that producing nutritious food is more than piling compost on the ground planting seeds and harvesting.

         The point of those last two paragraphs being that while CO2 does cause larger plant growth it is my belief that, that is to simplistic of a reason to say that nutrient values in food are dropping. The mineral management and cultural practices used by the farmer greatly influence the final nutrition of the crop and therefore the health of the animals and humans that consume it. This has been a very brief explanation but that is the nature of this form of writing. In the future I hope to go more in depth on the different aspects of soil health that were oh so briefly mentioned here. Until then happy gardening, and know that no matter the CO2 level we will do the best we can here at Broken Arrow to produce the most nutritious food that nature allows.