Farmer Conservation Efforts Highlighted During Earth Day

Earth Day was last week, and the agriculture community used the time to celebrate the conservation efforts farmers and ranchers perform every day to help reduce emissions. Shelby Myers, American Farm Bureau Federation Economist, said data from the EPA shows agriculture consistently accounts for just 10%.

“The other thing that we have is the ability for us to sequester greenhouse gas emissions, and our land use, land use change and forestry sector represents about negative 12.7%, which means pulling those emissions out of the air, and it increased year over year by four percent from 2019 to 2020. And so, when you combine our ability to sequester greenhouse gases with staying just ten percent, were actually at -2%.”

Myers said conservation efforts by farmers are reducing emissions.

“Agriculture continues to make great strides in its ability to implement voluntary conservation practices and we've seen these be very successful over the last couple of years, and in particular it's led to a year over year reduction in agricultural emissions from 2019 to 2020 by at least 4.3%.”

Meyers added there is a long list of efforts, and an accomplishments farmers and ranchers can celebrate. She said that the farming community is doing more with less, pointing out that since 1990, per capita emissions for agriculture has decreased 20%, meaning American farmers are feeding more people in ways that are conserving resources and taking care of the land and natural resources.

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