By Ronnie Cummins, November 27, 2019
“Unsustainable land use and greenhouse gas emissions are delivering a one-two punch to natural ecosystems that are key to the fight against global climate change.
And without sweeping emissions cuts and transformations to food production and land management, the world stands no chance of staving off catastrophic planetary warming.”—Huffington Post, citing the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.1
Agave plants (the best known of which are blue agave, used to produce tequila), along with nitrogen-fixing, companion trees such as mesquite, huizache, desert ironwood, wattle and varieties of acacia that readily grow alongside agave, are among the most common and prolific, yet routinely denigrated or ignored plants in the world. As India climate scientist Promode Kant points out:
“Agave is to the drier parts of the world what bamboo is to its wetter zones. Capturing atmospheric CO2 in vegetation is severely limited by the availability of land and water. The best choice would be species that can utilize lands unfit for food production and yet make the dynamics of carbon sequestration faster.
As much as 40 percent of the land on earth is arid and semi-arid, largely in the tropics but also in the cool temperate zones up north. And on almost half of these lands, with a minimum annual rainfall of about 250 mm and soils that are slightly refractory, the very valuable species of agave grows reasonably well.”2
Agave plants and nitrogen-fixing trees, densely intercropped and cultivated together, have the capacity to draw down massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere and produce more above-ground and below-ground biomass (and animal fodder) on a continuous year-to-year basis than any other desert and semi-desert species.
Agaves are ideal for arid and hot climates. Once established, agaves and their companion trees require little or no irrigation to survive and thrive, and are impervious to rising global temperatures and drought. Agaves alone can draw down and store above ground the dry weight equivalent of 30 to 60 tons of CO2 per hectare (12 to 24 tons per acre) per year. One hectare equals 10,000 square meters or 2.47 acres.
Now a new, agave-based agroforestry and livestock feeding model developed in Guanajuato, Mexico, promises to revitalize campesino/small-farmer livestock production while storing massive amounts of atmospheric carbon above and below ground.
Scaled up on millions of currently degraded and overgrazed rangelands, these agave-agroforestry systems have the potential to not only improve soil and pasture health, but to help mitigate and potentially reverse global warming, aka climate change.
Climate Emergency
As international scientists, activists and our own everyday experience tell us, we are facing a Climate Emergency. A “profit-at-any-cost,” fossil fuel-supercharged economy, coupled with industrial agriculture and factory farms, destructive land use and mindless consumption have pumped a dangerous load of CO2 and greenhouse gas pollution into the sky, bringing on global warming and violent climate change.
Degenerative food, farming, livestock and land-use practices have decarbonized and killed off much of the biological life and natural carbon-sequestering capacity of our soils, forests and ecosystems.
This degradation and desertification of global landscapes has oxidized and released billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, resulting in the elimination of much of the above-ground carbon biomass once stored in our forests and landscapes.
This global degeneration has depleted so much of the carbon and biological life in our soils, trees and plants that these natural systems can no longer draw down and sequester (through natural photosynthesis) enough of the excess CO2 and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to maintain the necessary balance between CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the carbon stored in our soils, trees and plants.
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) estimates that arid and semi-arid lands make up 41.3 percent of the earth's land surface, including 15 percent of Latin America (most of Mexico), 66 percent of Africa, 40 percent of Asia and 24 percent of Europe.
Farmers and herders in these areas face tremendous challenges because of increasing droughts, erratic rainfall, degraded soils, overgrazed pastures and water scarcity. Many areas are in danger of degenerating even further into desert, unable to sustain any crops or livestock whatsoever.
Most of the world’s drylands are located in the economically underdeveloped regions of the Global South. But there are millions of acres of drylands in the U.S., Australia and Southern Europe as well. Farming, ranching and ecosystem conservation are becoming increasingly problematic in these drylands, especially given the fact that the majority of the farms and ranches in these areas do not have irrigation wells or year-round access to surface water.
Crop and livestock production levels are deteriorating, trees and perennials have typically been removed or seasonally burned, and pastures and rangelands have been overgrazed. Poverty, unemployment and malnutrition in these degraded landscapes are rampant, giving rise to violence, organized crime and forced migration
The good news, however, coming out of Mexico—applicable to many other regions—is that if farmers and ranchers can stop overgrazing pastures and rangelands and they can stop slash-and-burn practices. In place of those practices, farmers and ranchers can reforest, revegetate, rehydrate and recarbonize depleted soils, by integrating traditional and indigenous water catchment, agroforestry, livestock and land-management practices with agave-based agroforestry. If they do, we may well be able to green the drylands and store and sequester massive amounts of carbon.
Vía Orgánica, the ‘Organic Way’
After decades as a food, farm, anti-GMO and climate campaigner for the Organic Consumers Association in the U.S., I now spend a good part of my time managing an organic and regenerative farm and training center, Vía Orgánica, in the high-desert drylands of North Central Mexico.
Our semi-arid, temporal (seasonal rainfall) ecosystem and climate in the state of Guanajuato is similar to what you find in many parts of Mexico, and in fact in 40 percent of the world. In our valley, we typically get 20 inches, or 500 millimeters, of precipitation in the “rainy season” (July to October), which greens the landscape, followed by eight months with little or no rain whatsoever.
At Rancho Vía Orgánica, we’ve been trying to regenerate our high-desert (6,300 feet elevation) environment, developing farming, livestock and landscape-management practices that produce healthy organic food and seeds, sequester carbon in the soil, preserve our monte, or natural densely-vegetated areas, slow down and infiltrate rainwater (including runoff coming down the mountains and hillsides) to recharge our water table, and reforest and revegetate our still somewhat degraded corn fields and pasturelands.
Looking across our mountain valley, the most prominent flora are cactus and agave plants—some of which are quite large—along with hundreds of thorny, typically undersized mesquite, huizache and acacia shrubs and trees.
In order to grow our vegetables and cover crops, maintain our olive, mulberry, citrus and pomegranate trees, and provide water and forage for our animals, we—like most small farmers and ranchers in Mexico—irrigate with only the rainfall that we can collect and store in cisterns, ponds and soils.
Eighty-six percent of Mexican farmers and herders have no source of water other than seasonal rainfall, so they have to struggle to maintain their milpas (corn, beans and squash) and raise their animals under increasingly adverse climate conditions.
Greening the Drylands: A New Agroforestry Model
Recently Juan Frias, a retired college professor and scientist, came up to me after attending a workshop at our farm. As we discussed regenerative agriculture practices and climate change, Juan told me about a new system of drylands agroforestry and livestock management (sheep and goats), based on agave plants and mesquite trees in the nearby community of San Luis de la Paz. They call their agroforestry system Modelo Zamarripa.3
By densely planting, pruning and intercropping high-biomass, high forage-producing, fast-growing species of agaves (1,600 to 2,000 per hectare) among pre-existing deep-rooted, nitrogen-fixing tree species such as mesquite, or among planted tree seedlings, these farmers are transforming their landscape and their livelihoods.
When the agaves are 3 years old, and for the following five to seven years, farmers can begin pruning the leaves (or pencas), chopping them up finely with a machine, and then fermenting the agave in closed containers for 30 days, ideally combining the agave leaves with 12 percent or more of mesquite pods by volume to give them a higher protein level. In our region mesquite trees start to produce pods that can be harvested in five years.
By year seven, the mesquite and agaves have grown into a fairly dense forest. In years eight to 10, the root stem (or pina), weighing 100 to 200 pounds, of the agave is ready for harvesting to produce a distilled liquor called mescal. Meanwhile the hijuelos (or pups) put out by the mother agave plants are being continuously transplanted back into the agroforestry system, guaranteeing continuous biomass growth and carbon storage.
In their agroforestry system, the Zamarripa farmers integrate rotational grazing of sheep and goats across their ranch, supplementing the pasture forage their animals consume with the fermented agave silage. Modelo Zamarippa has proven in practice to be ideal for sheep and goats. We are now experimenting at Vía Orgánica with feeding agave silage to our pastured pigs and poultry.
The revolutionary innovation of these Guanajuato farmers has been to turn a heretofore indigestible, but massive and accessible source of biomass—the agave leaves—into a valuable animal feed, using the natural process of fermentation to transform the plants’ indigestible saponin and lectin compounds into digestible carbohydrates and fiber.
To do this the farmers have developed a relatively simple machine, hooked up to a tractor, that can finely chop up the tough leaves of the agave. After chopping the agave, the next step is to anaerobically ferment the biomass in a closed container (we use 5-gallon buckets with lids).
After 30 days, the fermented agave-mesquite silage provides a nutritious but very inexpensive, compared with alfalfa, hay or cornstalks, silage or animal fodder that costs less than 2 Mexican pesos (or approximately 10 cents U.S.) per kilo (2.2 pounds) to produce.
According to Frias, lambs readily convert 10 kilos of this silage into 1 kilo of body weight. At less than 10 cents per kilo (4 cents per pound), agave silage could potentially make the difference between survival and bankruptcy for millions of the world’s small farmers and herders.
Agaves and Carbon Storage and Sequestration
The Zamarripa system of drylands afforestation and silvopasture draws down and stores in the plants large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere. Agronomists have observed that certain varieties of agave can produce up to 43 tons per hectare of dry-weight biomass per year, on a continuous basis.4
These high-biomass varieties of agave will likely thrive in many of the world’s arid ecosystems, wherever any type of agave and nitrogen-fixing trees are already growing.
Nitrogen-fixing trees such as mesquite can be found in most arid and semi-arid regions of the world. Mesquite grows readily not only in Texas and the Southwestern U.S., Mexico, Central America, Argentina, Chile and other Latin American nations, but also “thrives in arid and semi-arid regions of North America, Africa, the Middle East, Tunisia, Algeria, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar (Burma), Russia, Hawaii, West Indies, Puerto Rico and Australia.”5
At Vía Orgánica, outside San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato,6 we are using moveable, solar-fenced paddocks for our grazing sheep and goats in order to protect our mesquite tree seedlings, to prevent overgrazing or undergrazing, to eliminate dead grasses and invasive species, and to concentrate animal feces and urine across the landscape in a controlled manner.
At the same time that we are rotating and moving our livestock on a daily basis, we are transplanting, pruning, finely chopping and fermenting the heavy biomass leaves (or pencas) of agave salmiana plants. Some individual agave pencas can weigh (wet) as much as 20 kilos or 44 pounds.
The bountiful harvest of this regenerative, high-biomass, high carbon-sequestering system will eventually include not only extremely low-cost, nutritious animal silage, but also high-quality organic lamb, mutton, cheese, milk, aquamiel (agave sap), pulque (a mildly alcoholic beverage) and distilled agave liquor (mescal), all produced organically and biodynamically with no synthetic chemicals or pesticides whatsoever, at affordable prices, with excess agave biomass and fiber available for textiles, compost, biochar and construction materials.
Massive Potential Carbon Drawdown
From a climate crisis perspective, the Modelo Zamarripa is a potential game-changer. Forty-three tons of above-ground dry-weight biomass production on a continuing basis per hectare per year ranks among the highest rates of drawing down and storing atmospheric carbon in plants in the world, apart from healthy forests.
Imagine the carbon sequestration potential if rural farmers and pastoralists can establish agave-based agroforestry systems over the next decade on just 10 percent of the world's 5 billion degraded acres (500 million acres), areas unsuited for crop production, but areas where agave plants and suitable native nitrogen-fixing companion tress (such as acacia varieties in Africa) are already growing.
Conservatively estimating an above-ground biomass carbon-storage rate of 10 tons of carbon per acre per year on these 500 million acres, (counting both agave and companion trees, above-ground and below-ground biomass) we would then be able to cumulatively sequester 5 billion tons of carbon (18 billion gigatons of CO2e) from the atmosphere every year.
Five billion tons of additional carbon sequestered in the Earth’s soils and biota equals nearly 50 percent of all human greenhouse gas emissions in 2018.
More Background on Agaves
To better understand the potential of this agroforestry/holistic grazing system, a little more background information on agave plants, and nitrogen-fixing or trees such as mesquite, huizache or other fodder and food-producing trees such as inga or moringa may be useful.
Various varieties of agave plants (along with their cactus relatives and companion nitrogen-fixing trees) are found growing on approximately 20 percent of the earth’s lands, essentially on the half of the world’s drylands where there is a minimum annual rainfall of approximately 10 inches, or 250 mm, where the temperature never drops below 14 degrees Fahrenheit.
Kant has described the tremendous biomass -roduction and carbon-storage potential of agaves in dry areas:
“Agave can … be used for carbon sequestration projects under CDM [the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Climate Protocol] even though by itself it does not constitute a tree crop and cannot provide the minimum required tree crown cover to create a forest as required under CDM rules.
But if the minimum required crown cover is created by planting an adequate number of suitable tree species in agave plantations then the carbon sequestered in the agave plants will also be eligible for measurement as above ground dry biomass and provide handsome carbon credits …
It causes no threat to food security and places no demand for the scarce water and since it can be harvested annually after a short initial gestation period of establishment, and yields many products that have existing markets, it is also well suited for eradication of poverty …”7
Agaves, of which there are 200 or more varieties growing across the world, can thrive even in dry, degraded lands unsuitable for crop production because of their Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) photosynthetic pathway (cacti and other related desert plants also have a CAM pathway) that essentially enables these plants to draw down moisture from the air and store it in their thick tough leaves during the nighttime, while the opening in their leaves (the stomata) close up during daylight hours, drastically reducing evaporation.
Meanwhile, the agave's relatively shallow mycorrhizal fungi-powered roots below the soil surface spread out horizontally, taking in available moisture and nutrients from the topsoil, especially during the rainy season.
In addition, the agave's propagation of baby plants (or pups)—up to 50 among some varieties—that grow out of its horizontal roots makes the plant a self-reproducing perennial, able to sustain high-biomass growth, and carbon storage and sequestration on a long-term basis.
Even as a maturing agave plant is pruned beginning in year three (to produce fermented silage), and the entire mature agave plant (the pina) is harvested at the end of its life span, in order to make mescal, in our case after eight to 10 years, the plant leaves behind a family of pups that are carrying out photosynthesis and producing biomass (leaves and stem) at an equal or greater rate than the parent plant.
In other words, a very high level of above-ground carbon storage and below-ground sequestration can be maintained year after year—all with no irrigation and no synthetic fertilizers or chemicals required, if intercropped in conjunction with nitrogen-fixing trees such as mesquite, huizache, inga, moringa or other dryland species, such as the acacias that grow in arid or semi-arid areas.
Agaves and a number of their tree companions have been used as sources of food, beverage and fiber by indigenous societies for hundreds, in fact thousands of years. However until recently, farmers had not been able to figure out how to utilize the massive biomass of the agave plant leaves which, unless they are fermented, are basically indigestible and even harmful to livestock.
In fact, this is why, besides the thorns and thick skins of the leaves, animals typically will not, unless starving, eat them. But once their massive leaves, which contain significant amounts of sugar, are chopped up and fermented in closed containers, livestock, after a short period of adjustment, will gobble up this sweet, nutritious forage like candy.
Developing a native species-agroforestry-livestock system on 5 million to 10 million acres of land otherwise unsuitable for food crops in a large country like Mexico (which has 357 million acres of cropland and pastureland, much of which is degraded) could lsequester 37 percent to 74 percent of the country’s net current fossil fuel emissions (current net emissions are 492m tons of CO2e).
And, of course, wherever these agave-agroforestry-holistic grazing systems are deployed, farmers and ranchers will also be restoring the fertility and moisture-holding capacity of millions of acres of pasturelands and rangelands, thereby promoting rural food self-sufficiency and prosperity.
Scaling up best regenerative practices on the world’s billions of acres of croplands, pasturelands and forest lands—especially those degraded lands no longer suitable for crops or grazing—can play a major role, along with moving away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, in stopping and reversing climate change.
For more information on the global Regeneration Movement go to Regeneration International. Please sign up for our free newsletter and, if you can afford it, make a tax-deductible donation to help us spread the message of Regenerative Agriculture and Agave Power across the world.
“Our house is on fire,” as teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg reminds us, but there is still time to turn things around.
Reposted with permission from Mercola.com. Ronnie Cummins is international director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) and co-founder of Regeneration International. To keep up with OCA’s news and alerts, sign up here.
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