Giving Compass' Take:

• Ronnie Cummins explains how American farmers can tackle climate change through practices including regenerative agriculture. 

• How can funders support transitioning practices in American farming? 

• Find out how Canadian farmers are addressing climate change. 

The potential for regenerative agriculture to reverse global warming is huge—but only if these practices are adopted, rapidly, on a large scale. We can’t address global warming, one small farm or hobby farm at a time.

Utilizing satellites, surveys, and other sources, the USDA categorizes the 1.9 billion acres of the Lower 48 (i.e., all the states excluding Alaska and Hawaii) as follows: 654 million acres of pasture or rangeland, 539 million acres of forest, 392 million acres of cropland,  169 million acres of “special use” lands (parks and national/state forests), 69 million acres of urban land, and 69 million acres of “miscellaneous.”

Let’s look at the practices (and the math) of potential carbon sequestration (and reduction of methane and nitrous oxide emissions) on the 1.9 billion acres of U.S. farmland, pastures, rangelands, forests, and other landscapes by 2030.

U.S. pasture and rangeland (654 million acres) covers more than one-third of the Lower 48. One-quarter (158 million acres) of this acreage is administered by the U.S. government and is usually open to livestock grazing by ranchers for a fee. Another 127 million acres that the EPA classifies as croplands are used by farmers to grow animal feed for livestock. This means that the livestock and livestock feed portions of our agricultural lands adds up to 781 million acres, 41 percent of all the land in the Lower 48.

Read the full article about U.S. farming by Ronnie Cummins at YES! Magazine.