WHY Would Agricultural Data Science Accelerate our Climate Change Adaptation?

Unlike all other major greenhouse gas producing industries, agriculture should be made more sustainable more QUICKLY and can be more uniformly adapted to climate change in California, across the US, and most importantly INTERNATIONALLY. We can harness our man-made capitalist systems to accelerate that change. Here’s why…

WHY: Climate change does not care which sector produces a greenhouse gas (GHG) and time is of the essence. Agriculture produces three types of greenhouse gas emissions, methane primarily from cattle and dairy farms, and nitrogen oxide and carbon dioxide from cash crop farming. Methane is a gas that has a stronger impact on warming our planet in the short term. That industry is not as easy to transition QUICKLY due to consumer preferences, market, and industry forces. The US government is involved in agriculture in a myriad of ways. It has most if not all of the initial market data and spending power needed to effectively restructure that industry’s net zero transition, QUICKLY. Well before 2030, if it wanted to enforce strict sustainability standards.

A representation of this can be provided by how much was spent in 2021 via the US Farm Bill ($216 billion) vs actual GDP figures for agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting industries ($526 billion). For each dollar that agriculture produces, 41 cents was spent by our government supporting or regulating it. We need to spend that money wisely to make that sector sustainable. Only 2021’s defense spending of $744.1 billion out ranks agriculture since all of it is reported as government spending. Of the $4.3 trillion in 2021 in national health expenditure, the US government foot the bill for 34 cents of each dollar. My platform focuses on cash crops because the US government has more economic and regulatory leverage nationally and internationally on its entire vertical than housing, energy, or electric vehicles. From the farm to middlemen to the conglomerates that process food into final products, the USDA and other major western market regulators set the terms of trade, safety, environmental, and quality standards.

The US government strongly influences how cash crops like wheat, corn, soy bean, and rice are produced, packaged, priced, and sold across the world for it to be purchased by US food companies. Further, cash crops are the base of a complex international food system that feeds into bovine and fuel production, two major GHG sources. Structurally, cash crops provide the agricultural inputs bovine and fuel production use need to be made more sustainable with the help of data science. Lastly, if you compare the percentage of GHGs produced by a sector to their GDP, each dollar of agriculture’s GDP produces more GHGs than all other major GHG producing sectors.

HOW: NASA Satellites can already estimate greenhouse gases across the world automatically everyday produced by US farms. Currently brilliant data scientists are figuring out how to use that data to measure how much carbon is sequestered when a farm uses more environmentally friendly farming practices like no till farming. These satellites can estimate at scale the carbon captured in topsoil via regenerative practices, like organic farming. This data can then feed a market-based, data science enabled mechanism to assign GHGs to farmland.

A new government agency dubbed DOS, the Department of Sustainability, could enable this shift toward more long-term thinking about how we use farming resources sustainably. DOS would coordinate information and expertise across the Federal government's agencies to make life in the US better for blue urban food consumers and red America's farmers. DOS would focus on creating new consumer food labels and agricultural sustainability metrics for industry supply chain decision makers.

Financial and stock market forces that set the prices of agricultural cash crop commodity futures would also use that agricultural sustainability data. A commodity’s future price should incorporate the cost of more sustainable industry processes. Publicly listed farms and food companies would also be revaluated fairly to their direct competitors using DOS’s agricultural sustainability metrics. The government and private industry already have most of the data it needs to create a preliminary version of these estimates for major cash crop producers.

New laws passed by the Biden administration has already mandated that in 2024 all companies will report their emissions to the government. The international alignment of processes across financial markets that trade commodity futures can be harmonized to establish emission reporting standards. Once the stock market’s short-term reporting more appropriately values long term sustainability decision making that feedback loop should reward environmentally conscious companies.