Recently a study done at the University of Michigan has been making headlines, claiming food grown at home has a carbon footprint 5 times higher than those grown commercially. While there may be some valid points in the study, there are also many variables that are left out of their equations. Coming to such a conclusion and making a headline out of it not only seems irresponsible, but also intentional to further some type of special interest. Many people who may have been thinking about growing some of their own food at home might see a headline like that, and use it to rationalize why they should just keep relying on the unsustainable industrial food supply.
Their conclusion is that the infrastructure needed to grow food at home and people’s mismanaged compost piles are the main culprits to making home grown food less eco-friendly. I can’t argue with the specific details they point out, but the variables they chose to focus on seem so cherry picked, that one can only assume they went into the study with the hypothesis that home grown food was less sustainable, so they did what they needed to do to prove it.
The study included not only home grown food, or individual plots as they refer to them, but also community gardens and professionally managed urban farms. One of the most obvious errors in their calculations was that they claimed the consumer’s carbon footprint created by the traveling needed to obtain the food did not need to be considered, because on average there was no difference in distance traveled to obtain conventionally grown food vs. food grown in urban agriculture. News flash, the only traveling I do to obtain my home grown food is walk out my back door!
The biggest problem with their study is that they failed to consider that some people, like myself, might possibly have a negative carbon footprint due to their soil building and management practices. They even acknowledge this at the very end of their study, stating “How the repeated use of compost affects soil carbon sequestration in raised beds is also unclear, although existing evidence suggests that compost-dependent systems may sequester substantial carbon. Both topics warrant further study.” You see, the methods we use for building and maintaining our gardens actually sequester carbon due to our abundant use of wood chips and organic matter, which are predominantly composed of carbon. Because we never till and we continue to mulch our gardens, the carbon we use to build our soil may potentially be sequestered indefinitely. In addition, because we are building such healthy and lively soil, its potential to help sequester additional carbon from the atmosphere through plant photosynthesis is significantly increased. I’ve often joked that because we’ve spread so many wood chips on our property, that Bill Gates should be buying carbon credits from us! Ok, maybe I’m the only one who finds that joke funny…
While there are many other flaws in this study that I could point out, the main thing I wanted to get across is that with proper soil building and management practices, we actually have the ability to sequester substantial amounts of carbon in our own yards!
If you want to find out more about how you can help sequester carbon right at home while growing food or beautifying your landscape, contact us today for a Free On-site Consultation.
To read the article and study for yourself, you can check it out here: Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture