A new documentary explores the dangers that climate change poses to agriculture — and the seed savers who are working to make food systems more resilient.
By Charly Frisk, Yale Climate Connections
Planting seeds is a radically hopeful act. Sowing a seed is predicated on the idea that there will be a future — one that will support and nurture the seed.
Join young documentary filmmaker and climate storyteller Charly Frisk as she travels across Nordic regions to meet with people who are working to preserve the diversity of the world’s seeds. She encounters seed savers recovering ancient varieties from older generations, visits farmer’s markets that are revitalizing old traditions, and tours gene banks that are working at the intersection of science and culture.
A key take-away from the film is that the seeds used to grow food have become radically less diverse since the 1900s. In place of a profusion of varieties that vary across geographic regions — or within a single field — many farmers now use agricultural systems in which plants of a single food crop are genetically similar to each other. The world has lost 75% of seed diversity among food crops since the 1900s, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
That lack of diversity presents a severe risk to the security of global food systems. Without seed diversity, it’s difficult for plants to adapt to pests, diseases, and changing climate conditions — a particular concern as the world warms. But the film offers hope that seed biodiversity will be preserved, ensuring our food systems are resilient to climate change — safeguarding the ancient, diverse, heirloom varieties that enrich our lives here on planet Earth.
Charly Frisk is a master’s student at the Yale School of the Environment.
Tractor spraying on crops. Photo by Ferencz Istvan, Pexels.
While agrochemical corporations promote “flawed solutions,” said one advocate, “we need deeper, transformative approaches to actually solve the root problems of our broken food system.”
Even though synthetic pesticides—the majority of which are derived from fossil fuels—contribute significantly to planet-heating pollution and increase the vulnerability of food systems, industrial agriculture interests continue to recklessly portray further pesticide use as a sensible response to the climate emergency’s worsening impacts.
That’s according to a recent report published by the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), which details how agrochemical corporations exacerbate the climate crisis by refusing to admit that pesticides are part of the problem and instead promoting “false” solutions that enable them to keep peddling their highly profitable petroleum-based products.
The January report outlines how policymakers can help mitigate the climate crisis and build just and sustainable food systems by setting targets to drastically curb pesticide use, supporting agroecological farming practices, and protecting the rights of low-income individuals, disproportionately people of color, who are most harmed by pesticides, including farmworkers and residents of areas where the toxic substances are produced and applied.
“Governments are investing billions of dollars to address climate change, but these investments will fall woefully short unless they incorporate pesticide use reduction strategies and promotion of agroecological growing practices.”
“Reductions in pesticide use and the adoption of agroecology would decrease greenhouse gas emissions, while also reducing acute poisonings, long-term diseases like cancer, and other health impacts that rural communities face from pesticide exposure,” Nayamin Martinez, executive director of Central California Environmental Justice Network, said in a statement.
As the report explains: “Pesticides contribute to climate change throughout their lifecycle via manufacturing, packaging, transportation, application, and even through environmental degradation and disposal. Importantly, 99% of all synthetic chemicals—including pesticides—are derived from fossil fuels, and several oil and gas companies play major roles in developing pesticide ingredients.”
Pesticides, the offspring of a World War II-era marriage of Big Ag and Big Oil, help drive global warming to a greater extent than many realize, as the authors document:
Other chemical inputs in agriculture, such as nitrogen fertilizer, have rightly received significant attention due to their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Yet research has shown that the manufacture of one kilogram of pesticide requires, on average, about 10 times more energy than one kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer. Like nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides can also release greenhouse gas emissions after their application, with fumigant pesticides shown to increase nitrous oxide production in soils seven- to eight-fold. Many pesticides also lead to the production of ground-level ozone, a greenhouse gas harmful to both humans and plants. Some pesticides, such as sulfuryl fluoride, are themselves powerful greenhouse gases, having nearly 5,000 times the potency of carbon dioxide.
Despite mounting evidence that pesticides are helping to accelerate planetary heating, “climate change impacts are expected to lead to increases in pesticide use, creating a vicious cycle between chemical dependency and intensifying climate change,” the report notes. “Research shows that declining efficacy of pesticides, coupled with increases in pest pressures associated with a changing climate, will likely increase synthetic pesticide use in conventional agriculture. An increase in pesticide use will lead to greater resistance to herbicides and insecticides in weeds and insect pests, while also harming public health and the environment.”
That agricultural production is a substantial contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution is increasingly acknowledged, but the role played by pesticides is “infrequently addressed” and “many proposed solutions would not result in meaningful GHG emission reductions,” says the report.
It continues:
An example of a false solution is precision agriculture, which promises to reduce the use of petroleum-derived pesticides and fertilizers by using computer-aided technologies to more accurately determine need (pest presence) and then more accurately apply pesticides to intended targets. However, precision agriculture maintains a system dependent upon chemical- and energy-intensive technologies and materials, while diverting attention from and investment in more effective climate-friendly strategies in agriculture that have additional social and public health co-benefits, such as agroecology. Precision agriculture also increases the power and control of agrochemical companies, many of which own the precision agriculture platforms and the data inputted by farmers.
Another flawed solution, carbon markets, allows agribusinesses or farmers to sell carbon credits to corporations to “offset” continued greenhouse gas emissions—perpetuating reliance on fossil fuels. Carbon markets have a poor track record in terms of long-term climate mitigation, and have been shown to worsen economic and racial disparities.
Co-author Asha Sharma, organizing co-director at PANNA, said that “our new report reveals how oil and gas companies and pesticide manufacturers have followed a similar playbook—strategically promoting flawed solutions to the climate crisis, like carbon capture and storage and new digital agriculture tools, which in reality offer minimal climate benefits.”
“Corporations tout these novel technologies to protect their reputation, while they continue to profit from fossil fuels,” said Sharma. “We need deeper, transformative approaches to actually solve the root problems of our broken food system.”
The report makes the case for agroecology, which it defines as “a way of farming rooted in social justice that focuses on working with nature rather than against it.”
Agroecology “relies on ecological principles for pest management, minimizing the use of synthetic pesticides, while prioritizing the decision-making power of farmers and agricultural workers,” the report notes, adding that such an approach improves “the resilience of our agricultural systems to better withstand climate change impacts.”
The report makes three key recommendations for policymakers:
Establish measurable goals in climate policies to reduce synthetic pesticide use in agriculture;
Promote the transition to biodiverse, agroecological food and farming systems, such as by establishing and funding programs that provide increased technical assistance and incentives to farmers to adopt or continue these farming practices; and
In line with international law, adopt regulations that uphold and promote the rights of groups most impacted by synthetic pesticide use.
“Transitioning our agricultural systems to those that uplift ecological and social justice principles will not only help mitigate climate change, but also reduce the negative health impacts of industrial agriculture,” says the report. “While the work toward future policy and practice change continues, we can collectively support the advocacy work of impacted communities and organizations fighting for more equitable and sustainable food and farming systems right now.”
Co-author Margaret Reeves, a senior scientist at PANNA, argued that “governments are investing billions of dollars to address climate change, but these investments will fall woefully short unless they incorporate pesticide use reduction strategies and promotion of agroecological growing practices.”
King Solomon may have gained some of his famed wisdom from an unlikely source – ants.
According to a Jewish legend, Solomon conversed with a clever ant queen that confronted his pride, making quite an impression on the Israelite king. In the biblical book of Proverbs (6:6-8), Solomon shares this advice with his son: “Look to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise. Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.”
While I can’t claim any familial connection to King Solomon, despite sharing his name, I’ve long admired the wisdom of ants and have spent over 20 years studying their ecology, evolution and behaviors. While the notion that ants may offer lessons for humans has certainly been around for a while, there may be new wisdom to gain from what scientists have learned about their biology.
Ants have evolved highly complex social organizations.
Lessons from ant agriculture
As a researcher, I’m especially intrigued by fungus-growing ants, a group of 248 species that cultivate fungi as their main source of food. They include 79 species of leafcutter ants, which grow their fungal gardens with freshly cut leaves they carry into their enormous underground nests. I’ve excavated hundreds of leafcutter ant nests from Texas to Argentina as part of the scientific effort to understand how these ants coevolved with their fungal crops.
Much like human farmers, each species of fungus-growing ant is very particular about the type of crops they cultivate. Most varieties descend from a type of fungus that the ancestors of fungus-growing ants began growing some 55 million to 65 million years ago. Some of these fungi became domesticated and are now unable to survive on their own without their insect farmers, much like some human crops such as maize.
Ants started farming tens of millions of years before humans.
Ant farmers face many of the same challenges human farmers do, including the threat of pests. A parasite called Escovopsis can devastate ant gardens, causing the ants to starve. Likewise in human agriculture, pest outbreaks have contributed to disasters like the Irish Potato Famine, the 1970 corn blight and the current threat to bananas.
Since the 1950s, human agriculture has become industrialized and relies on monoculture, or growing large amounts of the same variety of crop in a single place. Yet monoculture makes crops more vulnerable to pests because it is easier to destroy an entire field of genetically identical plants than a more diverse one.
Industrial agriculture has looked to chemical pesticides as a partial solution, turning agricultural pest management into a billion-dollar industry. The trouble with this approach is that pests can evolve new ways to get around pesticides faster than researchers can develop more effective chemicals. It’s an arms race – and the pests have the upper hand.
Ants also grow their crops in monoculture and at a similar scale – after all, a leafcutter ant nest can be home to 5 million ants, all of which feed on the fungi in their underground gardens. They, too, use a pesticide to control Escovopsis and other pests.
Yet, their approach to pesticide use differs from humans’ in one important way. Ant pesticides are produced by bacteria they allow to grow in their nests, and in some cases even on their bodies. Keeping bacteria as a living culture allows the microbes to adapt in real time to evolutionary changes in the pests. In the arms race between pests and farmers, farming ants have discovered that live bacteria can serve as pharmaceutical factories that can keep up with ever-changing pests.
Whereas recent developments in agricultural pest management have focused on genetically engineering crop plants to produce their own pesticides, the lesson from 55 million years of ant agriculture is to leverage living microorganisms to make useful products. Researchers are currently experimenting with applying live bacteria to crop plants to determine if they are effective at producing pesticides that can evolve in real time along with pests.
Improving transportation
Ants can also offer practical lessons in the realm of transportation.
Ants are notoriously good at quickly locating food, whether it’s a dead insect on a forest floor or some crumbs in your kitchen. They do this by leaving a trail of pheromones – chemicals with a distinctive smell ants use to guide their nest mates to food. The shortest route to a destination will accumulate the most pheromone because more ants will have traveled back and forth along it in a given amount of time.
In the 1990s, computer scientists developed a class of algorithms modeled after ant behavior that are very effective at finding the shortest path between two or more locations. Like with real ants, the shortest route to a destination will accumulate the most virtual pheromone because more virtual ants will have traveled along it in a given amount of time. Engineers have used this simple but effective approach to design telecommunication networks and map delivery routes.
Photo by Carlos Pernalete Tua
Not only are ants good at finding the shortest route from their nests to a source of food, thousands of ants are capable of traveling along these routes without causing traffic jams. I recently began collaborating with physicist Oscar Andrey Herrera-Sancho to study how leafcutter ants maintain such a steady flow along their foraging paths without the slowdowns typical of crowded human sidewalks and highways.
We are using cameras to track how each individual ant responds to artificial obstacles placed on their foraging trails. Our hope is that by getting a better understanding of the rules ants use to respond to both obstacles and the movement of other ants, we can develop algorithms that can eventually help program self-driving cars that never get stuck in traffic.
Look to the ant
To be fair, there are plenty of ways ants are far from perfect role models. After all, some ant species are known for indiscriminate killing, and others for enslaving babies.
There is still a lot to learn about ants. For example, researchers still don’t fully understand how an ant larva develops into either a queen – a female with wings that can live for 20 years and lay millions of eggs – or a worker – a wingless, often sterile female that lives for less than a year and performs all the other jobs in the colony. What’s more, scientists are constantly discovering new species – 167 new ant species were described in 2021 alone, bringing the total to more than 15,980.
By considering ants and their many fascinating ways, there’s plenty of wisdom to be gained.
