An international group of researchers, including IRES alum and current faculty, are named U.S. national champions of the Frontiers Planet Prize for research that finds environmental and social benefits of agricultural diversification.
Adapted from Clint Talbott’s CU Boulder Press Release
Widespread agricultural diversification could improve the health of the world’s environment and that of its people, a landmark study published last year found.
On behalf of this paper and the co-author team, Zia Mehrabi, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and previous IRES postdoc has been named the U.S. national champion for the Frontiers Planet Prize.
“This paper never would have happened without its UBC roots,” says IRES’s Claire Kremen, who is a co-principle investigator and senior author on the paper.
The project grew out of a Grants for Catalyzing Research Cluster to IRES’s Hannah Wittman. From there, cluster members Zia Mehrabi and Claire Kremen led a successful grant that pulled the 59 authors on this team and their data together, including Hannah Wittman, first author Laura vang Rasmussen who was then a postdoc in UBC’s Faculty of Forestry, and Susanna Klassen and Dana James, who were then students in IRES’s graduate program.
As one of 19 national champions, Mehrabi and team are in contention to be named one of three international champions, each of whom will receive $1 million in funding to advance their research. The international champions will be announced at the Frontiers Planet Prize ceremony in Switzerland in June.
The Frontiers Planet Prize celebrates breakthroughs in Earth system and planetary science that “address these challenges and enable society to stay within the safe boundaries of the planet’s ecosystem.” The prize puts scientific rigor and ingenuity at its heart, helping researchers worldwide accelerate society toward a green renaissance, the Frontiers Research Foundation says.
The researchers found that diversifying crops and animals and improving habitat, soil and water conservation on individual farms can improve biodiversity while improving or, at a minimum, not coming at a cost to yields. Additionally, diversified farming can yield social benefits and improve food security—showing improved food access or a reduced number of hungry months, for example, particularly in smallholder systems.
The more diversification measures farms employed, the more benefits accrued, researchers observed. Essentially, the team found evidence to move toward agriculture that more closely reflects natural systems.
Using data from 2,655 farms across 11 countries and covering five continents, the researchers combined qualitative methods and statistical models to analyze 24 different datasets. Each dataset studied farm sites with varying levels of diversification, including farms without any diversification practices. This allowed the team to assess the effects of applying more diversification strategies.
Diversified farming differs from the dominant model of agriculture: growing single crops or one animal on large tracts of land. That efficient, “monoculture” style of farming is a hallmark of agriculture after the Green Revolution, which aimed to reduce global famine by focusing on high-yield crops that rely on fertilizers and pesticides.
B.C.’s blueberry farms are clear examples of the negative effects of oversimplifying farming, Kremen said last year.
“They pretty much grow from one side of the field to the other. It’s all blueberry. There’s very little of any other kind of habitat or any kind of diversification practices being used in that system,” said Kremen. “And since that has happened, increasingly, there’s a pest issue that has emerged.”
Diversification practices can help with pest issues, without relying on pesticides that have worrisome impacts on human health and surrounding ecosystems.
Making a case for a different way of doing agriculture is one thing. Implementing it on a widespread basis is something else. The dominant view, fostered by “big ag” (short for agriculture), is that “if you want to do ag, you’ve got to do it this way,” Mehrabi says.
“Our work challenges that idea, but it’s a bit of a David-and-Goliath situation,” he adds. “We have the stone, but it hasn’t yet landed.”
Globally, smaller farms tend to be more diverse in terms of their landscape use, as well as in their economic and livelihood strategies. “Yet, consolidation in the agri-food supply chain, including farmland concentration in the hands of fewer actors globally, has challenged widespread diversification,” says Hannah Wittman.
Supporting secure land tenure and farmland access through incentive programs, including for young farmers, is high on the policy agenda of many global policy institutions such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Committee on World Food Security.
About the Frontiers Planet Prize, Wittman lauds the organization for recognizing the importance of collaborative, interdisciplinary research that takes the diverse experiences of global agriculture seriously. “This project is unique in drawing strong evidence for the positive benefits of diversification from both social and ecological perspectives,” she says.
Launched by the Frontiers Research Foundation on Earth Day 2022, the prize encourages universities worldwide to nominate their top three scientists working on understanding and putting forward pathways to stay within the safe operating space of nine planetary boundaries that are outlined by the Stockholm Resilience Center.
These nominations are then vetted at the national level, and the top scientists face an independent jury of 100—a group of renowned sustainability and planetary health experts chaired by Professor Johan Rockström—who vote for the National and International Champions.
Read a guest opinion by Laura vang Rasmussen, Ingo Grass, Zia Mehrabi, and Claire Kremen at this link. See a Q&A with Mehrabi about adding carbon-footprint labels on food at this link.