If you were to quantify the cost of degradation on our water, air, and the medical bills that follow from long-term exposure to agrochemicals, we are paying for them way over the market price. When we buy these foods, we are paying for them once at the cash register and again through our tax contributions for tax-funded subsidies. Many cheap, conventionally grown foods are heavily subsidized by our own tax dollars. But those lower-priced, conventional products hide a secret in their deceivingly low costs: we are paying for them twice. With higher market prices for these products, many opt to bypass them, sticking with their low-price alternatives- hardly an unreasonable choice in a year where inflation has had a significant impact on our wallets. Regenerative and pasture-raised practices are now being featured in the dairy and meat aisle and are even being touted on the boxes of some of our new favorite cereal, cracker, and cookie options. These ecologically beneficial practices are challenging the dominant paradigm of growing food with agrochemicals and keeping animals contained and surrounded by concrete. Products that feature not only organic practices, but also regenerative practices (farming methods that actively regenerate by focusing on improving soil health through companion planting, biological soil amendments, and raising animals on pasture) are increasingly common. Increasingly, we are seeing new options populate grocery store shelves. Is there another way to grow our food without applying toxic chemicals that poison our water, without disturbing the soil and contributing to the emissions of noxious greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide? The source of these emissions? Soil and livestock management (fertilizers, manure, lime, pesticides, and annual disturbance to the topsoil). Nationwide, this puts Wisconsin in the top 10 of states with the highest agricultural emissions of greenhouse gases. To put this in perspective, all other sectors in Wisconsin (building, transportation, and electric energy sectors) have shown an 9% decrease in emissions. Our state’s agricultural sector is the only industry in Wisconsin that has seen an increase in greenhouse gas emissions since 2005- emissions from agriculture have grown by 21.3% over the last 18 years. Tens of thousands of private wells in Wisconsin are polluted with unsafe levels of nitrates, 90% of which come from agricultural sources like chemical fertilizer s and livestock manure. This runoff contaminates our groundwater, streams, rivers, and lakes… even the water we drink. Excess fertilizer s and manure end up flowing off fields with no plant roots to hold them during rain events. Only 6-8% of agriculture fields in Wisconsin use cover crops to protect exposed soils from runoff and erosion. Annual production of these short-lived commodity crops means that after the harvest season, plant roots are removed from the fields and farmland soils are left exposed to the elements, leading to drying, erosion, and runoff of both topsoil and fertilizers into our waterways. Often, these soils are put on “life-support” through the intensive annual application of fertilizers to replenish what has been lost.
In Wisconsin, conventional agricultural practices (growing a single crop, such as corn, soybeans, or wheat, on the same land, year after year) have resulted in tired soils. For decades, farmers have produced abundant and inexpensive food, but at great environmental cost.
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