Author: toensmeier

PAI’s Director Eric Toensmeier has just published an article in Scientific American with Dennis Garrity of the Global Evergreening Alliance. The article looks at future demand for biomass, as many climate change mitigation solutions use large amounts of biomass as feedstock. The article discusses demand, which overall is projected to increase in a business as usual world, but is somewhat reduced due to biogas digestors, clean cookstoves and paper recycling. To this is added the increased demand for BECCS, biochar, 2nd generation biofuels, and other mitigation solutions. Meanwhile supply from forests decreases with forest protection, but increases with agroforestry and production of dedicated perennial biomass crops on anthropogenic grassland. The article is not open access, but you can email PAI for an electronic copy.

Perennial industrial crops, like biomass crops, are an important but complex part of agriculture and industry’s mitigation potential.

The Perennial Agriculture Institute is pleased to announce our first publication – “Perennial vegetables: A neglected resource for biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and nutrition.” It is published open access by the prestigious scientific journal PLOS One.

Among our key findings:

• 613 species are grown around the world, representing 33-56% of all cultivated vegetable species.
• Perennial vegetables occupy 6% of world vegetable growing area,
• Carbon sequestration potential is 23-281 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year.
• Many perennial vegetables are particularly high in the nutrients needed to address deficiencies that impact some 3 billion people today.
• The group of vegetables with the highest levels of these nutrients is trees with edible leaves, of which the study identifies over 70 cultivated species.

PAI will be initiating efforts to bring together nutrition, agroforestry, climate, and crop biodiversity leaders to develop an initiative to increase the planting and consumption of these multifunctional species.

Image: Many trees with edible leaves are grown in coppice systems where they are pruned back every year to stimulate production of tender growth for an extended season. Here, edible-leaf mulberry (Morus alba) is grown at Las Cañadas in Veracruz, Mexico.

PAI is making progress towards our launch. All of our legal paperwork to become a non-profit organization is completed except for one piece which is held up by the government shutdown. In the meantime we have a fiscal sponsor and can receive donations. Several grant proposals are pending and we have several interested funders lined up.

Current fundable projects include:

Organizational setup expenses.

Strategic planning.

Research and outreach on the ability of perennial vegetables to address traditional malnutrition and industrial diet deficiencies while sequestering carbon.

PAI Director Eric Toensmeier has two recent publications on silvopasture and climate change mitigation. Silvopasture is the combination of trees, grazing land, and livestock. It has very high carbon sequestration potential and is widespread but not widely discussed as a climate solution.

On May 30 Toensmeier published an op-ed in the Washington Post about the neglected mitigation potential of silvopasture.

And in June Steve Gabriel’s Silvopasture: A Guide to Managing Grazing Animals, Forage Crops, and Trees in a Temperate Farm Ecosystem was released. Toensmeier wrote the forward and a feature article on climate change mitigation.

Increasing the visibility of agroforestry systems like silvopasture is part of PAI’s mission.