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Bianca Moebius-Clune on American Farmland Trust’s New Conventional Agriculture
Now heading up AFT’s Climate and Soil Health Initiative, she directs a program to support farmers who are adopting practices to improve their soil health and their farm’s viability, innovating as they go. AFT is promoting a big tent approach, calling on farmers to explore “a new conventional agriculture.” Moebius-Clune, who coined the phrase, is aware that to many the term “conventional” conjures images of business-as-usual chemical farming, with its many environmental and human health impacts. But she emphasizes that AFT intentionally conjoined the word “conventional” with “new.” “We want to bring about a shift to a form of agriculture across the country that we can all be proud of, where the new normal, the new conventional, is to successfully adapt soil health management systems to every farm, and for farmers to thrive as a result,” she says. “It’s a complex space,” she says, “but that is the space in which AFT has intentionally placed its programming and where we think we can have the most impact.”
The AFT soil health programming Moebius-Clune leads provides technical support to farmers to enhance their soil's biological diversity and functioning, through practices like cover cropping and cash crop rotation, better grazing, applying sustainably produced biochar, minimizing soil physical, biological, and chemical disturbance, and maximizing soil cover and living root presence to provide shelter and food to the soil’s inhabitants. Scientific evidence abounds that building a healthy soil microbiome translates over time into more resilient soils that grow more disease resistant and nutrient dense crops that require lower or no synthetic inputs. One could say that introducing soil health practices to farmers dependent on synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and other costly inputs, is a path to lower costs, lower risks, improved more stable yields, and eventually chemical-free farming.
AFT’s goal is to introduce more of the huge cohort of farmers “in the middle” to the bottom line and environmental benefits of soil health practices, and help them successfully transition. Although organic farmers do participate in nonprofit’s soil health programs, Moebius-Clune says the goal is not just to preach to the converted, but to reach the many farmers who are still farming in the “current conventional” way, who have so much to gain from adopting soil health practices, and are taking interest in alternatives as they are see other innovative farmers succeed. “Those are the people that we are most hoping to reach so that we can support in their transition,” she says.
American Farmland Trust’s Climate and Soil Health Initiative Director, Bianca Moebius-Clune’s career and life’s passion for building healthy, high-functioning soil grew out of her childhood experience following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. She grew up gardening, surrounded by farms, enjoying inherently local food in Germany, until the nuclear disaster that occurred in the then Soviet Ukraine led to major life changes. Seeking to avoid eating food produced in Europe that were likely to be radiation contaminated, her family converted to vegetarianism and began purchasing their vegetables from as far-away as New Zealand. “So, it was ‘let’s eat not local,’” Bianca recalls, “because our local soils were suddenly not functioning to produce healthy food.”
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One key element of the programming is creating strongly networked cohorts of trained farmer advisors who are leaders in their own local communities and can build peer support networks, so that contemplating change “is not so scary and lonely, but instead is exciting and energizing” Moebius-Clune says. “Those advisors can better reach those who aren't adopting yet. Conventions always change over time, when a new way becomes so obviously the better path. We are working to build a network of community leaders who can demonstrate, guide, troubleshoot, and help their peers successfully get onto that better path.” AFT envisions that by creating a national network of peer support from the grassroots up, conventional farming can be transformed into a new conventional approach, one based in sound agro-ecological science.
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