- Details
- Participants
- Notes
- Immigration
- Dry Corridor
- The new way of farming
- Results
- Scaling
- Next Steps & Needs
- Final Thoughts
- Resources
- Categories
Details
Podcast: 
Episode: Climate Change is Driving Migration. Could Smarter Ag Help?
Participants
Janae Morris
Janae Morris
Alex Blumberg
Alex Blumberg
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Daniel McQuillanDaniel McQuillan
Notes
Immigration
- The media uses words like migrant caravan and border surge. And called a national emergency.
- These are people trying to make the best of the choices in front of them.
- Not from Mexico, they are from Central America, specifically from a region called the “dry corridor.”
Dry Corridor
- Dry Corridor
- It contains 10 million people.
- Stretches across Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua
- 20-30 percent of people with projects for Catholic Relief Service have migrated from this region.
- One area went 45 days without rain during the rainy season.
- People are not leaving because they want to. They go because they have to.
- Their life plan is to stay where they are with their communities, on their farms.
- It is in a Tropical Dry Forest. Swings between rainfall extremes.
- The migration crisis is a hunger crisis caused by climate change.
- People here historically grow everything during the rainy season.
- Always saw drought during the middle of the rainy season, usually for a couple of weeks. People started seeing longer and longer of these periods. The dry period is called a coniquila.
- Traditional crops failed.
- Bad years are becoming the new norm.
The new way of farming
- Climate Smart Ag
- Implementing this can stretch the ability of crops to survive for more extended periods.
- We typically think of farming - tilling, planting, blocks of a single crop. Monoculture leads to soil degradation. The soil does not hold onto water as well as it used to. Healthy soil retains moisture.
- 4 Pillars
- Use fertilizer correctly—the right amount, the right kind, at the right time.
- Don’t till, don’t burn. Let the waste reabsorb back into the soil.
- Use cover crops - not main crops during the off-season to repair the soil.
- Diversify- plant other things - trees, nitrogen fixers.
- Similar to regenerative farming
- Set up 3000 test plots.
- Small areas on each farm while other sections remain as it was.
- One farmer is on a severe incline, where it’s hard to capture water.
- After a few years, his soil changed, and he had the highest yields of all his neighbors.
- They also set up working groups so the farmers can share best practices and information.
- Local farmer implementing the practice was able to find a cover crop that does all the other things you need for cover crops, but in addition, you could harvest the bean.
- The way each practice has evolved into localized specifics. Seeds, species, and timing are different.
Results
- 2018 - 41% more corn, 44% more bean than the traditional plots
- Climate Smart Ag had nearly 2x the production during dry years.
- The gap continues to grow over the years.
Scaling
- We need to have partners to scale the practices.
- We need most of the people in the watershed to implement the practices.
- The impacts can multiply as larger areas adopt it.
Next Steps & Needs
- Invest in agricultural education via agricultural extension.
- More support for smallholders.
Final Thoughts
- If we provide information and resources to these countries, we could turn off the flow of people wanting to migrate.
- Daniel is optimistic; people are changing, mitigating the effects, producing more food, and generating more income. But it needs to scale.
