Biodegradable Plastic Mulch: A Climate-smart Agricultural Practice

Sep 23, 2022

By Stacey Stearns

During the growing and harvest seasons, vegetable producers often begin their day before sunrise and finish as the last light is seeping into the horizon. These long days are normal but varied. Challenges such as pests, disease, climate change, and weather make each day and each growing season unique and unpredictable.

Vegetable farmers control some of the variables they face—like weeds and the temperature and moisture levels of their soil—by using a product that comes with pros and cons: plastic mulch.

Shuresh Ghimire, assistant extension educator for vegetable crops in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR), is working with producers in the state to find alternatives to plastic mulch without eliminating the benefits it brings.

"Farmers are among the first to feel the effects of climate change. A successful crop, especially outdoors, is heavily based on climate variables like temperature and precipitation. Farmers need a solution, but we know we can do better than traditional plastic mulch," says Ghimire.

He is leading efforts to introduce more biodegradable plastic mulch for Connecticut's vegetable producers.

"The goal is to address these challenges and increase food production closer to home," says Ghimire. "This provides greater food security and lessens our dependence on traditional agricultural regions like California that are facing their own climate-related challenges."

Why is mulch necessary? Mulch reduces the need for herbicides, conserves soil moisture, moderates soil temperature, and can increase both crop yield and quality. This helps keep more profits in the growers' pockets when margins are tight.

However, there are negatives that come with plastic mulch. Most plastic mulch products are non-recyclable. Ongoing research highlights the negative environmental impacts of plastic mulch. It is also costly and labor-intensive for producers to remove at the end of the growing season.

These drawbacks have a big impact at the state and national levels. Connecticut has over 5,500 farms, including about 1,000 that produce vegetables on more than 9,000 acres. There are about 4.4 million acres used for vegetable production in the United States, roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Plastic mulch becomes an unwieldy annual problem at this scale when it goes to a landfill at the end of each growing season.

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Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators