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March 1, 2022
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the lead federal agency helping farmers, ranchers, and forest owners shift towards sustainable practices. To do so, USDA offers several financial and technical assistance programs, including the Conservation Stewardship Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. USDA recently announced a new program, the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, which will invest up to $1 billion for pilot projects that create market opportunities for agricultural products that reduce greenhouse gas emissions or sequester carbon.
The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), an alliance of grassroots organizations, works to advance federal policies that bolster sustainable agriculture, with a special focus on supporting small and mid-sized family farms. EESI sat down with NSAC’s climate policy coordinator, Cathy Day, to discuss how federal programs can better support agricultural practices that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the climate crisis.
EESI: Farms and forests can be a tremendous tool for carbon sequestration, but there are often hurdles for implementing sustainable, carbon-negative practices. Why is that?
Day: According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, agriculture produces 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. If we open that up further to look at additional sources of emissions, like the production of fertilizers that are involved in agriculture, then we add even more emissions. So, there are a lot of opportunities for the agricultural sector to reduce emissions.
When implementing climate-friendly agricultural practices, we need to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon. Those are related but different goals. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we need to work towards reducing and eventually eliminating synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
Eliminating synthetic fertilizers will require a very rich and healthy soil microbiome. Because synthetic fertilizers and pesticides decrease soil microbiome, building the microbiome back up will require sustainable agriculture practices such as planting cover crops and reducing tillage. But farmers will not go from using synthetic fertilizers one year to having a sustainable agricultural system the next year because it can take as many as five years for soil microbiomes to recover. It also takes time for farmers to figure out how to implement sustainable practices. For example, cover crops can be planted at different times, which can result in different benefits, or a lack of benefits.
In the time it takes to build up the soil microbiome and figure out how to implement sustainable practices, farmers may see impacts on their yields. So it is really important to give them a buffer so that farmers can get to the point where their yields are being supported by natural systems instead of synthetic inputs like fertilizers.
EESI: What existing federal programs are helping farmers implement sustainable, climate-friendly agricultural practices?
Day: Many sustainable practices are already supported through the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), and sometimes through the Regional Conservation Partnership Program. Both CSP and EQIP are tried and true. But there are some changes that could be made to improve these programs to help farmers better access them. For example, more than half of farmers who apply for CSP or EQIP do not end up receiving financial assistance, partially due to a lack of funding. Nevertheless, these funds are helping farmers implement climate-friendly, sustainable agriculture practices. The CSP, in particular, is helping farmers take their already effective practices and build upon them to get well-rounded climate solutions.
EESI: The Biden-Harris Administration recently announced up to $1 billion for “Climate-Smart Commodities” pilot programs. What are your recommendations to make sure this new program is as effective as possible?
Day: There are some ways in which USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities leaves out key pieces. For example, the program makes it hard to move toward more innovative practices like perennial crops with long-term implementation timelines.
The Climate-Smart Commodities program also puts the burden of technical assistance on the applicant rather than on USDA. As a result, applicants who already have more effective technical assistance programs are going to be much better placed under the program. This could make it more challenging for Black, Indigenous, and people of color farmers who have traditionally had less access to technical assistance to participate in the program. Smaller farms may also have less technical capacity. However, it is great that USDA is beginning to think through these equity pieces to try to ensure that a variety of people are able to apply.
In addition, the program is focused on commodities rather than the practices that are used to produce the commodities. So it seems like the program will not help farmers focus on building climate-friendly practices, but rather on building marketing systems, which is just one part of the puzzle. There is nothing wrong with marketing, farmers have to sell their crops. But for small and mid-sized farms, small investments in things like composting systems or seed drying can go a long way; however, these things are not the focus of the program.
We also have concerns about the quantification and verification piece of the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program. While it is great to measure emissions, there are currently no effective ways to measure a lot of the climate-friendly systems that reduce emissions. For example, trying to measure the benefit of transitioning a degraded agricultural system to a well-managed organic farm is very hard because it takes a lot of capacity that many farmers and organizations do not have right now.
The limited capacity of many farmers to do quantification and verification is going to reinforce monocropping systems where measuring emissions is easier and where there are already existing people doing that work. This could push the system further toward monocropping—the practice of growing one crop year after year on the same plot of land—which is inherently less climate-friendly and sustainable in the long-term. While it is great that USDA wants to invest in climate-friendly practices, some of the ways in which this program aims to do so may reinforce the status quo rather than really move toward more climate-friendly systems.
EESI: What should policymakers consider as they move forward with financial incentives for climate-smart agriculture?
Day: If we think about using the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), building up things like infrastructure, storage, seed drying, and composting systems is important to support more sustainable, climate-friendly agriculture. We would also like to see more investment in planting perennial crops. These things may be able to be funded through the CCC. But they may also be accomplished by emphasizing them through the CSP and EQIP programs and ensuring that those programs are better funded, more accessible, and have lower bureaucratic hurdles. And many of these sustainable practices not only provide climate benefits, but can help improve water and air quality and support biodiversity.
EESI: What current climate-smart agricultural projects or organizations pursuing such projects do you find most exciting?
Day: The Land Institute does wonderful work with perennial crops. They now have a commercialized perennial grain crop, years ahead of their predictions of what it would take to produce, harvest, and commercialize a perennial grain crop. This is really exciting because it suggests that we are going to have climate-friendly perennial crops faster than expected.
The Savanna Institute is also doing great things in terms of agroforestry (which is the integration of trees and shrubs into agricultural systems). They are thinking about agroforestry much more cohesively and holistically than it often has been in the past. It is exciting to see them working in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa to change the landscape by planting more tree crops and incorporating trees with a lot of other agricultural products.
There is also a farm in Wisconsin called New Forest Farm that has a very integrated agricultural system with crops and livestock. And there are a lot of ecosystem and climate benefits of this system, like improved water and air quality, in addition to producing a lot of food.
Another organization I am excited about is the Quivira Coalition in New Mexico, which organizes land apprenticeships for people all over the West. They support many kinds of sustainable agricultural practices with a focus on education. This is important because we need much more farmer-focused education where farmers who are implementing climate-friendly practices help other farmers adopt those practices.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
For more on climate-friendly agriculture, check out EESI’s sustainable agriculture article series focusing on practices that provide climate adaptation and mitigation benefits.
Interview by Savannah Bertrand
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