Recent Hearings and Legislation Promote Climate-Smart Agriculture | Article

On Caney Creek Ranch in eastern Texas, ranch manager Kimberly Ratcliff is thinking about forests. She’s raising cattle, but she also manages a 2,500-acre, environmentally sustainable farm that incorporates the entire ecosystem—trees, forage, livestock, waterways, soil—into a silvopasture practice. This allows Ratcliff to raise healthier cattle, maintain cleaner watersheds, and protect other wildlife, all while storing carbon and saving money.

Livestock grazing in a silvopasture field. Photo courtesy of the National Agroforestry Center.

“Our efforts can support agricultural producers who have often been overlooked,” Ratcliff writes, adding that silvopasture also “supports conservation and our quest to combat some of the greatest challenges facing our planet.”

Ratcliff was one of four witnesses in a recent House Agriculture Committee hearing on climate-smart agriculture practices and conservation programs within Title II of the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, also known as the Farm Bill.

Agriculture is a critical piece of the climate puzzle. According to John Quinn, a professor at Furman University and a speaker at EESI’s fourth Congressional Climate Camp briefing, there are 22 million farms in the United States covering at least 922 million acres. Climate change is threatening farmers’ livelihoods as droughts, severe storms, and shifting seasons wreak havoc on crop yields. Many current agricultural practices also contribute to climate change, accounting for 10.5 percent of U.S. emissions in 2018.

This also means farmers are crucial to addressing the climate crisis. Even simple solutions such as improving irrigation systems could have massive benefits. Quinn estimates that increasing irrigation efficiency could sequester between one and two gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalents—roughly the emissions that 400 million cars produce in a year—and could produce between $540 to $930 billion in savings by 2050. Other common climate practices include using cover crops, rotational grazing, no-till management, silvopasture, and much more.

But not many farmers are putting these techniques into action. In EESI’s briefing on natural climate solutions, Kris Reynolds, midwest regional director at American Farmland Trust, remarked that less than one-third of U.S. row crops are managed with no-till or strip till, a technique that exposes the soil between rows, helping loosen and add nutrients to the soil. Of that one-third, only five percent use cover crops.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is working to address this through the Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP), which provides technical and financial assistance to farmers to implement conservation practices. Charles Isbell Jr., a third-generation farmer in Virginia and another witness at the House Agriculture hearing, discussed how, with EQIP’s help, he has added prescribed grazing systems, cover crops, stream exclusion fencing to protect the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and more to his property.

Isbell has seen the benefits of these practices first-hand. Using a multi-species cover crop has “virtually eliminated our need for chemical applications,” he said in his statement. “Our structured management of livestock and cover crops have allowed for almost doubling of the soil organic matter, which reduces erosion, increases nutrient holding capacity, and reduces runoff.”

There are other benefits from cover crops and no-till management too, Reynolds remarked. They can suppress winter and early season weeds, reduce soil loss, and increase soil biological diversity and nutrient availability. In a chain reaction, this also helps keep waterways free of excess sediment and nutrients that produce harmful algal blooms.

Another USDA tool helping farmers is COMET-Farm, an online program that estimates a farm’s carbon footprint and allows the user to see how different climate-smart practices can help reduce emissions and sequester carbon. The tool uses detailed information about each farm to create tailored estimates and suggestions to identify best practices for that location.

“The support payments and technical training and outreach from these USDA programs help to mitigate risk while farmers transition to these new practices,” said Keith Paustian, professor at Colorado State University and part of the team that developed COMET-Farm, in his statement.

However, there’s still a long way to go to transform U.S. farms from carbon emitters to carbon savers. The hearing witnesses brought up concerns about farmers having limited access to USDA offices, the large upfront costs of transitioning to these practices, and the low participation among small, minority producers in USDA programs. With the information from this hearing, the House Agriculture committee can be better informed on how to support these programs and further climate-smart agriculture practices.

Recent legislation introduced into the House and Senate could also boost this work, such as the Sustainable Agriculture Research Act (H.R.1363), expanding research on agriculture and resilience solutions to climate change, and the Growing Climate Solutions Act of 2021 (S.1251), helping farmers enter voluntary environmental credit markets.

“By working together through the implementation of conservation and regenerative agriculture practices,” Isbell said, “we can heal the soil that feeds the plants which in turn feeds all of us.”

Author: Emma Johnson