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09
June 2023
By
Georgina Gustin
Department of Agriculture Conservation Programs Are
Giving Millions to Farms That Worsen Climate Change
A new report tracks grants from the agency and finds
that the largest contracts are going to big California dairies.
A farmer harvests corn on Oct. 22, 2015 near Burlington, Iowa. Credit:
Scott Olson/Getty Images
The Department of Agriculture gives tens of millions of dollars every
year to farmers and ranchers to support conservation efforts on their
farms, but much of the funding ends up at big, industrial-scale
operations that critics say worsen agricultural pollution and emit
climate-warming greenhouse gases, a new report has found.
The report, released last week by the Institute for Agriculture
and Trade Policy, concluded that one of the agency’s biggest and most
popular conservation programs, the Environmental Quality Incentives
Program (EQIP), gave out its costliest grants in 2022 to seven large
dairy farms in California, the country’s biggest dairy-producing
state.
These grants, nearly $300,000 each, were for construction of
anaerobic digesters, which capture methane gas from lagoons where
manure is collected. The methane is then converted into “biogas” that
gets routed into pipelines to heat homes and buildings.
In all, more than $100 million in grants were awarded across
the country for such digesters that capture methane from manure and
other infrastructure at large concentrated animal feeding operations
for dairy cows and cattle, or CAFOs.
The USDA classifies digesters as conservation measures because they
capture and divert methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas, from
entering the atmosphere. But, critics say, funneling millions of
dollars to construct digesters and other waste equipment incentivizes
the expansion of massive dairy and cattle operations—and only
intensifies the country’s biggest source of agricultural methane: cow
burps.
The IATP analysis looked at practices that the USDA identifies
as having conservation benefits and calculated which of them were
getting the most money.
“We found that eight out of the top 10 go to support industrial
scale farms,” said Michael Happ, an IATP researcher who authored the
report. “But when you look at the most effective practices, they’re
not going to the types of farms that are making the climate crisis
worse.”
The EQIP program was launched in the early 1990s to help
farmers pay for conservation measures on their farms, such as planting
grasses to prevent erosion or creating windbreaks. It has become very
popular with farmers; the USDA turns thousands of potential grantees
away each year.
In the 2002 Farm Bill, the sprawling legislation covering farm
and nutrition policy that’s re-negotiated every five years, lawmakers
allowed CAFOs to be recipients of EQIP dollars.
“It was part of a compromise between those who wanted to
increase conservation spending and those from livestock-heavy states,”
Happ explained. “Since then, funding going to large CAFOs has gone
through the roof.”
As of March 2020, 255 digesters were operating on American
livestock farms. At least 59 more have come online since then,
according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
In addition to digesters, the EQIP program also funds other
costly CAFO-related infrastructure, such as waste treatment lagoons
and storage facilities. The Biden administration has said that methane
digesters would be a key component of its efforts to reduce emissions
from agriculture, placing them on its list of “climate smart”
practices. The Inflation Reduction Act, which directs nearly $19
billion to the USDA, specifies that nearly $8.5 billion of that will
go to the EQIP program.
“When we look at the list of climate-smart practices there are
a lot of things that we support,” Happ said. “Digesters are listed as
a climate smart practice and that’s something we strongly disagree
with.”
Late last year, the Environmental Working Group, which has extensively
tracked conservation funding and agricultural subsidies, found that
the USDA had given more than $7 billion to farmers through its major
conservation programs, including EQIP, from 2017 to 2020, yet only a
small percentage of the funding went to practices that had any climate
benefits, the group found.
“We know that EQIP funding is not going to the right
practices,” said Anne Schechinger, a director with the group and
author of the study. That analysis found that of the 10 practices that
received the most funding—roughly half of the overall funding—only one
had climate benefits, while the other 200 practices the agency
supported got the other half of the funding.
“That means there are tons of great conservation practices that
are getting almost no money,” Schechinger said. “And yet we’re
spending millions of dollars on things that most people would not
consider to be conservation.”
In response to a request for answers and an interview, the USDA
sent an emailed statement, saying that the agency last year announced
$325 million for a program called the Partnerships for Climate-Smart
Commodities, which focuses on “innovative projects that emphasize
enrolling small and underserved producers.” This brings that agency’s
total investment for climate-smart agriculture to more than $3
billion, the agency said.
“In addition, the Inflation Reduction Act provided $19.5
billion for climate-smart agriculture, enabling USDA to increase
access to its oversubscribed conservation programs. These additional
investments are estimated to help hundreds of thousands of farmers and
ranchers apply conservation to millions of acres of land,” the agency
said, noting that many of these conservation practices would have
direct climate benefits.
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