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Inside Climate News
As Emissions From Agriculture Rise
and Climate Change Batters American Farms, Congress Tackles the Farm
Bill
By Georgina
Gustin
March 01, 2023
The legislation represents a major
chance to tackle emissions, but some lawmakers vow to keep climate
measures out. Advocates call for more climate-focused conservation.
![](images/images_03_06_2023/farming_scott-olson-getty-2048x1365.jpg)
John Duffy walks across a field he is
planting in soybeans on April 23, 2020 near Dwight, Illinois.
Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images
When Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) took to the stage at a recent
conference in Washington, he made an urgent plea—a call for
transformation that he framed as a moonshot.
“They thought Martin Luther King was a dreamer,” Booker said. “They
thought all the great activists were dreamers. We are dreamers,
yes. But that’s what this country is about.”
The massive overhaul that Booker was pushing for is not about
poverty or sweeping financial change or racial justice, at least not
directly. Booker’s focus is on the country’s food system and on farm
policy, especially the massive, nearly half-trillion dollar
legislation—esoteric to most Americans—known as the Farm Bill.
Every five years or so, the bill is re-upped after an increasingly
lengthy and contentious battle that usually centers on the
country’s nutrition support programs, which consume three quarters
of the legislation’s funding. But this time around, as negotiations
get under way and committee meetings take place on Capitol Hill,
conversations are ramping up about American agriculture’s role in
contributing to—and addressing—climate change.
On Wednesday, the Senate Agriculture committee is holding a hearing
on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) conservation
programs, which advocacy groups say represent agriculture’s best
hope for tackling climate change. In advance of the hearing, nearly
650 farm, environmental and policy groups called for Congressional
leaders to focus on conservation funding.
Farming contributes about 11 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas
emissions, more if fertilizer production is included. But a new
analysis, published on Tuesday by the Environmental Working Group
based on data from the Boston Consulting Group, projects that U.S.
agriculture’s share of emissions could rise to about 30 percent of
the total by 2050—more than any other sector of the economy—if farms
don’t reign in emissions from fertilizer and livestock. Emissions
from agriculture have been on the rise for decades, even as
emissions from other sectors fall.
Booker, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, some fellow
Democrats and progressive farm groups say this Farm Bill, more than
previous ones, can and should play a role in staving off the climate
crisis. Part of the solution, they argue, is helping smaller farmers
produce healthier food in more climate-conscious ways and steering
support away from commodities like corn and soybeans, and from giant
industrial livestock facilities that are responsible for the
greatest portion of greenhouse gases from animal waste. Booker has
introduced legislation that would place a moratorium on these
massive factory farms.
Many critics of current farm policy view the increasing
consolidation and power of big agribusiness as a historical
inflection point, on par with the farm crises of the late 1970s and
1980s when interest rates and debt drove thousands of American
farmers off their land. Back then, “tractorcades” took to D.C.,
demanding the attention of lawmakers.
Next Monday, hundreds of farmers and farm groups from across the
country are planning something similar, though with a slightly more
bucolic vibe. They plan to march on the mall in Washington—along
with some sheep that will demonstrate rotational grazing on the
grass there—to call attention to the climate crisis.
“There are historical parallels,” said Mike Lavender, police
director with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC),
which is spearheading the march. “They descended on D.C. because of
consolidation and high prices back in the ‘80s.”
In the five years since the last Farm Bill was signed by then
President Donald Trump, a lot has changed. The country’s farmers
have been battered by a series of major storms, floods and droughts,
and have watched as growing seasons have become longer, hotter and
wetter.
After all the extreme weather, more farmers have come to accept that
climate change is, indeed, real, despite long-standing convictions
to the contrary. The American Farm Bureau Federation, the country’s
most powerful agribusiness lobbying group, had formally rejected the
science on climate change in its policy positions.
But even the Farm Bureau has pivoted, most notably in its embrace of
voluntary carbon trading markets, in which farmers are being paid to
sequester carbon in their soils.
“This is very different from the 2018 Farm Bill. Since then,
Congress has, by and large, admitted that climate change is real and
it’s affecting farmers,” Lavender said. “We’re in a vastly different
political moment.”
Some left-leaning and environmentally focused farm advocacy groups,
including NSAC and its members, say their biggest priority for the
legislation is to boost funding for the USDA’s existing conservation
programs. The two most popular are the Environmental Quality
Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program, both of
which are oversubscribed year after year. Advocates say these
represent the best opportunity for farmers to control greenhouse gas
emissions.
These programs got a significant infusion from the $369 billion
Inflation Reduction Act, the far-reaching legislation that aims to
cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent within seven years by
financing clean energy projects through federal programs. The bill
provides $20 billion to the USDA to support agricultural practices
that reduce emissions and sequester carbon in soils. Earlier this
month, the agency announced it was making $850 million available to
farmers this year.
When Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) took to the stage at a recent
conference in Washington, he made an urgent plea—a call for
transformation that he framed as a moonshot.
“They thought Martin Luther King was a dreamer,” Booker said. “They
thought all the great activists were dreamers. We are dreamers, yes.
But that’s what this country is about.”
The massive overhaul that Booker was pushing for is not about
poverty or sweeping financial change or racial justice, at least not
directly. Booker’s focus is on the country’s food system and on farm
policy, especially the massive, nearly half-trillion dollar
legislation—esoteric to most Americans—known as the Farm Bill.
Every five years or so, the bill is re-upped after an increasingly
lengthy and contentious battle that usually centers on the country’s
nutrition support programs, which consume three quarters of the
legislation’s funding. But this time around, as negotiations get
under way and committee meetings take place on Capitol Hill,
conversations are ramping up about American agriculture’s role in
contributing to—and addressing—climate change.
On Wednesday, the Senate Agriculture committee is holding a hearing
on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) conservation
programs, which advocacy groups say represent agriculture’s best
hope for tackling climate change. In advance of the hearing, nearly
650 farm, environmental and policy groups called for Congressional
leaders to focus on conservation funding.
Farming contributes about 11 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas
emissions, more if fertilizer production is included. But a new
analysis, published on Tuesday by the Environmental Working Group
based on data from the Boston Consulting Group, projects that U.S.
agriculture’s share of emissions could rise to about 30 percent of
the total by 2050—more than any other sector of the economy—if farms
don’t reign in emissions from fertilizer and livestock. Emissions
from agriculture have been on the rise for decades, even as
emissions from other sectors fall.
Booker, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, some fellow
Democrats and progressive farm groups say this Farm Bill, more than
previous ones, can and should play a role in staving off the climate
crisis. Part of the solution, they argue, is helping smaller farmers
produce healthier food in more climate-conscious ways and steering
support away from commodities like corn and soybeans, and from giant
industrial livestock facilities that are responsible for the
greatest portion of greenhouse gases from animal waste. Booker has
introduced legislation that would place a moratorium on these
massive factory farms.
Many critics of current farm policy view the increasing
consolidation and power of big agribusiness as a historical
inflection point, on par with the farm crises of the late 1970s and
1980s when interest rates and debt drove thousands of American
farmers off their land. Back then, “tractorcades” took to D.C.,
demanding the attention of lawmakers.
Next Monday, hundreds of farmers and farm groups from across the
country are planning something similar, though with a slightly more
bucolic vibe. They plan to march on the mall in Washington—along
with some sheep that will demonstrate rotational grazing on the
grass there—to call attention to the climate crisis.
“There are historical parallels,” said Mike Lavender, police
director with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC),
which is spearheading the march. “They descended on D.C. because of
consolidation and high prices back in the ‘80s.”
In the five years since the last Farm Bill was signed by then
President Donald Trump, a lot has changed. The country’s farmers
have been battered by a series of major storms, floods and droughts,
and have watched as growing seasons have become longer, hotter and
wetter.
After all the extreme weather, more farmers have come to accept that
climate change is, indeed, real, despite long-standing convictions
to the contrary. The American Farm Bureau Federation, the country’s
most powerful agribusiness lobbying group, had formally rejected the
science on climate change in its policy positions.
But even the Farm Bureau has pivoted, most notably in its embrace of
voluntary carbon trading markets, in which farmers are being paid to
sequester carbon in their soils.
“This is very different from the 2018 Farm Bill. Since then,
Congress has, by and large, admitted that climate change is real and
it’s affecting farmers,” Lavender said. “We’re in a vastly different
political moment.”
Some left-leaning and environmentally focused farm advocacy groups,
including NSAC and its members, say their biggest priority for the
legislation is to boost funding for the USDA’s existing conservation
programs. The two most popular are the Environmental Quality
Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program, both of
which are oversubscribed year after year. Advocates say these
represent the best opportunity for farmers to control greenhouse gas
emissions.
These programs got a significant infusion from the $369 billion
Inflation Reduction Act, the far-reaching legislation that aims to
cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent within seven years by
financing clean energy projects through federal programs. The bill
provides $20 billion to the USDA to support agricultural practices
that reduce emissions and sequester carbon in soils. Earlier this
month, the agency announced it was making $850 million available to
farmers this year.
“Our top priority, the top priority for most environmental groups,
is not just protecting the $20 billion for climate smart practices
in the Inflation Reduction Act, but also making sure the money isn’t
squandered,” said Scott Faber, who leads governmental affairs at the
Environmental Working Group (EWG).
As the $20 billion is parceled out over the next several years,
environmental groups want to ensure that the practices the USDA
deems “climate smart” have verifiable carbon benefits. Though the
legislation has climate-focused “guardrails” dictating that any
funded practices have measurable benefits, some environmental groups
are concerned that some of the funds could be used to expand
emissions-intensive forms of agriculture, especially large livestock
facilities.
“There are two big challenges,” Faber said. “One is that other
forces will try to divert funding to expand subsidies. The other is
that money will be squandered on practices that USDA will define as
‘climate smart’ when USDA is wasting a lot of conservation money on
practices that do nothing and can even make climate emissions
worse.”
Last fall, EWG conducted an analysis of the agency’s conservation
programs and found that very little funding goes toward programs
that address climate change. The analysis also found that USDA spent
$170 million from 2017 to 2020 on “waste storage facilities” for
livestock operations, which are significant sources of methane, an
especially potent greenhouse gas.
Already, for example, the USDA funds the development of methane
digesters on livestock farms, which are designed to capture methane
from animal waste. The new funding would expand the biogas program
through additional tax credits. Critics say the development of more
biogas merely incentivizes livestock facilities to expand and
produce more emissions-generating waste.
“If we’re going to be spending money on livestock programs, we
should not be funding high-emitting CAFOs,” said Michael Happ, who
covers climate and rural community programs at the Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy, a left-leaning policy group based in
Minneapolis. Happ was using the acronym for large livestock
facilities, or CAFOs—Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.
“We’ve raised concern around methane digesters that are really
expensive, industrial practices that incentivize CAFOs to keep
operating or expanding,” he said.
The “Food Not Feed Summit” in Washington, where Booker spoke, was
organized by Farm Action, a relatively new advocacy group that’s
pushing against increasing consolidation in the agriculture
industry.
Taxpayer-funded subsidies for crop insurance, they argue, are one of
the biggest drivers of that concentration. From a climate
perspective, they say, these larger, consolidated players farm in
more emissions-intensive ways, but also make it increasingly
difficult for smaller-scale growers to thrive—or exist at all.
As the name of the conference implies, subsidies should be flowing
more readily to growers of food, rather than to corn or soybeans,
which largely end up as biofuels or animal feed.
“The farmers who can afford to participate in crop insurance are,
overwhelmingly, producing feed, not food,” Faber said. “Fifty-six
percent of the crop insurance subsidies are going to corn and
soybeans, and seven percent of premium subsidies are flowing to
fruit and vegetables.”
Republicans in the House and Senate agriculture committees have said
that bolstering crop insurance is their leading priority in the farm
bill. But they’ve made clear they won’t require farmers to adopt
climate-friendly practices as a condition of receiving subsidies as
some advocacy groups have encouraged.
The current farm bill expires at the end of September. Until then
the agriculture committees will wrangle over the legislation, with
some Republicans calling for broad cuts to a number of programs and
vowing to ensure that the “farm bill doesn’t become the climate
bill,” while Democrats push to make bolster farm programs that
address the climate crisis.
The usually bipartisan bill faces a potentially bumpy passage in a
divided Congress, with roughly 40 percent of House members new and
unfamiliar with farm policy.
Next week, though, small farm groups, led by NSAC, will head to the
Hill after their march on the mall to educate them.
“Farming has changed dramatically in the last 50 years and how we
farm in the next 50 years will change even more dramatically as
farmers adapt to extreme weather,” Faber said. “Booker is right. The
moment is right.”
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