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July
19, 2023
By Gabriel Popkin, Yale Environment 360
The Biden administration bets big on ‘climate smart’
agriculture
![](images/images_07_21_2023/NoTillCornUSDA%20copy.jpg)
Corn planted in no-till corn residue near Minden,
Iowa. USDA
This story was originally published by Yale
Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk
collaboration.
A new kind of food may soon be arriving on
grocery store shelves: climate smart. Under the Partnerships for
Climate-Smart Commodities, a nascent U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA) program, this amalgam of farming methods aims to keep the
American agricultural juggernaut steaming ahead while slashing the
sector’s immense greenhouse gas footprint.
This spring, the Biden administration began allocating $3.1 billion to
hundreds of agriculture organizations, corporations, universities, and
nonprofits for climate-smart projects. These entities will pass most
of the money on to tens of thousands of farmers, ranchers, and forest
owners, including growers who manage thousands of acres and
underserved and disadvantaged farmers who often have much smaller
operations. The first agreements have now been signed; the money is
starting to flow.
The USDA estimates that the 141 funded projects will, collectively
over the project’s five-year lifetime, eliminate or sequester the
equivalent of 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, on
par with removing more than 2.4 million gas-powered cars from the road
over the same period. They will achieve this by paying growers to
adopt practices thought to either reduce greenhouse gas emissions or
capture carbon dioxide from the air. These practices include reducing
or eliminating tilling of soil, planting “cover crops” that grow
during the off-season and are not harvested, improving how farmers use
fertilizer and manure, and planting trees.
More importantly, the agency aims to catalyze new, premium markets for
products such as climate-smart corn, soybeans, and beef, which it
hopes will spur farmers to continue these practices far into the
future. “People want to know that when they’re spending their dollar
at the grocery store that they’re not hurting the environment; they
want to be helpful,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said last
December when announcing projects that received funding. The emerging
market for climate-friendly products, he added, represents “a
transformational opportunity for U.S. agriculture.”
The idea has enthusiastic supporters. The market that Vilsack
envisions “is potentially massive — much bigger than any federal
program could be,” says Ben Thomas, senior policy director for
agriculture at the Environmental Defense Fund. “And it’ll last as long
as the conditions that create the market still exist.”
But the high-profile effort has also come under fire. Some researchers
fear that the agency lacks a workable plan for measuring and verifying
the impacts of the practices federal dollars will be paying for.
Others say science has yet to prove that climate-smart practices truly
reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “We don’t have that understanding yet
for most climate-smart management practices,” says Kim Novick, an
environmental scientist at Indiana University.
The program’s harshest critics assail it as a giveaway to rich
corporations that will do little to rein in climate change — and might
even exacerbate it. “This program is just pork for big polluters,”
says University of Iowa economist Sylvia Secchi. “It’s a greenwashing
scheme. It’s going to allow nothing to get done.”
For decades, efforts to cut fossil fuel emissions have focused on
power plants, factories, and automobiles, not farmland. “Agriculture
has just not been at the table in a meaningful way,” says Thomas.
But it should be. For all of industrial farming’s success at feeding
people and livestock and producing biofuel, the sector is also a major
polluter, accounting for roughly 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas
emissions and roughly a quarter of emissions globally. The main
greenhouse gases emitted by U.S. agriculture today are nitrous oxide,
which comes mainly from soil microbes that digest nitrogen fertilizer,
and methane, burped by the nation’s roughly 92 million cows. Both warm
the atmosphere far more, per molecule, than carbon dioxide.
Farmland itself was also once a major source of atmospheric carbon
dioxide as farmers cleared carbon-rich forests and plowed up prairie
soils, releasing carbon from trees and the ground. Now, climate-smart
agriculture aims to recapture some of that carbon.
![](images/images_07_21_2023/GrassfedCows%20copy.jpg)
Ryan MacKay raises beef, pork, lamb and
poultry using natural, sustainable methods on his Hudson, MA farm.
John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Unlike with organic farming, climate-smart
farming has no list of allowed or prohibited practices. “There is no
single definition of climate smart,” says Omanjana Goswami, an
interdisciplinary scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Instead, it comprises a mélange of practices that, studies show, can
either reduce farms’ greenhouse gases emissions or increase the amount
of carbon stored in their soils.
Funded projects are receiving up to $95 million over five years to
help farmers take up these practices and to create monitoring and
marketing programs that, it’s hoped, will keep farmers on the
climate-smart track after the program ends. That all-carrot, no-stick
strategy is intentional and necessary to reduce agriculture’s climate
impact, says Robert Bonnie, under secretary for farm production and
conservation at USDA and one of the program’s chief architects and
champions.
“A voluntary, collaborative approach is the only approach that works
here,” says Bonnie. “Regulation isn’t very good at asking people to
adopt new practices.”
The department says the program will deliver benefits to underserved
and disadvantaged farmers, a group that includes farmers of color,
women, veterans, and small and beginning farmers who have, in the
past, struggled to access USDA funding streams and have sometimes been
intentionally excluded from them. Many of the projects whose signed
agreements have been made public, for example, will direct at least 20
percent of funds to underserved farmers.
Champions of the program also note that expected benefits go beyond
increasing carbon sequestration and reducing greenhouse gases from
farm fields. By encouraging farmers to reduce tillage, plant cover
crops, and take other measures, “we’re improving water quality; we’re
reducing erosion,” says Adam Kiel, executive vice president of
AgOutcomes, which is managing a $95 million climate-smart partnership
led by the Iowa Soybean Association.
But as the climate-smart commodities program gets underway, many
experts are warning that even its most-touted practices often fall far
short. For example, some cover crop studies have found that the
practice did not sequester significant amounts of carbon in soils,
while other studies that did find gains also had gaps or
methodological problems that diminished confidence in the results. And
an analysis published in May in Nature Sustainability found that yield
losses resulting from cover crops in the United States could erase as
much as 70 percent of their climate benefits if farmers cut down trees
elsewhere or plow up grasslands to compensate for those losses.
“I wouldn’t say we should pause everything, because there are some
real benefits to cover cropping,” says David Lobell, a food security
researcher at Stanford University and a coauthor of the Nature paper.
“But I think we should be much more vigilant about maintaining
productivity” as more farmers start using cover crops.
Other projects aim to reduce the greenhouse gas
footprint of beef and dairy herds by more carefully managing how these
animals graze pastures, so their manure can feed perennial grasses and
other plants whose roots pull carbon deep into the soil. But grass-fed
cows can also emit significantly more methane over their lifetimes
than those that spend more of their lives in feedlots. Some projects
plan to feed cows experimental additives that could reduce those
methane emissions.
Measuring and modeling nitrous oxide emissions accurately is also
notoriously difficult. And practices thought to reduce such emissions
— like applying some fertilizer in the spring, just before planting,
rather than applying all fertilizer in the fall — sometimes backfire.
In fact, few long-term assessments of any climate-smart practices have
been conducted on working farms, says Novick, making it hard to tailor
practices to particular soil types, climates, and situations.
“It doesn’t appear that funding decisions from this program were
necessarily made in a way that maximizes climate mitigation,” says
Novick, who led a team that last fall authored a report on how science
can inform nature-based climate solutions. “Ideally we would have
first invested in the data tools necessary to understand when and
where a practice is likely to succeed as a climate solution.”
There’s also the question of how to measure the program’s benefits.
Funded groups are required to take measurements that will allow the
USDA to assess the impacts of the practices farmers are implementing.
But the agency is also relying heavily on a computer model that was
designed to estimate greenhouse gases for planning large-scale
projects and that cannot accurately quantify emissions and carbon
capture from individual farms, notes Jon Sanderman, a soil scientist
at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
Bill Hohenstein, director of the USDA’s Office of Energy and
Environmental Policy, acknowledges that the science behind
climate-smart agriculture remains a work in progress. But he says it’s
mature enough to take action. “We could wait a decade and probably
understand these benefits better,” Hohenstein says. “But our view is
that we would end up with generally the same recommendations.”
In addition to the technical challenges of measuring carbon and
greenhouse gas changes, the Climate-Smart program will have to get
farmers to stick with new practices after payments have ended.
Officials say that payments to cover the startup costs for enrolled
farmers are essential. “If this stuff was free, folks would already be
doing it,” Bonnie says. But once they’ve bought equipment like seed
drills for no-till planting and climbed the learning curve, he and
Hohenstein say, reduced input costs, yield increases resulting from
healthier soils, and premiums for climate-smart products will start to
pay for themselves.
Many experts view such projections as overly optimistic. Hanna
Poffenbarger, a soil scientist at the University of Kentucky, says it
may take a decade for cover crop benefits, such as reduced need for
fertilizer and increased soil organic matter, to translate into
profits. That aligns with the experience of early adopters like Trey
Hill, a farmer in Maryland who says that even after planting cover
crops for more than 20 years, he’s still seeing yield losses in some
of his corn fields and an unclear impact on his bottom line. “When you
talk about improving soils,” he says, “we’re talking about a 10-year
commitment before you would really even see anything significant.”
Details on the projects themselves have been slow
to emerge. Though the projects receiving the bulk of the funding were
announced last September, the USDA has so far shared fewer than a
quarter of the signed agreements on its website. For the remaining
projects, the department has published scant information. For example,
a $61-million project led by the agribusiness giant Tyson to create
and market “climate-smart beef” comes with only a two-sentence
description that does not explain what practices will make beef
climate smart. In response to an interview request, a Tyson
representative linked to a blog post lacking substantive information
on how the company’s claims will be verified.
The vagueness troubles observers like Goswami, of the Union of
Concerned Scientists, who says that without clear standards, companies
will define “climate smart” in different ways, potentially confusing
customers. “If Tyson comes in and says farms and ranches who we’re
buying cows from have implemented X amount of cover cropping, does
that make their beef climate smart?” she asks.
Even people who received funding fear that the program could overwhelm
or confuse farmers who are suddenly inundated with competing
climate-smart offers. “In Iowa alone, there are 17 different
climate-smart projects” that will be recruiting farmers, Kiel notes.
At the same time, another branch of the USDA, the Natural Resources
Conservation Service, has been tasked with disbursing nearly $20
billion injected by the Inflation Reduction Act into farm programs,
including ones that pay farmers to grow cover crops or set aside land
for conservation. Private-sector carbon markets are also courting
farmers. And many of these initiatives require that farmers not take
money from competing programs, to avoid double counting of climate
benefits. “There’s going to be farmer confusion,” Kiel says. “It’s
unfortunate, but at least there’s going to be lots of choices.”
Secchi, meanwhile, questions why some of the wealthiest corporations
and individuals in industrial agriculture are receiving additional
federal money. She would have instead liked to see the government
insist that growers already receiving government subsidies through
other programs do more to reduce their climate impact. “Why can’t we
ask farmers who are getting crop insurance subsidies to plant cover
crops at zero extra cost for the taxpayer?” Secchi asks. She’d also
like to see more of the funds directed toward minority, Indigenous,
and other disadvantaged farmers.
Bonnie, the USDA undersecretary, responds that catalyzing large-scale
change requires working with companies big enough to reach thousands
of growers farming millions of acres. Building a program that will
create new markets rather than new regulations and policies, he adds,
insulates climate-smart agriculture from future Congresses and
administrations that may be less climate friendly.
One thing is certain: As the government looks to steer the ocean liner
that is American farming in a direction that’s climate friendlier yet
still highly profitable, a lot of eyes — both hopeful and skeptical —
will be watching closely.
This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment
Reporting Network, a nonprofit investigative news organization.
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