USDA’S CLIMATE CRUSADE: USDA successfully brought big ag aboard in the fight against climate change. Now they have to prove it will work, your host reports. The strategy of paying large incentives to farmers so they adopt climate-friendly farming methods won over large swaths of big ag, capturing a policy priority that has eluded past administrations. But they still need to prove it actually has an environmental impact and isn’t just a giveaway to Big Ag, as some climate activists fear. Bonnie’s brain: Robert Bonnie, the undersecretary of farm production and conservation, is the brains behind the USDA’s new approach. He’s a veteran of the Obama administration and saw that administration’s cap-and-trade approach go up in smoke. He researched how to gain support in rural communities for environmental efforts. “Our job here is to basically do this in a way that will attract support,” he said. “And then prove it can work and prove it’s durable.” The approach, and its $3 billion of subsidies, struck a positive chord with agriculture. Andrew Walmsley, then-senior director of government relations at the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s farm lobby of more than six million members, chalked the program’s popularity up to its “voluntary, incentive-based approach,” which he said allows for innovation. “A lot of credit is due to [Bonnie’s] work and his approach,” Walmsley added. Proving it can work: Having gotten the industry’s buy-in, USDA now needs to convince environmental advocates. Some are concerned that data from the USDA’s projects won’t be public because it contains trade secrets belonging to participating companies. “It’s not really clear how this is going to do a whole lot more, in some of the projects, than just create another source of income for somebody,” said Cathy Day, the climate policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “If most of the money ends up flowing to farmers and changing practices it becomes less of a concern. But we’d really like to know that there’s really good, firm data on that, to ensure that it’s not going to be benefitting the large transnational corporations.” Researchers also have cast doubt on the climate impact of one of the types of projects drawing the most funding — carbon sequestration, which can involve planting cover crops during the offseason to absorb more of the warming gases in the air. But a recent study from the Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment found that cover crops — especially when implemented poorly — can reduce overall crop productivity. That reduction in crop growth could cause “spillover” emissions in other areas of the world, where farmers would have to ramp up their own agricultural production to fill the void. David Lobell, the director of the Stanford center, said findings from early studies on soil carbon, which suggested that massive amounts of carbon could be sequestered by climate-smart agriculture, were overly optimistic. “They certainly are not going to deliver the climate targets that we need,” Lobell said. “Even within agriculture, they’re not going to be enough to offset carbon emissions by themselves. I think we’re going to need to do a lot more.”
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