America’s farms don’t just run on corn and cattle. They also run on cash from the US Department of Agriculture. Every year, the USDA spends billions of dollars to keep farmers in business. It distributes money to balance fluctuations in crop prices; it provides loans to farmers who want to buy livestock or seeds; and it pays producers who lose crops due to drought, floods and other extreme weather.
The agency is also now giving money — including $20 billion that Congress earmarked two years ago in the Inflation Reduction Act — to farmers trying to limit their greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon in soil, a key part of the Biden administration s goal to reduce the 10. percent of the country’s emissions generated by agriculture. The windfall of climate-smart farm financing has been widely praised by climate activists and researchers.
But exactly how the USDA spends that money is more complicated — and controversial — than it might seem, and not simply because Republicans in Congress threatened to siphon off the funds. A new report from the Environmental Working Group says that more than a dozen of the farming practices the USDA recently designated as “climate smart” — including several of the highest-funded ones — don’t actually have proven climate benefits. According to the group, this finding is particularly important because the USDA is likely to spend more money on the same practices in the coming years: Much of the $20 billion authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act has yet to reach farmers’ pockets.
Supporting farming techniques with uncertain benefits “undermines potential real reductions in emissions,” said Anne Schechinger, author of the report and midwest director at the Environmental Working Group, an environmental research and advocacy organization. “If these unproven practices remain on the list, a lot of money will go to these practices that are unlikely to reduce emissions.”
A spokesperson for the USDA said the agency uses a rigorous, scientific process to determine what it considers to be climate smart. Still, the agency acknowledges that not everything on its list necessarily has quantifiable benefits. New additions to the list are provisional – that is, they are added “under the assumption that they may provide benefits” and will be removed later if those benefits cannot be quantified.
Schechinger analyzed spending through the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, called EQIP for short, the agency’s biggest conservation program. She found that between 2017 and 2022, the program directed about $2 billion to techniques tentatively added to its climate smart list for this fiscal year.
“A lot of money seems to be going to climate-smart practices between 2017 and 2022, when really, very little of the total EQIP money actually went to practices with proven climate benefits,” Schechinger said.
In particular, the group questioned eight of 15 methods the Biden administration tentatively added, such as installing a waste facility cover or an irrigation pipeline. One of them – “waste storage facility,” a structure that holds manure and other agricultural waste — may even increase emissions, according to the report. The USDA has spent about $250 million on them between 2017 and 2022.
The department specifies on its list that only a specific type of waste storage facility, one that composts manure, counts as climate smart. These compost structures can reduce methane emissions and improve water quality, the agency says.
“Unfortunately, EWG did not consider the rigorous, science-based methodology used by USDA to determine eligible practices, nor the level of specificity required during the implementation process to ensure that the practices’ climate-smart benefits are maximized not,” Allan said. Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the USDA, in an emailed statement. “As a result, the findings of this report are fundamentally flawed, speculative, and rest on incorrect assumptions surrounding USDA’s selection of climate-smart practices.”
Schechinger acknowledged that the USDA does not define everyone waste storage facilities as climate smart, but she said the funding data she was able to obtain through a records request did not distinguish between specific facility types and that it “remains to be seen” whether the Inflation Reduction Act money will only go to the kind that compost manure.
Some researchers have argued that more studies need to be done on most “climate-smart” practices – even those, such as planting cover crops, which the Environmental Working Group doesn’t question in its report — before anyone can say how much climate pollution they’re curbing or carbon they’re sequestering. “For most climate-smart management practices, we don’t yet have the data and information we need to understand when and where they are most likely to succeed,” said Kim Novick, an environmental scientist at Indiana University.
Most scientists agree that more data needs to be collected and analyzed to understand, for example, the nuances of storage carbon in the soil. But some argue that climate change is just too urgent to delay action.
That’s one reason Rachel Schattman, a professor of sustainable agriculture at the University of Maine, supports the USDA’s use of climate funding. She also has confidence in the agency’s commitment to science. A practice is not placed on the agency’s conservation list “without having demonstrated environmental benefits or reduced environmental harm,” she said. “Whether those benefits or reduced harms are related to climate change is something [the USDA] currently grappling with in a very meaningful way.”
Schattman also said it’s important not to paint climate-smart practices with a broad brush. “Everyone’s farm is different. Everyone’s soil is different. Everyone’s microclimate is different,” she said. An irrigation pipeline in the Arizona desert may have a different effect on water and energy use than one on a farm in Vermont. Even if a practice here or there doesn’t reduce emissions or store carbon in the soil exactly as the USDA intends, Schattman said the influx of funding can still move agriculture in the right direction.
The Inflation Reduction Act “created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for many farmers,” she said. “I think it’s going to make a lot of things possible that people couldn’t do before.”
