Every five years, farmers and agriculture lobbyists descend on Capitol Hill to debate the farm bill, a massive food and agriculture funding bill that helps families afford groceries, pays out farmers who lost their crops to bad weather, and supports less than – profitable commodity markets, among dozens of other things. The last farm bill was passed in 2018, and in 2023, Congress extended the previous farm bill for an additional year after negotiations reached an impasse. The extension expires today, and Congress appears ready to settle for another one.
House Republicans and Democrats primary dispute over how much funding will go food programs such as SNAP and the Thrifty Food Plan. Another reason for this unusual departure — in previous cycles the bill has easily passed with bipartisan support — is a grant authority called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which has become a flashpoint for a fight over the relationship between agriculture and climate change. At first glance, the program might not sound all that controversial: It “helps farmers, ranchers and forest landowners integrate conservation into working lands,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funds a wide variety of conservation practices from crop rotation to ditch lining. . Unlike other major programs in the farm bill, such as crop insurance, EQIP costs only about $2 billion a year, which is paltry by federal spending standards. So why is this such a sticking point?
The Biden administration’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act expanded EQIP and three other USDA programs with billions of new dollars for on-farm improvements, but the bill specified that the money had to go toward “climate-smart” conservation practices. It was stricter than the original EQIP, which allows farmers to use money for thousands of different environmental-adjacent projects.
Democrats and climate advocates see EQIP as a potential tool to fight climate change, not just a way to fund building fences and repairing farm roofs. Agriculture is responsible for 11 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, a share that is projected to rise dramatically as other sectors of the country’s economy, such as transport, continue to decarbonise. To help the farming sector keep up with the nation’s emissions goals, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) included $20 billion in subsidies for farmers engaged in agricultural practices designed to be “climate-smart” — a category defined by the USDA, which administers the subsidies. These practices include installing vegetation breaks to reduce fire risk, electrifying tractors and planting “no-till” crops, which reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing soil disturbance.
Farmers and politicians from both parties embraced the additional EQIP money from the IRA, but the boost was a one-time infusion, expected to run out in 2026. Now, as lawmakers debate whether to make the expanded environmental program permanent in the looming new farm bill, Republicans and Democrats are clashing over what “climate-smart” means, and whether the money should be “climate-smart” at all.
Earlier this year, the agriculture committee chairmen in the Senate and House, which are controlled by Democrats and Republicans, respectively, released competing farm bill proposals. In May, the House committee approved its version, but it has not yet gone to the floor for a full vote. Nevertheless, the two proposals differ significantly on the fate of the IRA’s $20 billion conservation boost.
But with each passing year that a new farm bill is not passed, the amount of IRA money available to permanently reallocate into its conservation title will decrease, as more of the infrastructure funding is spent. With Congress now out of session until after November’s election, the two chambers will have a short window to pass their versions of the bill and then reconcile them by the end of the year. If they fail to do so by January, Congress’ next two-year cycle will begin, and the bills will be reset — so lawmakers will have to start over and renegotiate the bills in committee. Even with another short-term extension, the battle for next year will be much the same: If Republicans get their way, they will negate perhaps the most important effort in recent history to control the environmental and climate impacts of the nation’s massive agricultural industry. . If Democrats succeed, they would protect the IRA’s climate-ag money from possible repeal if Donald Trump wins the election, and the money would also be incorporated into the bill’s “baseline,” making it likely to be included in future farm bills hold on
Although the moment for some action is almost over this time, the arguments about whether and how to direct climate-specific funding to the agricultural industry are instructive for any future opportunities to make some progress. In February, Representative Glenn Thompson, the Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the House Agriculture Committee, proposed stripping the “climate smart” label from the IRA money, criticizing it as an unnecessary bureaucratic modifier. It would more or less negate the intent of the Inflation Reduction Act, by funneling the unspent portion of the $20 billion from that bill into EQIP’s catchment fund and allowing it to finance pasture fencing and other common improvements.
“These dollars, riddled with climate sideboards and federal bureaucracy, must be refocused on programs and policies that allow the original conservationists — farmers — to continue making local decisions that work for them,” Thompson wrote.
Ashley House, the vice president of strategy and advocacy at the Colorado Farm Bureau, took a softer line than Thompson, but still expressed some concern that the guardrails could lock farmers out of usable EQIP money.
“I think the anxiety and hesitancy when you talk about EQIP dollars being contingent on what’s climate-smart essential, what’s under that umbrella? If we find something useful in five years and it’s not on the list, do we still get our money? I think it’s the anxiety and hesitation, as opposed to, we just don’t want to participate in something that’s climate smart.”
But if all the money can be used for anything, then the chances of the agriculture industry meeting the goal set by the Biden administration — to reduce the 10 percent of the nation’s emissions generated by agriculture — dramatically decrease.
The Senate’s proposal, authored by Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow, who is retiring after this term, would restore the funding of the IRA as it is now, which protects the climate benefits. from Stabenow public position was that the climate strikes are a “red line” without which the bill will not pass, and she said she plans to stake her legacy as a lawmaker on passing a farm bill with the guardrails intact.
“If you remove those protections, a lot of those funds could go to practices that are good for conservation but not as good for climate,” said Rebecca Riley, managing director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s food and agriculture program. Perhaps of greatest concern to climate advocates is the fact that, under normal circumstances, 50 percent of EQIP funds are legally earmarked for livestock operations, which are among the most emissions-intensive agricultural sectors. So if the climate rails are removed from the IRA dollars spent through EQIP, they will be subject to this provision – and effectively used as a vehicle to further subsidize factory farming.
But some researchers criticized even those “climate-smart” agricultural policies that the Democrats are fighting to keep funded are themselves gifts to the agricultural industry of dubious value to the climate. For example, the USDA has given the “climate smart” label to projects that sequester carbon in soil. Many climate experts argue that the emissions benefits of these land sequestration projects overstated and difficult to verify. Funds are also available to cover practices such as the installation of anaerobic digesters to convert manure into biogas – a practice widely opposed by climate advocates, who say it encourages emissions-heavy factory farming.
The agricultural industry operates with deep-rooted industry standards, and the practices and policies that will make meaningful reductions in farming emissions and can be scaled to the entire industry are still being tested. That’s why Erik Lichtenberg, an agricultural economist at the University of Maryland who has studied the USDA’s conservation program, argues that the USDA must first cast a wide net.
The federal government has only distributed $2 billion of the $20 billion in “climate smart” funding from the IRA, so it’s too early for Democrats to claim this money as a success and for Republicans to claim that the climate cuts are too heavy. “It makes sense to experiment and be very broad because we can afford some failures in a search for successes,” Lichtenberg said.
But he also noted that, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, the best possible conservation technique is afforestation, which turns active farmland into carbon-absorbing forest. This echoes an argument by the agricultural historian Ariel Ron, who in a recent essay on this year’s farm bill that “the surest way to do ‘climate-smart’ agriculture is simply to convert excess farm land into new forests.”
For many environmentalists, water use is as big an issue as emissions, and there is similar uncertainty about whether and how EQIP affects water use on farms. Agriculture is the largest user of water in the arid western United States, accounting for more than 80 percent of water use in some basins; in some other cases, the industry causes household wells to dry up. EQIP has long doled out money for farmers to make their operations more water-efficient by lining canals with concrete or installing new irrigation machinery, but some research suggests the program hasn’t had its intended effect.
Anne Schechinger, an agricultural economist at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization focused on farming and environmental issues, says that’s largely because farmers in the West must use their entire water allocations each year or risk giving their water to others. losing users.
“Farmers still have to use their water allocation, even though they reduce water use every time they irrigate,” she said. “It’s like, ‘I’m using less water, so I can water more often,’ so then you’re still using the same amount of water.”
The difficulty of measuring EQIP’s effects on climate and water use has complicated the debate over this year’s farm bill — and this debate will not resolve itself.
Editor’s note: The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council are advertisers with Grist. Advertisers play no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
