The Farm Bill’s required to stave off the climate crisis---agriculture is a ticking climate bomb.

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.