Climate provisions fail.

Still, that money will do little more than make up for cuts — including those to the Conservation Stewardship Program — in the past two farm bills, according to Day. Groups like the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and even the more conventional American Farm Bureau Federation want to see Congress spend more on the conservation programs and target emissions. In recent years, those programs have shied away from funding “climate-smart” agriculture, according to an Environmental Working Group analysis published last year. Currently, half of the farm bill-authorized funds for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which shares costs for conservation-minded farm projects, goes to farmers’ livestock needs. That includes bankrolling methane digesters — systems usually made up of sealed tanks or ponds — that some farms use to convert methane from manure into fuel, called biogas, and fertilizer.

“On the surface, that absolutely reduces the magnitude of greenhouse gas emissions,” Day said. “However, those methane digesters also support an existing agricultural system that is built around high fossil-fuel use.” Digesters are often, though not always, used at Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, sometimes called CAFOs, industrial livestock pens that are a major source of methane emissions. Rather than propping those facilities up, Day said the farm bill should subsidize practices like perennial grazing and agroforestry, which involves diversifying farmland with trees and shrubs that limit soil erosion, create wildlife habitat, and store carbon. Day said she’s not sure yet if such proposals will see bipartisan support but that incentive-based policies stand a better chance than mandates.

Even if the farm bill boosts “climate-smart” farming by the billions, that alone won’t solve a major problem: Most growers don’t have the tools to know how much carbon they’re storing in their soil, said Cristel Zoebisch, deputy director of policy at Carbon180, a nonprofit focused on carbon removal and storage. “We need to be fairly certain that the amount of CO2 we’re saying we’re offsetting is actually being sequestered in agricultural lands,” Zoebisch said. “We don’t really have a good sense of what the baseline, what the starting point of soil carbon stocks looks like across the country today.”