Farm bill won’t solve climate change.

Although it seems like everyone in D.C. is buzzing about a “climate farm bill,” some of the most impactful changes, including crop diversification and shifting diets from meat toward plants, are barely on the negotiating table.

For the past decade, Emma Jagoz has been stewarding and expanding a thriving organic farm that now spans 25 acres near Frederick, Maryland. At Moon Valley Farm, she grows a wide variety of vegetables that end up in CSA boxes and restaurant kitchens in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia year-round.

Increasingly, she has had to contend with extreme weather: early frosts threaten her fall crops. False springs have caused her winter crops to bolt too soon. Rain comes all at once and then not at all.

“Over the past 12 years, it does feel like the seasons are getting less predictable,” she said in early March at the Farmers for Climate Action: Rally for Resilience in D.C., where she held a hand-drawn sign decorated with beets and tomatoes.

As an organic grower focused on building healthy, carbon-holding soil, Jagoz’s climate activism may seem predictable. But the already-devastating impacts of more frequent extreme weather on farms, combined with calls for agriculture to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, have now pushed farmers and farm groups across the political spectrum into the climate change conversation.

On a few key issues, such as paying more farmers to use climate-friendly conservation practices, farm groups that don’t always agree—including the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), the National Farmers’ Union, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, a leading member of the Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance—are now in accordance.

Can an unwieldy government bill, shaped by a bureaucratic system heavily influenced by the powerful agriculture lobby, really shift the food system toward a lower-emission, climate-resilient future?

It’s no wonder: In the last round of reports published by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s top climate experts warned of “a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.” The reports confirmed what many farmers are experiencing firsthand: Droughts, floods, and wildfires are destroying crops and threatening livelihoods and food supplies in more frequent and severe ways than ever before. Increasing temperatures are also causing heat and water stress that directly impacts the productivity of both crops and livestock.

“If we don’t reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, the severity of those impacts will be greater with each subsequent year,” explained Rachel Bezner Kerr, the lead author of the food and agriculture chapter in the IPCC’s impacts and adaptation report. At the same time, agriculture’s emissions have been rising, especially when it comes to the extra-potent but shorter-lived greenhouse gas methane.

So, as negotiations around the 2023 Farm Bill, the country’s most important piece of food and farm legislation, heat up, the question is: will it play a meaningful role in addressing and responding to the climate crisis?

Furthermore, can an unwieldy government bill, shaped by a bureaucratic system heavily influenced by the powerful agriculture lobby, really shift the food system toward a lower-emission, climate-resilient future?

“I would try as quickly as possible to shift subsidies and programs that encourage large-scale monocropping and high-input intensive farming to those that support a system that is more diversified and uses agroecological strategies for production,” said Kerr, when asked about how a climate scientist might rewrite the bill. “That would require a big shift in where the money goes.”

So far, however, the odds that the bill will bring about that kind of sea change seem slim. Based on the early negotiations and conversations, it looks like it won’t move the needle on many of the things that would have the greatest impact: reducing meat (especially beef) in American diets, diversifying farms from coast to coast, and cutting food waste.