Climate-smart funding won’t increase productivity --- will decrease yields and increase costs and emissions – focus on innovation and tech development is superior

With Congress finally starting to make progress on reauthorizing the long delayed Farm Bill, a showdown over funding for so-called “Climate-Smart Agriculture” is brewing. Environmentalists are set on protecting Inflation Reduction Act funding for USDA conservation programs that would incentivize things like the use of cover crops and regenerative farming practices. Republicans want to shift the funding into the Farm Bill and broaden eligibility to include traditional conservation program activities.

Representative Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-PA), who is chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, recently proposed taking the money back and instead putting it into the next Farm Bill as additional funding for conventional agricultural producers. A recent report from Senate Republicans made the same case: extend the “climate-smart” agricultural funding to all conservation activities, effectively diluting the funding into broad support for agricultural producers.

Environmental NGOs have, predictably, balked. A sign-on letter from UCS—with support from the who’s-who of the climate and environmental movement—tried to make the case that IRA conservation funding, as currently conceived, is both an economic and climate win for farmers. The Environmental Working Group, National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, EarthJustice, and others, have also sought to protect the IRA “climate-smart” agriculture fund status quo.

From a climate perspective, though, neither proposal makes any sense. The almost $20 billion set aside by the IRA to fund USDA conservation programs to incentivize “climate-smart” farming might encourage adoption of some practices with climate and productivity benefits, but the majority of what counts as “climate-smart” does little for the climate. Instead of legitimately reducing emissions from agriculture, or even increasing productivity, the IRA agricultural funding is set to fund the adoption of practices that have the potential to increase costs for farmers, reduce yields, and raise global emissions from agriculture.

Shifting the entirety of IRA’s funding to oversubscribed conservation programs, as Republicans have proposed, could have some productivity benefit—and thus some climate benefits too. Investment in conservation programs at USDA is a popular way to incentivize the use of agricultural practices that farmers want to adopt. It is also a sound investment in rural economies. But, it is not, by itself, a climate policy.

At the end of the day, neither proposal for the IRA funding will have much impact on greenhouse gas emissions from the agriculture sector.

There is a strong case for reallocating the IRA investment towards more effective programs. If Congress is going to do so, both farmers and the environment will be far better served by redirecting IRA agriculture funding toward innovation, R&D, deployment of new technologies, and industrial policy measures for agriculture than either continuing to spend that money on the dubious practices it is presently committed too or shifting it back into existing conservation programs.