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.
Source: Civil Eats – https://civileats.com/2023/04/26/climate-smart-farm-bill-heat-flooding-resilience-policy-conservation
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.
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.
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Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Senator Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico)
H.R.5861 – Agriculture Resilience Act
Link: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/5861
Shown Here:
Introduced in House (02/12/2020)
Agriculture Resilience Act
This bill addresses national greenhouse gas emission reduction efforts in the U.S. agriculture sector, including a national goal to achieve net-zero emissions by the year 2040.
Among other things, the bill
- expands the purposes of federally supported agricultural research, extension, and education to include accelerating the ability of agriculture and the food system of the United States to first achieve net zero carbon emissions and then go further to be carbon positive by removing additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere;
- requires the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to establish a national network of regional hubs for risk adaptation and mitigation to climate change;
- creates a soil health grant program for state and tribal governments;
- revises the agricultural conservation easement program to require owners that receive cost-share assistance to have a conservation plan in place that addresses applicable resource concerns for the land subject to the easement, including soil health and greenhouse gas emissions reduction;
- establishes an alternative manure management program to support non-digester dairy and livestock methane management strategies to effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to maximize environmental benefits;
- directs USDA to study dual-use renewable energy systems, including an assessment on the compatibility of different species of livestock and crop types with dual-use renewable energy system designs; and
- provides competitive grants and technical assistance for local educational agencies to implement food waste measurement and reporting, prevention, education, and reduction projects.
