Report: USDA conservation programs need to focus more on mitigating climate change

Farmers received billions of dollars from two of the largest federal agricultural conservation programs between 2017 and 2020, but only a small percentage of money-funded practices reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, according to a new report from the Environmental Working Group (EWG).

“Essentially, what we found is that of the $7.4 billion in payments to farmers that came from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, only a small portion went to climate-smart practices,” said Ann Schechinger, director of the Midwest for the EWG.

Schechinger said she hopes the report will spark more interest — either in Congress through the 2023 Farm Bill or among USDA officials — in reforming the agency’s conservation programs. Because the Inflation Reduction Act will soon direct more money to these programs, she said, “It’s especially important now to make sure that that money goes to these climate-smart practices rather than just business as usual.”

These findings come from the EWG’s Conservation Database, which collected 2017-2020 payment data for five of the USDA’s conservation programs. It replaces the organization’s previous conservation database, which collected data on about $40 billion in conservation funding from 1995 to 2015.

In an emailed statement, the USDA spokesperson did not specifically address the EWG findings, referring instead to “new tools” the agency has added to support adoption of climate-smart agriculture, such as the $2.8 billion earmarked for the New Climate Partnerships-Program Smart Goods and $8 million to support and expand soil carbon monitoring on working agricultural land. “Since day one, the Biden-Harris administration has taken bold steps to support the adoption of climate-smart agriculture and forestry through our existing voluntary conservation programs,” the spokesperson said.

“Climate smart” is a description the Norwegian Red Cross began using last year after the US Department of Agriculture evaluated its programs to see which programs could reduce carbon emissions and/or sequester carbon. Many climate-smart practices are either part of the NRCS’ Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP) or the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP).

The Inflation Reduction Act allocates an additional $8.45 billion for the EQIP program, $3.25 billion for the CSP program, $6.75 billion for the Regional Conservation Partnership Program, $1.4 billion for the Agricultural Conservation Mitigation Program, and $1 billion for technical assistance. Some Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee said they would not prioritize conservation mitigation programs over other programs.

Both EQIP and CSP push farmers to implement such practices on their land as growing cover crops or creating wildlife habitats. EWG analysis found that only about a quarter of EQIP or CSP funding in 2017-2020 went to climate-smart practices; It has also shown that some of the best funded practices are in fact exacerbating climate change.

For example, the fifth most-funded EQIP initiative, which paid $174.2 million to farmers, went to build waste storage facilities in concentrated animal feeding operations. Waste from thousands of animals in these facilities is transported to open lakes, accelerating the production of methane and nitrous oxide, both potent greenhouse gases.

EQIP has paid out more than $341 million for cover crops, which is a climate-smart practice. But other such practices have received only a small amount of funding. For example, the Norwegian Red Cross spent just $28,000 between 2017 and 2020 on circumferential buffer strips, which reduce soil erosion and nutrient run-off, and only set aside $2,000 to support grass windbreaks — rows of trees or shrubs between crop fields — that help Also in reducing soil erosion and nutrient runoff. Soil erosion.

Schechinger said it took a year of Freedom of Information Act requests and other actions to obtain data from the USDA and that the agency refused to provide data for EQIP and CSP practices that had five or fewer contracts funded in a county in a given year. This data gap makes it impossible to get a complete picture of spending, she said, but what’s missing only underscores the scarcity of funding and the low adoption rate of USDA’s climate-smart practices and improvements.

For example, she said, more than half of CSP contracts for climate-smart practices and enhancements — 63 of a total of 114 — were missing from county-wide data, meaning they were implemented on fewer than six properties in any county in a given year.

“Congress must reform these important conservation programs to make efforts to reduce agricultural emissions a top priority,” Schechinger said. “Until the USDA becomes more transparent, no one will be able to fully analyze how and where conservation spending flows into on-farm efforts that can help slow the climate catastrophe.”

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from San Jose News Bulletin https://sjnewsbulletin.com/report-usda-conservation-programs-need-to-focus-more-on-mitigating-climate-change/