Biden's climate-smart ag program was better than nothing. Trump killed it.

Yahoo

3 days ago

The "Eating the Earth' column explores the connections between the food we eat and the climate we live in.
Farms are a huge climate problem, so it was great that the Biden administration made a huge commitment to 'climate-smart agriculture.' But some details of its first $3 billion initiative to make agriculture climate-smarter were not so great.
The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, launched by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in early 2022, provided generous grants to America's least cash-strapped agribusinesses, including Archer Daniels Midland, JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and PepsiCo, as well as America's most influential farm groups, representing corn, soybeans, cotton, pork, and dairy. A few of its 135 projects actually looked climate-harmful, financing emissions-boosting pseudo-solutions like biofuels, manure digesters, and grass-fed beef.
Far too many grants went to scientifically controversial efforts to sequester carbon in farm soils through trendy 'regenerative' practices like planting cover crops and reducing tillage, and not enough flowed to simpler, evidence-backed strategies to reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions. And the Biden USDA's well-intentioned efforts to make sure a large portion of the grants went to smaller farms, specialty crops, sympathetic nonprofits, and traditionally underserved communities often seemed to take precedence over reducing emissions.
I wrote a skeptical column about then-President Joe Biden's climate-smart approach back in 2022, so I had mixed feelings when the Trump administration cancelled the climate-smart commodities program this April. It was clearly a flawed program. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had a point when she mocked it as slow and bureaucratic. While her primary complaint that it didn't send enough money directly to farmers wasn't my primary complaint — USDA sends plenty of money directly to farmers! — even some Trump-hating advocates of sustainable farming agreed with her critique of its 'sky-high administration fees.'
But no one truly believes the program's cancellation had much to do with flaws in its design or execution. Its fatal flaw, from the Trump perspective, was obviously its climate-smart premise; Rollins slagged it as 'largely built to advance the green new scam,' in violation of 'Trump administration priorities.' Those priorities are not a secret: This administration doesn't believe agriculture policy should have anything to do with the climate, which is why it scrubbed the word 'climate' from USDA's website. It doesn't care that agriculture generates one-fourth of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Nobody who's concerned about the planet should be happy that an imperfect agricultural program was cancelled for the sin of trying to reduce agricultural emissions. As University of Iowa economist Silvia Secchi, one of the program's harshest critics, puts it, 'Regardless of my opinion of these grants, it makes no sense to kill them before we learn anything.' The Environmental Working Group published an analysis last year attacking Biden's climate-smart approach, but vastly prefers it to Trump's screw-the-climate approach. 'Even if we didn't love where all the money was going, it was better than just giving farmers subsidies,' says the group's Midwest director, Anne Schechinger.
When President Donald Trump commits egregious transgressions — deporting a Venezuelan hairdresser to El Salvador or investigating the mayor of Chicago for bragging about his diverse staff — pundits often try to look balanced by criticizing the suboptimal behaviors he uses as excuses: Biden neglected the border; DEI went too far. There's a reluctance to simply say: This is egregious.
Well, I spent the last six years reporting a book on how to feed the world without frying it, and I'll say this: Trump's belief that we shouldn't even try is egregious. Biden and his team deserve credit for making climate-smart a priority. Trump's USDA agreed to keep funding some of the climate-smart grants after farm groups protested their cancellation, but it's not calling them climate-smart anymore, and it won't pursue climate-smart investments in the future. It's defiantly climate-dumb.
But I've also pointed out that it's boring to harp on the badness of a climate-denial administration doing climate-denial things. And there are lessons we can learn from the politics and substance of the climate-smart partnerships — about mistakes that shouldn't be repeated, and at least one remarkable success story that should be expanded worldwide.
In my book, I tell the tale of a big internal Biden administration fight over climate-smart agriculture that never made it into the public eye.
On one side was then-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who wanted to pay farmers to adopt regenerative practices — like keeping soils covered and minimizing soil disturbance — that he believed would sequester carbon in their soils and help reverse climate change. He loved the idea of fifth-generation Republican dirt farmers who wore John Deere hats and drove Ford F-150s embracing kinder and gentler approaches to their land that would help them earn a premium for sustainably grown commodities and sell soil-carbon credits as an extra crop.
On the other side was White House climate aide David Hayes, who thought soil carbon was wildly overhyped — by the United Nations, environmentalists, foundations who seemed to cough up cash whenever they heard the word 'regenerative,' celebrity-studded documentaries like 'Kiss the Ground,' and even Big Ag and Big Food conglomerates eager to claim climate benefits for regenerative practices in their supply chains. Hayes pushed for at least half the climate-smart grants to go to less scientifically controversial efforts to reduce methane and nitrous oxide, which make up more than half of direct farm emissions.
Hayes was right about the science. It's extraordinarily difficult to measure soil carbon accurately or ensure it remains underground. It's also extraordinarily difficult to build more soil carbon without adding more nitrogen in the form of fertilizer or manure, which have negative climate impacts of their own. Indigo Ag, a carbon-market leader that announced a plan in 2019 to help regenerative farmers sequester a trillion tons of soil carbon, has gotten less than one one-millionth of the way to that goal. Regenerative agriculture also tends to produce less food per acre, which means it requires more acres to produce the same amount of food, which means it accelerates the global march of farmland into carbon-rich forests and wetlands.
'There's just too much excitement about soil carbon,' Hayes told me.
But Vilsack won on the politics. Most of the climate-smart grants promoted regenerative practices designed to move atmospheric carbon underground and help build new markets where farmers could sell soil-carbon credits — and the same was true for another $20 billion steered toward climate-smart agriculture by Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. Cover crops and no-till were by far the best-funded practices, even though there's at best mixed evidence that they can sequester much carbon. Biden even dropped a prime-time plug for cover crops into his first address to Congress.
If USDA's soil-carbon obsession started the program on the wrong track, it strayed even further from its climate-smart mission by insisting that 40% of its grants go to underserved communities, and by promoting regenerative hemp, regenerative sorghum, and dozens of other alternatives to big row-crop commodities. Some of the resulting projects were just weird. One $20 million regenerative grant was divided among small farmers in New York, minority farmers in North Carolina, wine growers in California, and a nonprofit called Nature for Justice, as well as traditional big corn and soy producers in the Midwest and the giant agribusiness Corteva. It was hard to see a coherent strategy behind the grant, beyond spreading money across the country and checking all the Biden team's priority boxes. In any case, the Trump team has cancelled it, along with dozens of other grants that explicitly prioritized equity and diversity.
Hayes did pressure USDA to make a serious commitment to verifying actual soil-carbon results, and to his credit, Vilsack agreed, creating a $300 million monitoring fund and steering a variety of grants toward data collection and measurement. Vilsack was excited to document the climate benefits underground, while Hayes suspected the department would learn that soil carbon was mostly a mirage; either way, it would gather valuable information.
But the Trump administration is cancelling those data-focused grants, too, part of its push to scrap grants that proposed to send less than 65% of their cash directly to farmers, or had not yet sent any cash to farmers. The measurement grants generally sent more cash to scientists, universities, and companies like Indigo.
The Trump team also axed most of the grants focused on large numbers of small farms growing unconventional crops, because they required much more administration. For example, the Pennsylvania group Pasa Sustainable Agriculture lost a $59 million grant because it planned to buy supplies like cover crops and tree seedlings in bulk for 2,000 farms as small as a quarter-acre rather than giving the cash to the farmers and making them buy supplies themselves. The association's director, Hannah Smith-Brubaker, says it was finally ready to ramp up in the field after spending just $2 million of its grant over the first two years, mostly on administration and preparation — and now it won't be spending anything.
'This was supposed to be an experiment,' Smith-Brubaker says. 'We'd spend five years tackling these problems on different types of farms with different practices, and we'd start to get some comprehensive answers about what works. It's such a shame that we won't.'
Robert Bonnie, Vilsack's deputy who oversaw the grants, says there was a political strategy behind the grant program: By offering farmers carrots rather than sticks, and helping them develop markets for climate-smart commodities regardless of their personal climate views, USDA could build lasting support for evidence-based innovations in farm country. But he says he underestimated the Trump team's enthusiasm for policy vandalism, for trashing anything it could fit into its culture war against anything Biden-related or climate-related.
'It turns out there are no rules, and nothing matters,' Bonnie told me.
Again, it's not the Biden team's fault that the Trump team hates the climate. But just as many climate hawks now wish the Inflation Reduction Act's clean-energy provisions had focused more on getting green stuff built quickly, and less on requiring union labor, American-made components, and other conditions unrelated to the climate, it's tempting to wonder what the climate-smart grants could have achieved before Trump ransacked them if they had focused on delivering quick emissions-reducing results.
Actually, we don't have to wonder, because a single grant amounting to just 0.25% of the $3 billion climate-smart commodities program did exactly that.
Four years ago, when a 23-year-old finance whiz named Tyler Hull was working for a farmland asset manager in Nashville, Tennessee, he spun off a subsidiary called AgriCapture to exploit the fledgling carbon markets that were starting to reward businesses for reducing emissions. Soil carbon was all the rage, and Hull figured that if he could persuade his firm's tenant cotton and corn farmers to plant cover crops, stop tilling, and adopt other regenerative practices that would sequester carbon underground, they could sell carbon credits and the company's land would get healthier.
But once he dug into the science and mechanics of soil carbon capture, Hull concluded it was mostly bogus. He calculated that farmers could at best sequester one-fifth of a ton of carbon underground per acre, so they would earn less selling credits than they would spend on seeds for cover crops — and since tilling the soil in the future would release the sequestered carbon, the carbon-credit agreements would prohibit any tillage on the land for decades.
'It just didn't work,' Hull recalls. 'We had to pivot.'
Hull soon stumbled across an emissions-reduction opportunity that wasn't bogus at all: reducing methane from rice fields through better water management. Methane-producing microbes that thrive in flooded rice fields are responsible for 10% of the world's agricultural emissions, but reducing the duration of flooding through practices like 'alternative wetting and drying' and 'furrow irrigation' can cut those emissions in half — the equivalent of up to two tons per acre, with no drag on yield and no restrictions on future land management.
AgriCapture received a $7.5 million climate-smart grant in 2022, and it was the only project to start sending money to farmers that first year. It used remote sensing to document 30,000 tons of methane reductions on 25,000 acres, then sold the credits to an international bank. It also saved 9 billion gallons of fresh water without any loss of yield. This year, it's enrolling 150,000 acres, about 5% of U.S. rice production. The Trump administration is allowing the project to continue because it's already used most of its grant, and Hull says it will be able to keep expanding without additional federal subsidies.
If rice farmers worldwide all adopted these practices, they could eliminate enough emissions to offset half the aviation industry.
'This can become the new normal,' Hull says. 'It's practical and profitable, and even if you don't care about global warming, it's saving water and creating a new export market for American farmers: carbon credits you can trust.'
Regenerative agriculture is sexy and popular, with support from Al Gore, Joe Rogan, Rosario Dawson, the Indian mystic Sadhguru, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but its ability to move a lot of carbon from sky to soil remains speculative at best. By contrast, AgriCapture's effort to reduce methane by reducing flooding on rice fields is simple, effective, and potentially lucrative.
There are also proven strategies to reduce methane from cow burps with feed additives, reduce nitrous oxide emissions by using fertilizer more efficiently, and store carbon above ground by planting trees and shrubs in pastures and fields — with climate benefits that are relatively easy to measure and monetize. The Biden team could have made an international splash by bringing those strategies to scale, if it hadn't been so excited about its soil-carbon experiment.
Now that experiment is over, and that's Trump's fault.
But in the future, if policymakers who do care about climate progress want to make climate action more popular with the public, they might want to focus on actions they know will help the climate. And if those actions can create measurable environmental benefits that farmers can get paid for, they might even be popular in farm country.