President Joe Biden's administration poured $3 billion into greening agriculture. Some climate advocates aren't convinced it will help.
President Joe Biden’s administration poured $3 billion into greening agriculture. Some climate advocates aren’t convinced it will help.
Robert Bonnie, the Agriculture Department official who came up with the plan, acknowledges that it’s essentially a giant science experiment. But he insists it’s necessary to try to incentivize the industry to reduce its massive carbon footprint, which amounts to roughly 10 percent of the country’s emissions.
After the Obama administration ended and Donald Trump became president, Bonnie returned to Duke University, where he had earlier received a master’s degree, to study “conservation in rural America” — essentially how to get the agriculture industry to join the fight against climate change.making it harder to ignore global warming
Bonnie’s research with his colleagues at Duke led to a proposal to use the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation, an internal bank, to pay farmers and agribusinesses to test green agriculture production methods.The USDA received 1,050 proposals from farmers, agribusinesses and academic institutions seeking to be part of the conservation program — but could only support 141 projects with the current round of funding.
“I will remind you that farm groups, major farm groups, virtually every commodity group, wanted this program to be set up and basically outlined how it should be set up, which we followed to a ‘T,’” Vilsack pointed out. “They certainly are not going to deliver the climate targets that we need. Even within agriculture, they’re not going to be enough to offset carbon emissions by themselves. I think we’re going to need to do a lot more.”Researchers also have cast doubt on the climate impact of one of the types of projects drawing the most funding — carbon sequestration, which involves planting cover crops during the offseason to absorb more of the warming gasses in the air.
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