The Next Agricultural Revolution will be a Climate Revolution
But not if Republicans write the next Farm Bill
Joe Biden, Tom Vilsack, and Matt Russell at Coyote Run Farm
A simple idea that was amplified by an Iowa farmer during the months before the 2020 Iowa caucuses set the stage for the Biden/Harris administration to usher in the next agricultural revolution--climate-smart agriculture. The administration announced in February that it would invest $1 billion in farmers and ranchers across the nation. On September 14, they announced a $2.8 billion investment in the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, and other programs continue to roll out.
The idea is to pay farmers for environmental services. Every environmental and many social challenges we face relates in some way to how we use the land, and Biden’s plan for climate action incentivizes farmers, ranchers, and foresters to tackle these challenges head-on.
Global warming and ecological disasters. The rapid loss of species. Poor water quality. Declining soil health. Loss of habitat. Flooding in parts of the world and desertification in others. Wildfires. Threats to our food supply and overdependence on a few crops and animals. Income inequality and poverty. Dead zones in our oceans and environmental degradation causing social instability, ethnic tensions, population displacement, and war.
Incentivizing farmers, ranchers, and foresters is a giant first step toward addressing these challenges through practices that sequester carbon with myriad other environmental benefits.
The farmer who leveraged the idea is my friend, Matt Russell, who, with his husband Patrick Standley, owns Coyote Run Farm in rural Marion County, Iowa. The amplification was part of the Iowa caucuses and the media attention it drew. Because of this, Neil Hamilton, Emeritus Professor of Law at Drake University and former director of the Agricultural Law Center, believes Coyote Run Farm may be the nation's most important farm.
The wave of attention that came to Matt’s presentation of the idea began in 2019 when Democratic presidential candidate and now a candidate for the Governor of Texas, Beto O’Rourke came to visit the farm. Beto had read of the idea in a piece Matt and I published in the New York Times, “What Democrats Need to Know to Win in Rural America.” Beto included the idea in his platform, and it spread from there. Then presidential candidate and now Vice President Kamala Harris also came to the farm, and most importantly, during his bid for the Presidency, Joe Biden visited with now Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack in late November 2019.
As documented by Eric Lach in the New Yorker in “How an Iowa Farmer used the Campaign-Stop Economy to Push Climate Action on 2020 Democrats,” other candidates or their campaigns reached out to Matt, including Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Jay Inslee, Tom Steyer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Andrew Yang, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and Tim Ryan. Several candidates mentioned it during the televised presidential debates. National, international, and local media flooded the farm and helped elevate the message.
I was there as a member of the local media when O’Rourke, Harris, and Biden visited. Matt told the same story each time in front of the barn, Pdog wandering at his feet or plopped on haybales. He told them the barn was built in 1936. The farm family was betting that the future was bigger horses and stronger harnesses when the future was actually tractors, hybrid seeds, and petrochemicals of the Green Revolution.
Russell said that incredible public investments were made to advance this revolution, including helping the family navigate changes that eventually would make their barn obsolete. He then asked, on the brink of another agricultural revolution, who’s betting on more of the same for rural America and who’s investing in the future?
He said the future isn’t more of the same, only bigger--the future is instead to use smart government policies to empower farmers and others who use the land to do so to address climate change. That is, pay farmers, ranchers, and foresters for environmental services.
I didn’t watch Matt as he presented his ideas when Vilsack and Biden visited. I watched Vilsack. As Matt came to his closing remarks, Vilsack’s eyes widened slightly, and he nearly imperceptibly nodded.
I knew at that moment that Vilsack “got it.”
And now, the Biden administration is investing in rural America in a historic way to empower farmers, ranchers, and foresters to address the great challenges we face.
Some will say that it’s too costly. It’s not a cost at all. It’s an investment that will save trillions of dollars and countless lives.
Make no mistake; if Republicans gain control of Congress during the midterms and the presidency in 2024, this will go away. That, or the money will flow away from being put to good use by farmers, ranchers, and foresters, up the supply chain to large corporations.
Most importantly, if Republicans win the midterms, they will write the new Farm Bill, likely setting Climate-Smart Agriculture back at least five years. Republicans are already pitting climate against other farm and environmental programs.
“Congress must be mindful of this massive amount of funding before amending programs or making policy changes that reorient programs toward climate. No one natural resource concern should be prioritized over others,” California Republican Rep. Douglas LaMalfa recently said at a hearing in a panel of the House Agriculture Committee. LaMalfa is the top-ranking Republican on the Subcommittee on Conservation and Forestry.
LaMalfa doesn’t get it. It’s not one program over another. Investing in how farmers, ranchers, and foresters use the land will address soil health, water quality, habitat loss, and much, much more, including climate change. It’s a holistic approach.
There is too much at stake to give power to a party that for over a generation has either denied climate change is caused by humans or refused to take it seriously, a party that shows little interest in building and maintaining infrastructure, and a party that believes the government is the problem, not part of the solution.
Where’s Matt Russell now? He’s still a farmer, but now he’s in the Biden Administration as State Executive Director of the Farm Service Agency (FSA) in Iowa, where he and his FSA team under Biden and Vilsack’s leadership, are working to give our farmers, ranchers, and foresters the tools they need to address the global challenges that face humanity.
Pulitzer Prize winner Art Cullen of the Storm Lake Times Pilot is concerned that too much of this money is going to ADM, Cargill, Iowa Select, and other large agribusinesses. He says that this is too much like the fox running the henhouse. But Cullen says if the fox remains well fed, he’s less likely to eat the eggs, and maybe this will help keep these critical programs in the next farm bill.
I recently asked Art where the money should go. “The bulk needs to go to Matt Russell here, and to the other state FSA offices,” he said. “They should decide where to spend it.”
The FSA partners with farmers, ranchers, and foresters every day. Let’s put farmers, ranchers, foresters, and local FSA offices to work toward solving the world's problems.
With them, we have bottom-up solutions driven by people who work the land, not top-down “solutions” driven by agribusinesses who were primarily responsible for creating the problems in the first place.
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Those who think that paying farmers for environmental services is a form of socialism ought to consider that the current system of crop insurance and direct payments for conventional crops is just that. I am not a policy wonk and have no idea how this would work structurally, but it makes no sense to me that Iowa would need to important 80-90% of its food. The only reason the SYSCO truck is a cheaper source of food for schools and daycares is because that food has already been subsidized. There's a lot of potential education on a diversified farm in biology, chemistry, agronomy, and entrepreneurship. Every school in Iowa should have a few farms that they partner with for food and for curriculum. You know what would *not* make a high school student's eyes glaze over? Learning how to raise honeybees. Or pressing apple cider. It's great that some schools are managing their own gardens, but they'd be better off partnering with real experts on real farms.
Thanks for sharing this info, Bob.