Why Agriculture and the Climate Bill don't Mix

It seems everyone is in a tizzy over agriculture and the climate change bill. Environmentalists are mad about concessions given to farm-state legislators to get the bill—known as "Waxman-Markey," after its two principal sponsors—through the House last July. The industrial farm lobby is mad about the climate bill generally, worried it will raise energy costs. And farmers are unsure how, if at all, they will benefit from the offset credits they could receive, and what they would need to do to get them.

It is high time we took steps as a nation to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Tackling climate change is perhaps one of the most important and difficult challenges we have faced as a society; but including agriculture in the Waxman-Markey bill is bad for farmers, eaters and the planet.

For the bulk of human history, we’ve grown food, fiber and energy without reconfiguring the atmosphere, but the industrial revolution made the bulk of agriculture highly dependent on fossil fuels. Today in the U.S., agriculture accounts for about 13 percent of our nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions, and it also contributes heavily to soil erosion, water contamination and the loss of biodiversity—but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Waxman-Markey has recognized agriculture’s enormous potential to not only mitigate the ills it has caused, but to also act as a carbon sink. This is the basis for the bill’s carbon offsets program for agriculture, where farmers would receive government credits for doing things like tilling their soil less and planting trees on cropland. Polluting industries and investors could buy these credits, in theory helping fund these on-farm carbon-sequestering activities.

This program is troubling for several reasons. Technically, carbon offset projects are notoriously difficult to measure and verify—making the incentive for change subject to the whims of a speculative market dominated by Wall Street banks. And making it awfully difficult to ensure that offsets will be a long-term, reliable solution to climate change. Falling carbon offset prices would be poor incentives for farmers to switch to climate-friendly agriculture practices. It is hard to envision this having much of a positive impact—for farmers or the planet.

Agriculture is among our greatest achievements and one of our most precious resources. It gives us season after season of food and fiber. Done right, it builds healthy soils, helps purify our drinking water, provides wildlife habitat, and yes, even helps mitigate climate change. With support, agriculture creates livelihoods for farmers, helps preserve the culture and knowledge of food production, and promotes an ethic of land stewardship and preservation. And let’s be clear, good farming has been the basis for a sustainable planet for centuries. Agriculture should in no way be given a free pass when it comes to climate change mitigation, but it is not the source of the climate change problem.

Making Waxman-Markey a primary vehicle for debating agricultural sustainability schemes distracts from making real progress toward more climate-friendly, sustainable agriculture, and takes away much needed resources.

We should not aim to define agriculture’s role in our society through a climate bill. Instead, we should begin a separate, equally urgent process to decide how best to promote agricultural systems that provide us with the kind of farms, rivers, livelihoods, and climate we value as a society. The USDA’s Conservation Stewardship Program, which pays farmers for sustainable practices on working, productive lands, provides one good place to start such conversations. Expanding such programs should be a clear priority for policymakers and the public, but ultimately, agriculture policy will have to reach much further, to a vision and scale that match the historic challenges we face.

Let’s push forward with strong climate policies, but let’s not use agriculture to circumvent the source of the problem. Our food system is too precious. We already know that agriculture can benefit us all; let’s find a way to make certain that it does.

Comments

[Jim Kielkopf]

Julie, I'm not sure I understand your point, but I'm pretty sure I don't agree with a lot of what you've said here. You seem to be arguing that agricultural concerns should be excluded from any "cap and trade" climate change legislation. But what is the counterfactual here? If agriculture is not included, then it is left subject to possible direct regulation by the EPA under the Clean Air Act, with lesser input from farmers or their advocates. Is that what you are advocating? If so, I think you should be explicit about why you think farmers, food consumers, and the natural environment would be better served by possible direct EPA regulation of agricultural GHG emissions instead of including some form of regulation under the auspices of the USDA under a new climate change law. (There might be good reasons, but you haven't stated them here.)

As written, the climate bill is not about agriculture. It contains some payoffs to agricultural interests through offsets and a role for the USDA but, except for a few shrill voices from some in the Big Ag lobby, most impact studies forecast only very small impacts on agricultural activities due to a new cap and trade policy, with or without agricultural offsets. This leaves sustainable agriculture largely unimpaired by Waxman-Markey to engage in other policy directions. So how does Waxman-Markey make the outlook for sustainable agriculture worse?

[Julia Olmstead]

Jim,
Thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking comment. I'll try to explain myself a little better.

To begin, I am certainly NOT advocating for EPA regulation of agriculture. I agree that agriculture should be addressed under a legislative approach and that USDA needs to remain the primary authority in regard to climate and agriculture. But I don't think that including agriculture as part of the Waxman-Markey offset scheme is the only or best way to ensure this outcome. As you say, Waxman-Markey is not about agriculture. It would only regulate part of what goes on in our fields, and it would do so very indirectly. The rewards -- climate-wise, environment-wise -- would be few to none, which, considering that agriculture makes up over 40% of land use in the US, is a real concern, considering how much good agricultural carbon sequestration practices could do to mitigate emissions. So a major concern of ours is the low level of involvement that farmers are being asked to play in meeting GHG reduction goals.

The risks from an inherently volatile carbon market are several. On the one hand, carbon prices could swing so low farmers have little incentive to make changes or to maintain practices. On the other, high prices could lead to quick decisions to move away from sustainable practices and toward dubious offsets like no-till. More important, however, is that the bill does nothing, and in fact may prove a distraction too or siphoning of policies and incentives that promote truly sustainable farming practices (rotational grazing; crop rotations and cover crops; organic production; small, intensively managed production -- smaller-scale approaches recommended by the World Bank's International Assessment of Agriculture Science and Technology for Development).

The Boxer-Kerry climate legislation that was introduced yesterday is adding an interesting twist to this discussion. Unlike Waxman-Markey, this new bill doesn't exempt agriculture from the overall GHG cap. That move, I think, should inspire us to begin talking about the difference between industrial agriculture and other kinds of farming, about what should be considered “point” and “non-point” pollution sources, and between emission sources we can regulate and those we cannot. Industrial agriculture, in such forms as factory animal farms, are among the biggest source of agriculturally-related GHG emissions, should be held accountable for reducing those emissions. It's not too hard to measure the amount of methane coming off a manure lagoon, for example, and then set reduction targets. That's much harder to do with many other kinds of farms, however, and in those cases I think we'd be much better off pushing for expanded ag policies that incentivize and support agricultural systems and practices for all farms that seek to not only reduce net agricultural GHGs, but also take into consideration the other environmental, social, and economic imbalances on our nation’s farms.