S3 Ep018 Regenerative Agriculture, Agroforestry, Climate & 2023 Farm Bill: with climate activist Pamela Tate, Pt1
Pamela Tate is an advocate for regenerative agriculture and agroforestry and climate activist with leadership roles in organizations including The Climate Reality Project and American Forests. She walks us through policy proposals for climate smart practices in agriculture, so that we can help advocate for good nutrition, conservation, and climate resilience. She explains:
Why we all should be concerned about good Farm Bill policy,
What global soil degradation means for the world’s food supply,
How the key principles of regenerative agriculture and agroforestry work towards weather resilience and environmental health for the planet,
The Regenerative Agriculture Coalition’s key policy recommendations to improve nutrition, climate change, and food security outcomes through the 2023 U.S. Farm Bill.
How To Get Involved:
1. Find Your Elected Official:
https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm?OrderBy=state
2. Review the Climate Reality Project Chicago Metro Chapter slideshow presentation, “The 2023 U.S. Farm Bill, the Food System, & Soil: A Call to Action” available at Kinderpublic’s YouTube Channel How To: Advocate for Regenerative Agriculture, Agroforestry, & Climate in the 2023 US Farm Bill
3. Call your elected official:
Talking Points for People Calling Legislators on the Farm Bill
My name is XXXX and I represent 30 chapters of the Climate Reality Project’s Coalition on Regenerative Agriculture.
We have been researching climate-smart practices for farmers to improve their profits, help with biodiversity, mitigate severe climate events, and sequester carbon from the atmosphere.
We know that regenerative agriculture and agroforestry are our last best chance to halt climate change. And with the increasing rate of global warming and severe weather events, support for these conservation practices needs to be in THIS farm bill. It will be too late to address it 5 or 6 years from now.
From this, we created two policy documents for the 2023 Farm Bill–one on Regenerative Agriculture and one on Agroforestry in particular. Both are aimed at shifting incentives and funding to more climate-smart practices. I sent these to you on XXXX, and am wondering if you have had a chance to review them.
If no, move to the six recommendations to highlight them.
If yes, thank you for reviewing them and I’d like to take a few minutes to talk through the high points of our policy recommendations. Please let me know how much you already know about Regenerative Agriculture and Agroforestry in particular.
Let’s review these six recommendations at a high level.
As you know, these conservation and climate-smart programs have been historically seriously underfunded. In a given year, between 39% and 69% of applications to support a transition to regenerative and organic farming are denied due to lack of funding. [This is especially difficult for small and mid-sized farmers.]
This is why our first recommendation is to increase funding and incentives for climate-smart approaches such as cover cropping, alley cropping, rotating crops, no or low amount of tilling, and using trees as windbreaks.
It is also important to ensure that conservation programs and incentives do not support Greenhouse Gas-producing practices like controlled animal feeding operations (CAFOs).
I’d like to emphasize that we need to ensure that all Conservation funding is mandatory, just as commodity crop funding is. Protecting conservation funding from the cuts during the annual budget appropriations process is critically important.
The second recommendation is to expand crop insurance to farmers who move to conservation and climate-smart practices. Currently, farmers have to choose between getting discounted crop insurance and getting financial support through conservation funding. This makes no sense!! Crop insurance should be incentivizing farmers to move to these practices, rather than prohibiting them.
Our third recommendation is to provide the necessary resources to the Natural Resource Conservation Service to increase personnel and provide them with training in soil health practices. There is simply not enough training or resources or staff to support the number of farmers who need assistance to learn about these practices and implement them. As we know, making this shift requires longer timeframes and new equipment to allow these practices to be adopted and to produce results; and unfortunately, the NRCS does not have the personnel or the training to help with such a transition.
Our fourth recommendation is to increase resources for federally funded research. In spite of how profitable regenerative and organic practices are, and how much better they are for the environment, less than 2% of public funding for agricultural research focuses on the outcomes and benefits of these practices.
One important aspect of this research issue is the need to increase climate-specific agriculture research and to add climate resilience to the purposes of various grant programs.
The fifth recommendation is to expand processing and storage facilities in regional sites. Currently, the USDA facilities are set up to serve industrial farming. The number of USDA processing and storage facilities, for example, declined from 10,000 in 1967 to 850 in 2021, significantly adversely affecting services and availability for small farmers. Farmers report the need for regional services and mobile units for all farming processes, such as seed cleaning, composting and animal inspection.
One particularly problematic provision is using conservation funds to subsidize Controlled Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), which are major producers of methane and are highly polluting. This subsidy should be eliminated.
The last recommendation is to provide incentives that will support the growth of agroforestry practices. Agroforestry research has proven that these practices improve water quality and retention and flood management and provide nature corridors that result in more healthy ecosystems. In turn, agroforestry decreases severe weather events, increases soil health and nutritional value of food, and sequesters carbon.
Expand incentives & funding for implementation of agroforestry practices, including alley cropping, riparian buffers, silvopasture, windbreaks, forest farming & forest-related easements
Expand Agroforestry Financing, Safety Net, and Risk-Management Options as the implementation process can be risky and takes time
Fund Agroforestry Education/Information Dissemination, Research, and Technical Assistance
Promote Reforestation/Afforestation/Proforestation Projects; Promote Carbon Sequestration
We need to benefit wildlife and climate resilience by adding wildlife conservation and habitat connectivity to the ranking criteria for the Wetlands Reserve Easements (WRE) program.
It is also critically important to restore mandatory funding for the Healthy Forest Reserve Program (HFRP). This will help to ensure that a predictable amount of funds are available each year, since we need this funding if we want a long-term commitment to carbon sequestration and ecosystem stability.
We really appreciate your willingness to discuss shifting the Farm Bill incentives and programs to focus more on practices that improve our soil, the nutrition in our food and allow for greater sustainability and biodiversity.
If there is any other information we can provide, please be in touch and we will respond right away to your request.
Bio:
Prior to July 1, 2018, Pamela Tate served for 28 years as President and CEO of The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), a national, non-profit educational organization committed to expanding lifelong opportunities for adults and advancing experiential learning and its assessment. Throughout CAEL’s history, Tate led the organization's growth and involvement in public policy, innovative workforce education services for employers and adult learners, and systemic change efforts throughout higher education and the private sector.
Since 2018-2019, Tate has devoted her life to addressing the climate crisis. She was trained by Al Gore and the Climate Reality Project in 2019, and since then has conducted numerous presentations to community groups, and corporate and higher education audiences. As a Certified Climate Reality Leader and Chair of Campaigns for the Chicago Metro Chapter of The Climate Reality Project, Tate works on regenerative agriculture practices, tree conservation and preservation, electrification of public transit and private vehicles, and federal and state policy change to de-celerate global warming.
She is a member of the Board of Directors of American Forests, where she serves as Chair of the External Affairs Committee; she is on the Leadership Council of the African Wildlife Foundation, and she is a member of the Oak Park Climate Action Network in her Village, where she is making recommendations on climate action to the Village President and Board of Trustees. She is also on the Executive Committee of the Guide Dog Foundation’s Board of Trustees, and President of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies Advisory Committee for DePaul University.
Throughout her professional career, Tate has been known for helping colleges and universities to develop Prior Learning Assessment programs and improve the quality of their services for working learners. Tate has worked with hundreds of employers on tuition assistance policy, implementation of career development practices for employees, and exemplary practices in employee learning and development—with a focus on upskilling the front-line workforce.
She led CAEL in raising millions of dollars in foundation and government funding for the development of projects that unite business, government, labor and postsecondary education to address workforce skill shortages - resulting in industry-sponsored degree and certificate programs on-line, industry-wide and statewide career pathways projects, and regional lifelong learning and talent development initiatives. Under her leadership, CAEL helped tens of thousands of employed adult learners throughout the country through career counseling services, CAEL’s on-line portfolio assessment service, and its facilitation of on-line degree and certificate programs sponsored by industry sectors such as telecommunications and utilities.
As a presenter, she is regularly sought out for her vision and insights into adult learning and workforce development and their vital relationship to the future of the economy. Among her hundreds of presentations throughout her career, she focused primarily on workforce education, adult learning and public policy—and has in the past five years shifted her presentations to focus on the climate crisis.
In 1996, Tate was acknowledged for a career devoted to expanding lifelong educational opportunities for adults with the Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa, conferred by SUNY Empire State College in Saratoga Springs, New York. She also received honorary doctorate degrees in humane letters from DePaul University’s School for New Learning in 2005 and from Thomas Edison State College in 2007. In 2011, she received the degree of Doctor of Public Service honoris causa from St. Leo University. In 2013, Tate was awarded the President’s Medal from Excelsior College in recognition of her continued dedication to expanding opportunities for adult learners. In 2018, Tate was inducted into the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame, and received CAEL’s first-ever Pamela Tate Rise Award, which is given annually to a person “who has risen to the challenge of bridging higher education and the workplace, enriching the lives of adult learners and strengthening our nation’s workforce”.
Tate was born in Davenport, Iowa, and grew up in East Moline, Illinois. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana with master’s degrees in both English and Journalism. She completed her doctoral course work at the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania.
“The Farm Bill- to a lot of us- might seem not very relevant. It's just relevant to farmers. But the truth is, it is literally a program that impacts more Americans than any other government program, and it's not just about farmers and ranchers, it's about our food, our water, the air we breathe, it's about the wildlife, it's really about also the future of the planet. And so this is an enormous opportunity for us and we don't want to miss it.” -
Pamela Tate
Transcript
Season 3, Episode 18, Pt 1: Regenerative Agriculture, Agroforestry, Climate & 2023 Farm Bill: with climate activist Pamela Tate
Pamela Tate, climate activist:
The Farm Bill- to a lot of us- might seem not very relevant. It's just relevant to farmers. But the truth is, it is literally a program that impacts more Americans than any other government program, and it's not just about farmers and ranchers, it's about our food, our water, the air we breathe, it's about the wildlife, it's really about also the future of the planet. And so this is an enormous opportunity for us and we don't want to miss it.
[Rhythmic sounds of electric train pulling into station]
[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]
Cevan Castle, Host:
Welcome to Season 3 of Towards a Kinder Public, a podcast dedicated to designing kinder public space that better meets our interconnected needs. I’m Cevan Castle, and along with Annie Chen, we are Kinderpublic.
This is the first episode of a special two-part “civic how-to” conversation with climate activist Pamela Tate. We’ve broken the conversation into two parts on the podcast, but you can find the full presentation as a video on our new Youtube channel, where we are @kinderpublic, or find it linked from our website, kinderpublic.com. In the video presentation, you will find vibrant visuals of the methods and policies we discuss. If you are listening via the podcast, we are so glad you are here, and will describe the information so that you can follow along.
We are really fortunate to have Pamela here to walk us through the regenerative agriculture and agroforestry recommendations for one of the most important pieces of legislation on climate for the foreseeable future, which is the 2023 Farm Bill.
Pamela is the Chair of Campaigns for the Chicago Metro Chapter of The Climate Reality Project, and a member of the Board of Directors of American Forests, where she serves as the Chair of the External Affairs Committee, as well as many other leadership roles in organizations serving climate, education, and disability missions.
Over the past few episodes of Towards a Kinder Public, we have talked about organic and regenerative agriculture, such as our conversation with Don Viecelli, a climate activist in numerous leadership roles and the incredible organizer who works with Pamela to develop the policy paper and civic information we are reviewing today, as well as Elizabeth Henderson, a trailblazing New York organic farmer and leader in community conscious agricultural systems.
Today, we build on that information by reviewing the specific recommendations we can share with our congresspersons, to make meaningful improvements to our access to nutritious food and to our climate resilience, as well as better support our farmers who are employing conservation and climate smart methods.
This review is detailed, to help us all feel confident to advocate for regenerative agriculture and agroforestry methods.
Next week, in part 2, Pamela will take us step-by-step through the method that she uses to reach out to her congressperson and request a meeting to share information. It’s really an informative and encouraging talk, especially if you are just beginning to get more involved in this type of advocacy work.
Please listen to these episodes and help us by reaching out to your elected representatives. The time to update our agricultural and food system legislation is NOW.
So I hope you join us again next week for the step-by-step civic how-to! But if you’re ready to get to work, you can find the entire presentation on Youtube right now!
As always, thank you for listening! We appreciate you so much. I hope you enjoy this conversation.
[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]
Cevan Castle, opening interview:
Pamela Tate, thank you so much for joining me this morning, I really appreciate your time, and I’m looking forward to discussing this civic how-to information with you!
Pamela Tate:
It's great to be here and I appreciate the invitation, because we really want to get people working on advocating for the Farm Bill.
So, I'll just begin, I will go over a few of the pieces of information about regenerative agriculture and agroforestry, just so that we're all on the same page, but I think the thing that I want to emphasize the most is that the Farm Bill- to a lot of us- might seem not very relevant. It's just relevant to farmers. But the truth is, it is literally a program that impacts more Americans than any other government program, and it's not just about farmers and ranchers, it's about our food, our water, the air we breathe, it's about the wildlife, it's really about also the future of the planet. And so this is an enormous opportunity for us and we don't want to miss it.
Then just briefly, I'm going to cover the soil depletion and its relationship to climate change very quickly, how these practices that we're talking about can help, what they actually are, and then what can we change using the Farm Bill. And how do we advocate conservation in the Farm Bill- what are the ways that we go about that.
[showing slide of global map of soil degradation]
Now, I just want you to see this picture, because I don't know about you but this is very disturbing to me, because the dark blue areas- and they're really cobalt blue areas- are the areas worst affected by soil erosion. And that's what we need to know going in, is that global soil health is definitely in decline. Degradation of farmland soil. It causes crops to be less productive, and because there's more global warming and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that even makes crops more unproductive. So the thing that we've got to do is reverse these practices that are degrading our soils. And one thing I wanted to mention, you may or may not know, is that about 3.2 billion people across the planet are suffering from degraded soils. That is almost half of the world's population. So everybody knows it, but we're not necessarily taking steps fast enough to do something about it.
Cevan Castle:
Well, this is interesting. Could I actually ask a question about that point- I think it's still a very common misconception that changing our agricultural systems will cause less nutrition rather than better and improved access to nutrition, because there's an impression that industrial farming actually increases the access to healthy food. Is that true?
Pamela Tate:
Uh no, that is a misconception. The conventional agricultural methods produce more food, but the food that they produce is less nutritious, and every time you add chemical fertilizers or any other chemical inputs, including pesticides, in the soil, you kill a lot of the natural microorganisms that are in the soil. And you end up having a nutritional problem with what you're growing. And one example that I read in the research- I've read many research reports- but one of them said that we would have to eat eight oranges today to get the same nutritional value as our grandparents did eating one, because of how they're grown. So it's like there's more of them, but we're still not getting what we need. So I think that misconception is a huge problem.
Cevan Castle:
Thank you.
[showing slide of IPCC data on agricultural methods and climate change impacts]
Pamela Tate:
I just wanted to mention the international governmental committee on policy change, you know they are pointing out that on the climate side, we were on nutrition but on the climate side of the house, agriculture and the food system are key to global climate change.
[showing slide of 6 principles of regenerative agriculture]
How we do agriculture could make an enormous difference in what we are able to pull down out of the atmosphere in the way of CO2, so I just want to briefly review with you the principles of regenerative agriculture. And these are the ones that I think you've covered before, so I won't do as much in detail on them, but a really important one that was new to me is make sure that you have the least disturbance of the soil that you can.
And remember there's a big difference between soil and dirt, because once all the nutrients are out of the soil, they just become dry dirt. And that's why you have dust storms, and we had the Dust Bowl in the 30s, because there wasn't anything left in the soil to hold it together. So the thing that's exciting I think, is that you don't disturb the soil, you don't till the land and expose the soil, you just drop seeds in the ground. And you don't use chemical fertilizers and pesticides, you also don't let the fields be barren in the winter, you use little cover crops that will cover the ground all winter long, because then, you're protecting the soil by doing that.
In other words, keep it in the ground and cover it up. You know, it's pretty clear. And then you also should of course do composting, and make sure that the organic matter that you're composting goes back to enrich the soil.
Then, we really believe strongly that if you're going to produce animals, and there's a lot of controversy about animals, but if you're going to grow and breed animals, then you've got to stop putting them in these controlled animal feeding operations, and put them into grazing areas, in forested areas, because if they if their waste is in that kind of an area it just enriches the soil, whereas when it's in a dry feed lot with nowhere to go it just ends up causing methane emissions.
Cevan Castle:
It's a pollutant.
Pamela Tate:
Yeah, it's a huge pollutant. But it doesn't have to be, if it's done as a part of a regenerative integrated farm.
And then, you know, I just would say, building biodiversity generally is really good for the soil. Meaning, maybe incorporate perennials- perennial grasses, trees, shrubs- what they do is keep the roots in the ground, and that's where you want them. Because the more roots you have in the ground, the more water control you have, and the less prone the farm is to flooding. And just keep in mind, the way that these crops vary based on where you live. Like, you wouldn't plant the same row crops or the same kind of trees if you're in Arizona versus if you're in the state of Illinois, but there are people that can help you with that.
[showing slide of comparison of no-till vs till fields]
So those are the things that I think will make a real difference, and this is just a picture of each of them. That's what a no-tilling looks like on the left. See all that grass and stuff in the middle cover crop, and whereas in the winter to the right, that's what things look like.
Cevan Castle:
So, just to describe this for people who may not have access to the visuals at this moment, on the left side of the screen we're looking at a picture where we have brown, dry looking grass strips interspersed with green vibrant looking crop strips, where the brown cover crop- which has finished its life cycle- is now protecting and covering the soil.
And on the right side, we have a picture of a till agricultural setup, where the entire soil surface is completely exposed to the sun, deeply grooved, and available to be blown away by the wind.
Pamela Tate:
Right.
[showing slide of pictures of flowers and bee, farm worker]
This is just- no need to probably explain this one. I've already talked about the biological and crop diversity part, but I just thought that was a great picture of a bee on a flower!
What you want to do is you want to promote pollinators, and by doing diverse plantings, you do. You increase your biological and crop diversity.
[showing slide of comparison of field with no cover crop vs field with soil under cover crop]
Now there's another picture here you could explain that if you'd like but it's it's what a cover crop looks like in the off season. In other words, when we're not in the growing season. And on the left, you've got this very brown bare soil and it's easily blown away. We lose tons of topsoil per acre every year. On the right- I don't know what that cover crop is- but it's the same kind of land, it's covered like this all winter.
Cevan Castle:
And like you mentioned, there are people that can help you determine what the appropriate cover crop is for what you're trying to achieve.
Pamela Tate:
And what's available where you live…
Cevan Castle:
Exactly.
Pamela Tate:
…and what's native.
[showing slide of animals in dry exposed soil feed lot vs animals on green grass pasture]
This might be one of the last two comparisons. If you cause your animals to graze or be in a very confined area, you will see land barren like this. If, on the other hand, you do planned grazing where you literally move them from paddock to paddock over the growing season, and they are grazing in different areas, you allow time for the for the soil to regenerate and for it to use their waste in an effective way. So it's very important to graze one section at a time, one part of the pasture at a time, and then let the remainder of the pasture rest.
I remember hearing one farmer say that to me, “I just let it rest,” which is a nice concept, you know! We all need rest.
Cevan Castle:
That’s right.
[showing slide of picture of small plane pouring chemicals over monocrop vs picture of a multicrop, regenerative farm with woodlands behind]
Pamela Tate:
So then, this is really important. On the left side, you see a plane dropping huge amounts of pesticides, and on the right, you see no chemicals, a greener area that has lots of grass and lots of trees in the woods behind. It's just a whole lot more healthy, for not only the animals, but us, you know. We don't want the pesticides in our food, and many of them do end up in our food. So that would be another thing.
And that's one of the reasons that farmers are more profitable when they use regenerative approaches. It's because they're not paying for all the fertilizers and the pesticides. So they may produce fewer crops because they're diversifying them, but they're more profitable. That's often another misconception, that regenerative farming doesn't make money. It actually does, and a lot of farmers will tell us that.
[showing slide of comparison between farm land that has been cleared of trees vs a mixed use regenerative farm with crops and trees and livestock grazing underneath]
And then just briefly here, we also wrote a paper, and when we're talking to congressmen we discuss with them the practices of agroforestry. And that's not talked about as much. For some reason, and I really don't know why, it hasn't gotten the attention that farming itself has gotten. Because what you can do, if you plant trees in various ways- which I'll just mention briefly- if you do that, you can stabilize your soil and you can pull down more carbon, so you can also increase nutritional value in the food. Tree roots are wonderful stabilizers and kind of safeguards against flooding and drought.
So the picture here that we're seeing is animals grazing under trees. So the the idea is to farm with trees, not to cut the trees down so that you can farm.
Cevan Castle:
This is actually the more original farming system for this continent, and it's been- like you said- it's been removed from our awareness. David Gissen, in his recent book, The Architecture of Disability, discusses how the representation and imagery around agriculture has favored the European method of clearing the land, whereas we see in some naturalist paintings and documentation, that early on, agroforestry was absolutely the way that Indigenous people maximized the amount of food that they were getting out of the land, but in a healthy, respectful way.
Pamela Tate:
Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, you know, I guess I wasn't as aware of the benefits of agroforestry until we started doing this research, but now I really see how the tree root systems improve the aggregation of the soil and organic matter. They have a way of pulling it in and retaining it. And when we've seen pictures of farmlands one next to the other, where one is totally flooded, and the other isn't, it's always when the one that's in good shape is one with diversified crops and trees. So, you know, we've got a lot of proof that this works, we just need to get the word out.
[showing slide of alley cropping, an agroforestry method]
I'm showing some pictures that people may or may not be able to see just of what we mean when we say agroforestry. We might mean something like this, alley cropping. That is where you plant a single or multiple rows of trees in parallel to the crops, you break up, every so often you put in a row of trees.
[showing slide of wind breaks, an agroforestry method]
Then there's wind breaks. This is where the trees are- I have big fields on the screen and then the trees are in a row, and they're called also shelter belts- they're the planting of trees as barriers to protect a specific area downwind, and they help reduce wind erosion. So those are also really important.
[showing slide of riparian buffer, an agroforestry method]
And then there's the third kind, these riparian buffers. And what they are is, you plant those at the edge of bodies of water, and what that does is, it buffers the water bodies from potential negative impacts so cropland or pasture, because it reduces soil erosion by having them at the edge instead of having them just wash into the rivers and end up in dead zones in the ocean. So, that is another method that can be followed based on where you live.
[showing slide of silvopasture, agroforestry method]
And then we've already looked at this, it's what's called silvopasture, which is grazing your animals in the forest. You know, that's a much more attractive picture than a controlled animal feeding operation. We just see a bunch of cattle grazing in the middle of a bunch of trees. <laugh>
Cevan Castle:
Right! Those must be healthier, happier animals, too.
Pamela Tate:
They are. They are.
[showing slide of forest farming, an agroforestry method]
And then the last one, just quickly, is forest farming, and that's where you can cultivate shade tolerant specialty crops, that means like, let's see, medicinal herbs, mushrooms, things like that. It can help protect forests, and keep from causing flooding, and helps with drought as well.
So, these are all ways to add more value to your land but also help the climate, because the more of these things you have, the more CO2 is going to be sequestered.
Okay, so now that we've just done our little, you know, kind of 101 on regenerative agriculture and agroforestry, I want to focus on the Farm Bill itself. Because as I said before, it's the most important bill, in that it affects every person in the country, and it's coming up this year. Every five or six years that comes up for reauthorization. And one of the reasons that it is so critical, is that it has a conservation title in it. There are eight titles, and the conservation title is absolutely central to moving to regenerative practices, and that's what got me interested in it, in fact, a couple years back.
So I want to share with you, in a moment, the policy recommendations that we have made for regenerative agriculture and agroforestry. Then we'll do a little bit of information and resources at the end.
[showing slide of the US Farm Bill’s key areas of spending and dollar amounts]
But look at the size of it. The U.S Farm Bill is 1.3 trillion dollars.
Cevan Castle:
Wow.
Pamela Tate:
I mean, it's huge. One of the titles goes for nutrition, what used to be called food stamps, but it's now called the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). But after you take that out, that 84 percent out, then what you have left is 79.7 billion dollars in the crop insurance title, we're going to look at that quickly, you've got 59.2 billion in this all-important title conservation, and you've got 56.1 billion in commodity subsidies.
So you know, those are the three that we have we focused on.
And I also want everybody to remember when they talk to their legislator, that, this year, this is unusual, but this year the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed a year ago, it provides an additional 10 billion for climate smart agricultural practices. Now, it isn't in the Farm Bill, but it's almost like an add-on to the Farm Bill. We want to make sure that Congress does not take away that 10 billion and put it into something else. We want to make sure we save that 10 billion for climate smart practices, because those are exactly the practices we've been talking about.
So, I'm just going to review for you the recommendations that we zeroed in on. Now there could be, there are more, there are many more that would improve it. But I just felt that it was important for us to drill down to the big six that we thought could make the most difference.
[showing slide of regenerative agriculture recommendation #1]
And the first one is to upgrade and enhance programs, incentives, and funding that will help scale up our regenerative agriculture practices, and further, that would make reducing greenhouse gas emissions a priority for the spending. Because right now, it's not listed as a priority in the spending. To me, that is really critical.
Cevan Castle:
Right!
Pamela Tate:
And there are lots of specifics under that that I could talk to you about. Right now, though, for example, between 39 and 69 percent of the applications for moving to a conservation approach are denied due to lack of funding.
Cevan Castle:
Wow.
Pamela Tate:
So even though all these farmers want to do this, many want to do this, it's just not easy to get anything approved. There's just not enough money there. So we could really use that additional 10 billion dollars from the IRA.
The other thing is that, often the conservation title passes as part of the law, but then it's subject to the annual appropriations process, so it's an easy area to cut. It has been in the past. So we are trying to make sure that it becomes a mandatory program that is not subject to annual appropriations reductions. To me, that's a critical one.
[showing slide of regenerative agriculture recommendation #2]
Then we have one recommendation related to the crop insurance title. And why are we focused on crop insurance, you might wonder. But what I want to share with you, which I was surprised to learn, is that if you decide as a conservation-minded person that you want to transition your farm to the approaches I'm talking about, it will take two to three years to make that transition, and with trees, it might take a few more because they have to grow. Well, if you go that way, then you lose your crop insurance discount because the crop insurance premium discounts are geared to large commodity crops, conventional agriculture, it's all related to what the yield is per acre rather than what the soil is doing. And so, essentially, you kind of have to choose between conservation and insurance. I mean, that's what it feels like to me. And that's a huge disincentive for farmers, you know, what they need is the opposite, they need an incentive to move into conservation.
So just to be clear, the conservation title, if you go into that part and you want to get funded from one of the many programs there, you have to diversify your crops. You have to include a non-commodity cover crop, or you know, you would lose your support through the conservation title program. So this is a serious problem, and I don't think it's talked about enough. You could, for example, you could reward farmers who use good soil health with a higher premium subsidy amount or an adjusted insurance premium rate. There are a number of ways that legislators could make this change, and we do recommend some of them in our document.
[showing slide of regenerative agriculture recommendation #3]
So, the third thing that we are talking about with every congressman’s staff that we can reach is we've got to do something about the resources that are given to the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). I talked with several of them myself, with agents, because I don't own a farm and I don't know about this. So I tried to get to know them. And to a person, they said, we don't have the staff or the technical expertise to help farmers implement regenerative practices. We know about them, but unless a farmer comes to us and specifically says that they need this help, we don't really go out there because we don't have the manpower to do it.
And they told us that they thought that they needed training. They needed, you know, new curriculum, and so in our policies we have suggested things like a certification curriculum for all the technical service providers in the NRCS. This could be done I think without a huge amount of expense. I mean- it would cost- but it's doable.
And then we suggest ways for farmers themselves to go through soil health education and training, and that would raise awareness and get this to happen more quickly.
So, we've got just three others.
[showing slide of regenerative agriculture recommendation #4]
We noticed that two percent- less than two percent- of public funds are going to support research in this area. It seems so strange to me, because the practices have been proven to be more profitable, and better for nutrition, and for animals, and for pollinators, and for carbon sequestration, and yet two percent (less than two percent) of the money for research goes into regenerative ag. And all the research that is funded, is for promotion of inputs like chemicals into farming.
A lot of the research at universities is funded by the agro-chemical industry, and so of course they have an interest in these areas, and they have the money. So, we need our public dollars to be going into research in the conservation area.
[showing slide of regenerative agriculture recommendation #5]
And then this one, this fifth recommendation, is a little less obvious, so I’m going to spend just a bit of time on it.
We're suggesting that the Farm Bill incentivize the investment in infrastructure that would support a decentralized and diverse food system.
And to give you an idea of why this is needed, farmers told us they need regional services, the kind of subsidies that are currently only going to the largest industrial farms. For example, seed cleaning facilities, storage for crops, places to have crops inspected, all of the USDA programs for looking at what farmers are producing. Right now, they are down to I think- let me see if I have the number- yeah, there's only 850 of them now, across the whole country. Whereas in the late 60s, there were 10,000 of them.
So it makes it really difficult for a small or regional farmer to even get an appointment, to even get to them, so this really puts them at a disadvantage. So what we're trying to do is, to say, let's use some of the dollars, maybe from the IRA, to introduce some mobile units, some regional services, and the kinds of subsidies that currently are going to only the largest conventional farming facilities.
And let's incentivize doing it the way we're suggesting.
And maybe, even, remove some of the subsidies from controlled animal feeding operations. Because <laugh> I read this amount and at first I thought it couldn't be true, but it is, if you subsidized a controlled animal feeding operation, and then you have to, of course, then add a digester to digest the methane, those digesters are four million dollars each.
Cevan Castle:
Wow!
Pamela Tate:
And so why is the government purchasing methane digesters, which we wouldn't need if we weren't farming that way? <laugh> I don't know about you, but that really….
Cevan Castle:
Yes… no, that actually was a big topic in one of our recent podcast episodes with a New York organic farmer, who was talking about the unreliability of that system, the environmental damage, the loss of the natural fertilizer for pasture, and then the use of the methane product to feed into natural gas pipelines.
Pamela Tate:
Right. Right. Thank you for saying that because I was going to mention that at the end.
Yes, it's just used to produce more fossil fuel energy.
So I just don't understand why we would need to subsidize these controlled animal feeding operations, and then subsidize the purchases of methane digesters. If you- just think- if you took that four million dollars for each one of them, and you instead put it into regional and local and mobile services, what a difference it could make.
[showing slide of regenerative agriculture recommendation #6]
So the last one is on our agroforestry topic that I brought up earlier. We’ve come to believe from all the research that we need to do the same thing here, we need to expand the incentives and the funding to implement these practices. We've got to help farmers understand that you don't cut down trees to do farming, you farm with your trees and you manage them, and they will help your soil.
We're losing 5.4 tons of topsoil per acre, per year right now. That's a lot. That's a lot of topsoil, and we don't want another dust bowl, and that's where we're headed. So we need to stop that from happening.
[showing slide of agroforestry recommendation #1]
I'm not going to go through the agroforestry policy requests in any detail, because you've already gone through what the agroforestry practices are, but remember that right now there's very few incentives and there's very little funding, so obviously those things need to be changed.
And then we need to do the same thing here that we are what we were arguing for in the regenerative agriculture area, we need to fund education, information dissemination, research. We need to fund the technical assistance providers.
We put in our little slide here the titles we're talking about- Title Five, Title 11.
[showing slide of agroforestry recommendation #2]
Title 11 is the crop insurance title. So this has the same issue as regenerative agriculture in general, you know, it isn't getting… it isn't allowing farmers to make good choices. So that is the second one.
[showing slide of agroforestry recommendation #3]
And then we also go really in depth about number three, which is to really expand protections for existing natural forests.
And not just on public land, but on private land as well. I'm hoping that we can get some incentives to build public-private partnerships, or get private landowners to conserve these forests, because we need them for sequestration of carbon, but also for wildlife, protection of habitat. So we're hoping that the Farm Bill could expand these protections, and in doing so, increase the health of the soil.
So the research in every single area is just needed right now, and training, and technical assistance. I know that's always the solution talked about, but the truth is, it's the best one, you know. Everybody needs it.
[showing slide of agroforestry recommendation #4]
So last, we looked at the forestry title- title eight- and I thought that this was really an important statistic to share with you: that the U.S National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, which was issued by the EPA in April of last year, it states that U.S forests sequestered an offset of approximately 13 percent of the gross greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. And if we planted many additional trees and forests, we could make a huge difference in pulling down more carbon from the atmosphere. and we're talking about including money for native plant surveys, native seed banks, native plant nurseries, everything that will build this supply chain for trees, seed banks.
We’re short of seeds right now, and nurseries are trying to get more of them. I am on the Board of Directors of American Forests, so I know quite a bit about the seed bank issue. And if there were more federal funding to support this, it would make a huge difference to people in terms of how likely they'd be to make the change
So we, having seen all this, said to ourselves, well the big agricultural and chemical interests are lobbying, so we better do the same thing, you know. <laughing>
Cevan Castle:
Right!
[Sounds of frogs calling from a marsh on a rainy summer evening]
Cevan:
Be sure to check out our website for links and resources from Pamela for this episode, the talking points that Pamela mentioned in our conversation, and some graphics that we found to share with you that explain the way the Farm Bill is organized. As always, a full transcript of the conversation is available on the podcast section of our website, kinderpublic.com, as well as a captioned video on Youtube.
If you have enjoyed an episode of Towards a Kinder Public, we would love your help in sharing the episode with others. Please leave us a rating and a review, it helps us make our topics more visible, and we really appreciate your support.
You can find us on instagram, facebook, twitter, and youtube! We are @kinderpublic.
I’m Cevan Castle, my guest has been Pamela Tate, Chair of Campaigns of the Climate Reality Project Chicago Metro Chapter. Have a very good week!
[Frog sounds continue and then fade out]
Organizations Mentioned in this Episode:
Climate Reality Project Chicago Metro Chapter Regenerative Agriculture
Environmentally Harmful Farming Methods Mentioned in this Episode:
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)