Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is announcing today $1 billion in funding for a conservation pilot program called the Partnership for Climate Smart Commodities. The money will come from the Depression-era Commodity Credit Corporation, Ximena Bustillo reports for Politico's Weekly Agriculture. President Biden is following former President Trump's lead in using the CCC for policy purposes; Trump used it to compensate farmers for losses during the trade war with China. The CCC gets its money from Congress.
USDA is encouraging greener practices in agriculture since that sector accounts for about 10 percent of the nation's overall carbon-dioxide emissions. "The goal is to implement climate-friendly conservation practices on working farms and forests (such as no-till, cover crops, rotational grazing or reforestation) and then actually measure and verify the climate benefits of those practices," Bustillo reports. "Those could include sinking carbon into soils, capturing methane or releasing less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."
The funding will be released in two rounds; it's "designed to fit a wide range and variety of production and ideally will not favor one commodity, region or operation size over another," Bustillo reports. "Vilsack said USDA will seek periodic updates from the pilot projects to help inform department policy, as well as programs that could be more permanently established or changed through the 2023 Farm Bill."
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