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Iowa farmer: House Farm Bill misses the mark on conservation funding
Bill would increase funding for conservation, but lacks climate-oriented IRA funding
May. 24, 2024 6:38 pm
Severe drought last year “burned up” much of the 800 acres of corn and soybeans Pete Youngblut, his father and brother had planted.
“We had all but one farm that was the worst crop we've ever taken off,” the 38-year-old Dysart farmer said.
And heavy rains in recent weeks, including over the last few days, have flooded recently planted fields and paused crop planting in others, impacting crop yields and farming costs.
Youngblut said farmers and ranchers across the country are facing serious challenges, from plummeting profits to high costs to increasingly extreme weather.
He’s among a group of farmers across the country pressuring Congress as part of a national campaign to protect funds in the next Farm Bill for practices that help farmers become more resilient in the face of floods, droughts, windstorms and wildfires.
The House Agriculture Committee early Friday approved a Republican-led farm bill that offers a sharp increase in funding for conservation, but would eliminate the programs’ focus on farming practices that reduce emissions tied to the warming and erratic climate.
The last farm bill, enacted in 2018, expired last year, but Congress extended it until Sept. 30.
House Republicans five-year, $1.5 trillion Farm, Food and National Security Act includes a $14 billion boost to conservation programs, but would take that money from unspent funds tied to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and remove the climate law’s requirement that the conservation be targeted at greenhouse gas reductions.
Republicans said that change would allow a wider array of conservation work, and that the money coming from the Inflation Reduction Act would be added to the farm bill’s budget baseline, meaning lawmakers writing subsequent farm bills could count on the money being available for conservation.
Democrats, conservation and environmental groups say while the House bill includes a sharp increase in conservation funding, removal of the climate guardrails associated with that funding could stymie efforts to address both the damage of climate change and farmers’ opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“These conservation programs are wildly popular. They're oversubscribed,” said Joe Hack, national spokesperson for Invest in Our Lands.
“They've been in place for a long time, and they've proven to be quite effective and helpful, first of all, for farmers profitability and their ability to continue to thrive economically in challenging environments,” he said. “But, also they're good environmental policies. And there's no better stewards of the land than our farmers and ranchers, whose livelihoods of course depend on it.”
The concern, Hack said, is that without the Inflation Reduction Act climate designation, “these programs will lose out on that funding because it could be used for other competing priorities” within the farm bill.
The ag-focused group has recruited farmers and ranchers across the country, like Youngblut, to join the campaign to urge lawmakers to protect the billions in climate-related conservation funding included in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature climate and health care law.
Youngblut and Hack said that investment needs to remain dedicated to its original purpose: supporting proven, effective and popular practices that help American farmers build resilience.
‘Can totally change everything if we lose these funds’
Youngblut and his father have utilized multiple Environmental Quality Incentives Program contracts to plant cereal rye as a cover crop, leading to substantial savings on fuel and labor.
“Going into this year, we’ll be cover cropping everything,” he said.
The family for years has practiced no-till tillage and has since transitioned to a precision tillage practice where only the band of soil in which the seed will be planted is cultivated.
“When you're trying to do conservation practices. It's not cheap. And this stuff takes real money,” Youngblut said. “Those moneys are helping us purchase the technology, purchase the equipment and perform the practices to do not only a better job and take care of the environment, but conserve on our side where we can save some money on fertilizers” and other costs.
Youngblut said that increased funding for conservation programs must be accompanied by legislation that supports climate-focused conservation tools.
“When you've got high land rents, high cost of seed, high cost of fertilizer, high cost of chemicals, the amount that the farmer makes is minimal,” he said. “So any help that we can get to be able to do this stuff is a win.”
Youngblut added nearly every farmer he knows “is trying to be involved in these programs, sees the benefits of them and is trying to utilize them.
“That can totally change everything if we lose these funds.”
Creating incentives for soil health improvements through cover crops have been shown to reduce crop losses in drought years and reduce instances of prevented planting, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Such practices also can lower the cost of the taxpayer-funded crop insurance program over time if enough farmers adopt the practice. While use of the practice has increased over the past decade, cover crop adoption is less than 5 percent across the nation.
Offering farmers who plant cover crops savings on their crop insurance bills will offset their costs and make it easier for farmers to adopt the practice, according to the NRDC.
Senate Democrats released their own framework for a bill earlier this month with climate change provisions.
Bill would expand access to precision agriculture
House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson, a Republican from Pennsylvania, and Iowa’s Republican U.S. House members said the legislation would go a long way toward protecting farmers from weather-related disasters and falling commodity prices, by strengthening subsidized crop insurance and boosting payment rates in crop programs.
Thompson said nothing in the bill limits climate-smart practices, if states want to make them a priority for the USDA funds they receive.
The bill also incorporates precision agriculture, based on provisions from legislation introduced by Iowa Republican U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson.
The measure adds technologies that use web-based global positioning data and other information to help farmers with targeted fertilizer application, water conservation and irrigation efficiency to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), helping farmers decrease environmental inputs while increasing output.
The voluntary conservation program offers farmers and ranchers financial cost-share and technical assistance to implement conservation practices.
Hinson, speaking to reporters Friday, said the Biden administration has “gone too far” in its climate push, issuing rules that “make it too hard for farmers to get rewarded for the practices that they do.”
“We want to make sure farmers can continue to be the best environmentalists that they are,” she said. “We know that programs for conservation are overutilized. And we have funded them to the best of our abilities through this farm bill package.”
The House Farm Bill also adds the planning, adoption and acquisition of precision agriculture practices and technologies as eligible for Conservation Stewardship Program payments.
It adds a $100 million grant initiative to CSP to improve soil health, authorizes a matching grant program for states and eligible Indian Tribes to improve soil health and increases the CSP minimum payment to $2,500.
Farmer: Focus on beneficial practices, not emission reductions
Jason Russell, of Monticello, farms 700 acres in northern Linn and Jones counties, where he grows corn, soybeans and cereal rye and raises hogs and cattle.
He has used Environmental Quality Incentives Program funds to plant cover crops, and has CSP contracts to conduct nitrate testing and comprehensive nutrient management planning, significantly reducing his fertilizer costs. One of his hog sites is powered entirely by renewable solar and wind energy.
Russell emphasized the importance of prioritizing soil health and water quality in agricultural conservation in a new farm Bill.
He highlighted the benefits of practices like no-till farming, cover crops and nutrient management, but acknowledged the limitations of current conservation efforts and the need for more scientific evidence on the effectiveness of such practices.
The greenhouse gas benefits of conservation practices may not be scientifically proven, and some practices may actually hurt yields, Russell told The Gazette.
“There's just really no good template that is going to show us what we should spend our money on the greenhouse gas front,” he said. “Now, with that being said, should we keep doing these practices? Yes, I think we should,” to incentivize and promote soil health and help farmers contain costs.
“Do we need to have conservation funding to study these things and broad-acre implementation? Yes. We do,” Russell said.
“But to say that greenhouse gases are the sole purpose of these conservation efforts? No. You got to look at the water, the soil erosion, nutrient retention — all that has the big benefits here. Because we know that those things are real. We can measure those things.” he said.
“So any money being spent on that, I think you should have proven scientific evidence of what is actually happening on the farm and not what’s perceived.”
Comments: (319) 398-8499; tom.barton@thegazette.com
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