The government and private sector will have roles in maintaining the progress made by the pioneers of climate-smart agriculture, said a group of experts working through the AGree farm-policy initiative on Tuesday. They recommended lower crop insurance premiums for farmers who use practices that reduce agricultural risk, bank lending policies that recognize the benefits of conservation practices, expansion of USDA stewardship programs, and inclusion of “early innovators” in the supply chain sustainability programs of food and beverage companies.
“Early innovators are our leaders in conservation agriculture,” said the AGree Climate, Food and Agriculture Dialogue (CFAD) in a report. “As public and private investments in climate-smart agriculture increase, we risk excluding the very leaders who blazed the trail of expansion of climate-smart agriculture. Our goal should be to develop an agricultural system that encourages maintenance of existing climate-smart practices, continued innovation, and broader adoption of climate-smart practices.”
Many proposals for climate-smart programs would reward newcomers for their work to sequester carbon or reduce greenhouse gas emission without consideration of the mitigation work already in place, said the report. It acknowledged there is no agreement on who qualifies as an early innovator, how many of them there are or “the magnitude of the risk of losing their established conservation progress.”
“CFAD proposes that the most sustainable and influential way to maintain and expand climate-smart agricultural practices is to build the business case for conservation adoption,” said the report. “This can be done by embedding incentives for the adoption and maintenance of climate-smart agricultural practices throughout agricultural markets, finance systems, regulatory processes, and insurance programs.”
Among eight recommendations, it said that the federally subsidized crop insurance program should recognize the risk-reducing benefits of conservation practices; that farm lenders recognize the benefits of conservation practices when offering loan terms to producers; that USDA explore development of climate-smart commodity markets that reward early innovators through new market mechanisms. It also said that USDA should expand its soil and water conservation programs and make them “more outcomes-based” to reward producers for generating conservation benefits.
Last June, CFAD said funding for USDA’s working lands programs, now around $4 billion a year, should be increased to as much as $20 billion.