Back Forty: What we’re looking at in 2023
Back Forty will bring you periodic reviews, interviews and reporter insights about the stories they wrote. We hope you enjoy it as a companion to our main content on TheFERN.org and our Ag Insider policy news site. You can subscribe to the newsletter below.
By Samuel Fromartz
We asked our Washington editor, staff writers, and Midwest climate reporting fellow what they’ll be keeping an eye on in the coming year. Here’s a look, by no means exhaustive, at what they’ll be writing about in 2023.
Washington editor Chuck Abbott:
My watch list for the new year begins and ends with the farm bill, probably the only legislation of import from the Senate and House Agriculture committees that is guaranteed to become law in 2023. The slog toward passage begins with an unofficial listening session at the Pennsylvania Farm Show on Saturday, Jan. 7, called by Rep. Glenn Thompson, the incoming House Agriculture chairman.
Flash points for the farm bill are predictable – food stamps, climate change, and crop subsidies — even if the resolutions are not. Portions of the current farm law begin to expire on Sept. 30 of this year. All sides want to enact a farm bill on time, but an extension of the 2018 law is possible if arguments fester. The 2014 and 2018 farm bills were slowed by Republican attempts to slash SNAP benefits.
Thompson, from northwestern Pennsylvania, has accused the Biden administration of acting as “a lone wolf” in pursuing the Climate Smart Commodities program and told an Iowa Farm Show audience last summer that he wanted to “make sure the farm bill doesn’t become the climate bill.”
Staff writer Bridget Huber:
Since I’m just back from the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, I have biodiversity on the brain! I am looking forward to digging into the intersection of biodiversity and agriculture, and how national and local policies can be shifted to stop funding the destruction of nature and to incentivize farmers to adopt more sustainable practices. I’ll be looking at what the U.S. is and isn’t doing to protect the species and ecosystems within its own borders and how all of this is affected by global warming.
Next year should also bring an overhaul of nutrition standards for school meals, and I’ll be following that process carefully. School food is the biggest component in USDA’s child nutrition programs, which were last updated in 2010. The tension, as always, will be between making sure that meals are healthy and aligned with national dietary guidelines while also ensuring that schools — which are suffering from high food costs, labor shortages and, oftentimes, outdated and insufficient equipment — can both prepare those foods and get kids to eat them.
Staff writer Teresa Cotsirilos:
In 2023, the western U.S. will have to make increasingly difficult decisions about how to manage its water supply, a limited resource that it has spectacularly mismanaged for well more than a hundred years. As a historic, climate-fueled drought grinds into its fourth year (the recent rains notwithstanding), it’s becoming increasingly clear that the region’s water usage is unsustainable. In California, the agricultural sector will be forced to make hard choices about which crops to save and which to fallow, decisions that could rattle rural economies and increase food prices nationwide.
Agricultural communities in Arizona and Nevada will have it even worse. The Colorado River provides drinking water for roughly 40 million people and supplies irrigation water for 5.5 million acres of land. In 2023, experts predict that the river could also devolve into a “complete doomsday scenario” after being sapped by drought and a century of overuse. If the seven states that rely on the Colorado River are unable to cut their own diversions, the federal government says it will do it for them.
At risk of sounding Pollyanna-ish, I think these potentially devastating developments are also an opportunity. It’s a chance for the West to reform and regulate its agricultural industry, which is the largest consumer of fresh water in many western states and produces a high percentage of the U.S. food supply. The drought is forcing some local leaders to reevaluate their long-held assumptions and start thinking radically. As a journalist, I’m delighted to be covering that process.
Midwest climate reporting fellow Nancy Averett:
In 2023, I’ll be keeping an eye on the contentious battles to build Midwestern pipelines to ferry carbon from the smokestacks of ethanol plants to underground sequestration sites. Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s plan to fight climate change. With millions to be made from new federal incentives for CCS, oil company executives and agribusiness moguls quickly zeroed in on the Corn Belt’s ubiquitous ethanol factories, which produce a relatively easy-to-capture stream of CO2. While some corn growers have embraced the pipelines, others fear they will ruin farmland and threaten public safety.
I’ll also be tracking other ways that subsidies and incentives for carbon sequestration, some via private markets, affect farmers; proposed limits on how and when farmers fertilize their fields; the development of new biofuel crops; and the draining of the Ogallala aquifer. Agriculture in the U.S. generates about 11 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions: as FERN’s Midwest Climate Fellow, I’ll be looking at how farmers and ranchers might rise to the challenge of shrinking that impact.