In their new book, Farming for Our Future: The Science, Law and Policy of Climate Neutral Agriculture, Peter Lehner and Nathan Rosenberg write that agriculture needs to move beyond producing what are sometimes called the Four Fs: food, feed, fiber and fuel. Given the climate crisis, they argue, a fifth F must be added: a future. Lehner, who directs Earthjustice’s Sustainable Food & Farming Program, and Rosenberg, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, detail a number of ways that the vast constellation of policies that support U.S. agriculture can be reoriented toward mitigating climate change. But they also challenge some of our received ideas about who farmers are and what their role is in rural communities. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do we need to pay more attention to the role of agriculture in climate change?
Lehner: The standard figure given in the EPA greenhouse gas inventory is that agriculture contributes only 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. But when you take all the elements of agriculture, and look at them on policy-relevant timescales—20-year global warming potential rather than 100-year, which makes methane far more important—and then take into account the enormous land use impacts of agriculture, you see that agriculture is actually on a par with the transportation sector in terms of emissions. We simply won’t be able to achieve our climate change goals, let alone our environmental health, public health or justice goals, without reforming our agriculture system.
You do some myth-busting about who America’s farmers actually are. We have this image of the struggling family farmer, but you write that farmers have a great deal more wealth than the average American. Why is it important to counter these outdated narratives?
Rosenberg: The Census of Agriculture includes a lot of properties and people who don’t necessarily consider themselves farmers. They may do it as a hobby; they don’t sell or produce any agricultural products. But those data are used to present a misleading picture of farming and farmers. This obscures the fact that there is a relatively small number of well-financed and large operations that are doing most of the polluting in agriculture. And even if we just regulated the worst actors, we’d have an incredibly important impact on agricultural emissions.
You write that farm policy should meet the needs of a broader array of people, who you call “new constituencies.” Who are they?
Rosenberg: We focus on three constituencies: rural residents, non-white farmers and farmworkers. These groups don’t get much of a say in farm policy, and this has had drastic consequences. Farmworkers in most states don’t even have basic labor rights. And while agricultural pollution affects all of us, rural residents get the brunt of it. Non-white families have been almost completely shut out of the wealth-producing aspects of agriculture, which has had important consequences, both for their political power and for racial inequality. Excluding these communities from the conversation and conflating the farm economy with the rural economy, or the interests of farmers with rural interests, obscures these voices and helps perpetuate systems that don’t benefit society broadly.
Another theme is the need to rethink agricultural productivity, in part by leveraging public funds to push farmers to mitigate climate change.
Lehner: The food we produce has created a public health epidemic of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease. Our food system is creating more public health harm than smoking. While at one point we could say that farming should focus on productivity, on producing calories, that’s just not the case anymore. Now what society needs from its land, air, water and soil is healthy food and climate stability. The land is a great asset. The people who manage it can potentially be great stewards and produce what society really needs. We heavily subsidize the production of corn and soy and other commodity crops. But we don’t actually need so much soy and corn; we need a stable climate. And that’s what we should be subsidizing.
There are so many programs that support farming—crop insurance, extension, research, conservation payments—how can they be reoriented to support climate-neutral agriculture, especially with the next Farm Bill reauthorization coming up?
Rosenberg: There is much that can be done, both by Congress and by the Biden administration through executive action, right now. In addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, we want to use agriculture as a way to store carbon. Soil health is incredibly important, and should be a public policy priority. But increasing biomass through perennial agriculture and systems like agroforestry will also be critical. That is something that we can start encouraging through more and better direction of research funding.
Lehner: When I was starting to work on clean energy in the 1980s and 90s, it was very expensive and it wasn’t clear how we were going to move toward renewable energy. In contrast, today we have farmers, all around the country, on different crops at different scales, using very productive practices that are storing more carbon in the soil and in biomass and are reducing greenhouse gas emissions and producing healthier food. So, the question is much more how to scale up and improve what we know, as opposed to having to almost invent it from whole cloth.
We already have lots of programs that are spending billions of dollars every year that can be better targeted—we don’t have to find new money. For example, we’re paying farmers for conservation programs, many of which, the NRCS itself has found, are counterproductive. Let’s spend that conservation money better. Our crop insurance program encourages risky behavior and climate-unfriendly practices. It can be fixed, either administratively or legislatively.
You also write about false solutions, where money and policy should not be flowing. Can you talk more about carbon offsets and biogas and why these aren’t strategies to pursue?
Lehner: The idea behind offsets is that farmers can increase the amount of carbon stored in their plants and soil and then sell a carbon credit to a fossil fuel polluter who wants to avoid reducing their emissions. There’s both a technical fallacy and a policy fallacy in this. The technical fallacy is that it’s really hard to measure soil carbon in any way that it is administratively feasible and that will allow small farmers and farmers that have been traditionally excluded from farm programs to participate. And it’s often impermanent—even if you change farming practices to store soil carbon, you’ll release a lot of soil carbon as soon as you reverse those practices. There’s also the policy problem: If farmers are changing practices to reduce greenhouse gases and increase soil carbon, we should encourage it, but it would be a profound societal problem if that then allows the fossil fuel polluter to keep polluting.
And biogas?
Rosenberg: Agricultural biogas is presented as a solution to a very real problem—facilities that use wet manure management have incredibly high emissions. The promise of biogas is that we can cover these manure lagoons that are emitting greenhouse gases and burn the gas for fuel, which, as it is presented, would mitigate emissions. But there are several problems with this narrative. One is that the data that industry shares generally don’t include leakage rates. And there’s been an increasing amount of research that demonstrates that leakage is generally higher than previously believed and cancels out any kind of positive climate effects.
Another problem is that the analyses that show strong climate benefits from biodigestion don’t take into account alternative systems. They just compare the worst possible management system—an open manure lagoon—to covering that lagoon and creating biogas. But other systems, like dry manure management and grazing, have much lower emissions than these biodigester facilities. And while biodigesters reduce pollution compared to lagoons, they still pollute. No one wants to live next to a CAFO, whether or not it has a biodigester. They’re often placed adjacent to poor communities, and there’s been a large number of spills and accidents that make living near these facilities intolerable and cause direct health problems. So the industry often portrays it as kind of this win-win, where we’re making the living conditions of the people in the community better while reducing emissions and giving farmers another avenue of financial support. But, in fact, no one really wins from it.
Any final thoughts?
Rosenberg: The last major change in agricultural policy was during the New Deal, and since then we’ve kind of been keeping our policy together with these kludgy changes and just kind of working from the same frame that we’ve had for almost 90 years. And it doesn’t work. It’s going to have to change dramatically in response to climate change and other environmental problems, to our public health problems, and the fact that it’s negatively affecting rural communities. And one of the things that I’ve been really encouraged by in the last few years is how many policymakers seem to understand that we need dramatic changes. [Rep. Chellie] Pingree, [Sen. Cory] Booker — they’re just examples of policymakers who are putting out really ambitious proposals. And I don’t necessarily expect those proposals to be passed this year. But it’s only a matter of time until agricultural policy gets another major transformation. And I’m optimistic that it’ll look more like their vision than the industrial vision that others might be putting forward.