Many farmers and sustainable agriculture advocates across the country helped to pass the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) more than one year ago. Thanks to those efforts we now have an unprecedented level of resources farmers can use to mitigate and adapt to more extreme weather events. That level of investment is critically need at this time.
Nationally, three of every four applications for the Environmental Quality Improvement Program (EQIP) go unfunded each year. Analysis of those funding allocations reveals that two of the top ten EQIP practices funded by total dollar amount spent were related to covering and storing waste, practices that offer little in the way of conservation benefit and are part of an overall pattern of funding for industrial practices.¹
This year $1.5 Billion in new funding is available for EQIP projects across the country. This funding comes with “climate focused guardrails”. Additionally, new rules in the IRA waive a previous requirement that 50% of those funds had to be used for livestock operations. This change will allow more funding to reach non-industrial type projects that benefit small to mid-scale producers and provide real climate and community benefits.
The Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) is one of the best tools we have to address climate resiliency head on. Like many thing in life, there are no silver bullets when it comes to addressing problems as large as those we face with climate and what is most needed are systems level approaches. CSP is just the tool to do that by giving farmers the ability to earn payments for actively managing, maintaining and expanding conservation activities through multiple practices. $500 million in new climate specific funding will support CSP projects in the coming fiscal year helping to make up for a shortfall where, in 2022 more than 24,000 farmers and ranchers were turned away due to lack of funding.²
IRA investments in these two programs is especially critical given Congress’s inability to both pass a budget for the 2024 fiscal year and reauthorize the 2018 Farm Bill. The current partisan stalemate may limit current conservation funding to the IRA allocations described above without which, we would be facing an even larger backlog of funding requests from farmers and a greater deficit in addressing climate change.
Source: calclimateag.org
Photo Credit: pexels-pavel-bondarenko
Categories: Ohio, Sustainable Agriculture