America\u2019s farms don\u2019t just run on corn and cattle. They also run on cash from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Every year, the USDA spends billions of dollars to keep farmers in business. It hands out money to balance fluctuations in crop prices; it provides loans for farmers who want to buy livestock or seeds; and it pays growers who lose crops to drought, floods, and other extreme weather. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The agency is also now giving money \u2014 including $20 billion that Congress earmarked two years ago in the Inflation Reduction Act \u2014 to farmers trying to curb their greenhouse gas emissions and store carbon in soil, a key part of the Biden administration\u2019s goal to cut the 10 percent of the country\u2019s emissions generated by agriculture. That windfall of climate-smart farm funding has been widely lauded by climate activists and researchers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But exactly how the USDA spends that money is more complicated \u2014 and contentious \u2014 than it might appear, and not simply because Republicans in Congress<\/a> have threatened to siphon the funds away. A new report from the Environmental Working Group says that more than a dozen of the farming practices that the USDA recently designated as \u201cclimate-smart\u201d\u2014 including several of the highest-funded ones \u2014 don\u2019t actually have proven climate benefits. That finding is especially important, according to the group, because the USDA is likely to spend more money on the same practices in the years to come: Much of the $20 billion authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act has yet to reach farmers\u2019 pockets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Supporting farming techniques with uncertain benefits \u201cundermines potentially real reductions in emissions,\u201d said Anne Schechinger, author of the report and midwest director at the Environmental Working Group, an environmental research and advocacy organization. \u201cIf these unproven practices stay on the list, then a lot of money will go to these practices that likely aren\u2019t going to reduce emissions.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n A USDA spokesperson said the agency uses a rigorous, scientific process to determine what it considers climate smart. Still, the agency acknowledges that not everything on its list necessarily has quantifiable benefits. New additions to the list are provisional \u2014 that is, they\u2019re added \u201cunder the premise that they may provide benefits<\/a>\u201d and will be removed later on if those benefits can\u2019t be quantified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Schechinger analyzed spending by the USDA\u2019s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, called EQIP for short, the agency\u2019s biggest<\/a> conservation program. She found that between 2017 and 2022 the program directed around $2 billion to techniques that were added provisionally to its climate-smart list for this fiscal year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt looks like a lot of money is going to climate-smart practices between 2017 and 2022 when, really, very little of the total EQIP money has actually gone to practices with proven climate benefits,\u201d said Schechinger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In particular, the group called into question eight of 15 methods that the Biden administration added provisionally, such as installing a waste facility cover or an irrigation pipeline. One of them \u2014 \u201cwaste storage facility<\/a>,\u201d a structure that holds manure and other agricultural waste \u2014 may even increase emissions, according to the report. The USDA spent about $250 million on them between 2017 and 2022. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The department specifies on its list that only a specific kind of waste storage facility, one that composts manure, counts as climate-smart. These composting structures can reduce methane<\/span> emissions<\/a> and improve water quality, the agency says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cUnfortunately, EWG did not take into account the rigorous, science-based methodology used by USDA to determine eligible practices, nor the level of specificity required during the implementation process to ensure the practices\u2019 climate-smart benefits are being maximized,\u201d said Allan Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the USDA, in an emailed statement. \u201cAs a result, the findings of this report are fundamentally flawed, speculative, and rest on incorrect assumptions around USDA\u2019s selection of climate-smart practices.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Schechinger acknowledged that the USDA doesn\u2019t define all<\/em> waste storage facilities as climate-smart, but she said that the funding data she was able to obtain through a records request didn\u2019t distinguish between specific facility types and that it \u201cremains to be seen\u201d whether the Inflation Reduction Act money will go only to the kind that composts manure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some researchers have argued<\/a> that more studies need to be done on most \u201cclimate-smart\u201d practices \u2014 even ones, such as planting cover crops<\/a>, that the Environmental Working Group doesn\u2019t question in its report \u2014 before anyone can say how much climate pollution they\u2019re curbing or carbon they\u2019re sequestering. \u201cFor most climate-smart management practices we do not yet have the data and information we need to understand when and where they are most likely to succeed,\u201d said Kim Novick, an environmental scientist at Indiana University. <\/p>\n\n\n\n