Climate-Smart Ag Money Tied Up With Farm Bill

Jon Doggett spent more than three decades working for several agricultural trade groups on policy issues important to U.S. farmers and ranchers.  When looking at the development of climate-smart agriculture, he thought the U.S. agriculture would be ahead of its current development pace.

“I think we could be a lot further along. I look back at my career and working on climate change issues in Washington, D.C. for farmers and ranchers, and I was the lead lobbyist on climate issues with the American Farm Bureau back in the ‘90s. We wasted 25-30 years arguing about things that weren't getting us to the point where we could do what we needed to do," Doggett noted.  "The environmental community didn't understand agriculture, and agriculture felt threatened by some of the things that come down the pike.”

More farmers, he said, are realizing that climate-smart ag has benefits for them.

“We're finally to a point where I think there's more and more people in agriculture who are saying, ‘You know what, we can do something with this. We can expand some markets on our farm or ranch, and we can go ahead and make a more resilient operation here for our family.’ Those are things that we can get done, and we have some money to do it. Farmers and ranchers say we want incentive-based voluntary programs, and this is an incentive-based voluntary program that has quite a bit of money for it,” Doggett explained. 

If the money is there and more farmers are interested in it, why doesn’t climate-smart ag continue developing? 

"It's trying to get to a Farm Bill, and when you try to get to a Farm Bill, you got to find the money, and there's money in that pot," Doggett said.  "But I think that's a different pot.  That Climate-Smart Money is a five-year program, now in the first year, which will help U.S. agriculture make the transition to even more efficient production, and we've been doing that for eons, but this is an opportunity to take some money and get a little further along.  That money is being looked at by some folks who said, ‘Hey, this is the way that we go ahead and afford such-and-such in the Farm Bill,’ and everybody’s looking for the money.”

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