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In this episode of Eat.Drink. Think., we talk with Lisa Held, senior staff reporter with Civil Eats, about two agricultural innovations that are at once ancient and modern: agroforestry and biochar. We unpack the techniques and talk about both the promise and challenge they hold for farmers adapting to the climate crisis.
Lisa wrote two articles: “Biochar’s Big, Carbon-Rich Moment,” and “Can Farming with Trees Save the Food System,” as part of a partnership between Civil Eats and Edible Communities which uses journalism to bring to light emerging challenges and opportunities in sustainable food systems.
This episode is brought to you by American Farmland Trust, the founder of the 15th annual America’s Farmers Market Celebration (AFMC). Each summer, AFMC brings together thousands of supporters nationwide to celebrate local food, agriculture and community. Vote for your favorite farmer’s market as it competes for state, regional and national awards. Voting runs from June 19th to September 18th at markets.farmland.org.
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Links:
Lisa Held: Civil Eats | Website | Twitter
Agroforestry: Can Farming with Trees Save the Food System?
Biochar’s Potential to Combat Climate Change
US Biochar Initiative
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Amy O’Neill Houck:
Welcome to Eat. Drink. Think. I’m Amy O’Neill Houck. In this podcast from Edible Communities, a network of magazines published in the US, Canada and Mexico, we celebrate all things local and sustainable in the food world. This episode is brought to you by American Farmland Trust, the founder of the 15th annual America’s Farmers Market Celebration (AFMC). Each summer, AFMC brings together thousands of supporters nationwide to celebrate local food, agriculture and community. Support your favorite farmer’s market as it competes for state, regional and national awards. Voting runs from June 19th to September 18th at markets.farmland.org.
Today, we’re speaking with Lisa Held, Civil Eats senior staff reporter. Since 2015, she has reported on agriculture and the food system with an eye towards sustainability, equality and health and her stories have appeared in publications including The Guardian, The Washington Post and Mother Jones. In the past, she covered health and wellness and was an editor at Well and Good. She’s based in Baltimore and has a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism.
Recently, Edible Communities and Civil Eats partnered to produce a series of pieces that are available for the network of more than 70 local, independent, edible publications to use in print. Lisa is the author of two recent stories, Biochar’s Big, Carbon-Rich Moment and Can Farming With Trees Save the Food System. We’ll discuss both today, they cover agriculture innovations that are, at once, ancient and modern, agroforestry and biochar. We’ll take a look at these techniques and talk about what promise and challenges they hold for farmers adapting to the climate crisis.
Lisa, welcome to Eat.Drink.Think.
Lisa Held:
Thank you, Amy. I’m so happy to be here.
AOH:
Great. Well, let’s start with biochar. What is it and what’s its history in agriculture?
LH:
Sure. So, biochar is essentially a form of charcoal, it’s pretty simple. Like a lot of things we talk about in agriculture that sound techy, it’s usually a little bit more basic than we realize.
So, you basically start out with some kind of biomass, usually wood, branches, pieces of trees, it could be things like corn stalks or peanut shells, the remnants of things that we’ve grown and you burn it. And instead of just letting the wood, let’s say, burn until it’s completely gone and is a pile of ashes, you burn it in this controlled way where it’s deprived of oxygen and you end up with these little pieces of charcoal or biochar and it’s essentially a stable form of carbon that’s left over.
And that’s why we’re talking about it because we’re in the middle of a climate crisis and we’re looking for ways to take carbon out of the air and put it back into the soil.
And so, biochar can be created and then added back to soil where it can stay stable for hundreds, maybe thousands of years depending on the conditions. We need more research on that, we can talk about that later.
But yeah, in terms of the history, so my reporting didn’t get too far into the history. But when you talk to experts, generally, they say the practice of adding charcoal to soil can be traced back about 2,500 years to the Amazon basin in Brazil and indigenous civilizations there used it to create fertile soils and there are other places in South America and West Africa where populations used it in similar ways.
So, it is a fairly ancient practice that is just now getting more and more attention in American agriculture.
AOH:
And just how is it different from, say, a charcoal briquette that you’d buy in the grocery store or is it?
LH:
It’s actually a hard question to answer. I don’t know, on a molecular level, exactly how those briquettes are created or how different it is. I would say, it’s probably not a good idea to just start adding charcoal briquettes to your garden. I think it is different and it’s created in more specific ways but essentially it’s the same idea at its core.
AOH:
Yeah, I guess that it’s not just like what’s left over in your fireplace or your barbecue pit afterwards so you wouldn’t be just adding ash, for instance, that’s different from that. So, I’m just curious about are people using it on really small scales, is this something industrial or are backyard gardeners doing it too?
LH:
It’s both. So, most biochar in the country right now is made as a byproduct of energy production in biomass energy plants.
So, these are places where, basically, things like we were talking about before like wood that is left over is used to create energy and then biochar is a byproduct and it’s sold and used for industrial purposes.
But there are plenty of backyard gardeners who make it themselves. You can go on YouTube and just search biochar and there’s lots of videos of homesteaders who have systems they’ve created with a series of barrels and they show you how to do it.
So, it is a little bit of both.
I would say, in terms of gardeners, there are some people who I talk to in my reporting who are very passionate about it. There’s one gardener in Pennsylvania who has been making it for decades and uses it for a million different things and is very passionate about it.
But I think those people are enthusiastic but rare. I don’t think the average gardener really has started using this yet mainly because it is still mysterious to most people and there isn’t a lot of information on exactly what to do with it and how it will affect your plants and your soil.
AOH:
So, you just mentioned biomass energy plants which is not something that really comes up a lot when you hear about the different kinds of energy that we’re producing. We’re talking about coal fire plants ramping down and natural gas maintaining or ramping up and all these things that people are juggling to try and reduce the carbon and the greenhouse gasses.
So, why aren’t we hearing about biomass energy? How does that come into play?
LH:
Yeah, it’s a good question. I’m not an energy reporter, I’m an agriculture reporter and I don’t actually know that much about biomass energy as a topic.
But in just looking into this, I would say it’s a very small percentage of energy production in this country and I think part of it is that it’s expensive and natural gas production, for example, is a lot cheaper and has, I think … There was a moment where maybe biomass was going to be a bigger portion of our energy and it seems like it was maybe displaced by lower cost fossil fuels like natural gas.
So, it’s not a very significant proportion of our energy and it doesn’t … I cover climate in the context of the food system so, again, I’m not tracking this closely but it’s not something you ever hear about as we should be doing more of this. I really almost never heard about it until I was just doing this reporting on biochar.
AOH:
That’s what I was wondering. Is it something where you feel like the momentum is building or it’s … Yeah, interesting.
In your piece, you mentioned that one of the big challenges to seeing the benefits of biochar technology is scale. And I guess the biomass energy comes into play a little bit there but both about how to produce enough of the material and how to foster adoption by farmers.
So, what would help the most to further biochar’s use as a soil builder and a carbon catcher?
LH:
Sure. So, in the US, we’re not producing a lot, that’s the first thing.
So, the US Biochar Initiative gave me some numbers and they had these estimates, there’s about 150 commercial producers in the country and they create between 70 and 100,000 tons per year.
And that sounds like a lot but Project Drawdown’s estimates on how to make a climate impact with biochar are based on using 63 million tons at a minimum.
So, 100,000 versus 63 million is a pretty big gap. Those are estimates, there aren’t great numbers, that’s another issue.
That same organization, the US Biochar Initiative, they’re working now on trying to do better at collecting data on where it’s actually being created and how much is being created. But there’s definitely no getting around the fact that, if we want to be adding it to more soil and storing carbon this way, it needs to scale up exponentially and that will require a lot of money and a lot of infrastructure.
And then there’s the issue of, if we had all of this, then using it at scale, adding it to agricultural soils.
And I think the big challenge there is on the research side. So, as I mentioned earlier a gardener might not know what to do with it and I think, at this point, most farmers don’t know what to do with it either.
And there is a growing body of research but we need a lot more information on exactly how it impacts different kinds of soil in different places in the country according to climate, according to what you’re growing. So, if you’re growing corn in Iowa or you have an apple orchard in New York or you have almonds in California, how adding biochar to your soil might impact how those plants grow is going to be different and so we need a lot more place specific research.
I also think, going back to production for a second, a lot of the production, as we said, so far, on the commercial side, has been associated with biomass energy.
And one of the places I think is the most interesting in terms of scale is producing it on a smaller scale regionally.
So, in my reporting, I talk to a lot of people in forestry, in places like Montana and Colorado who are coming at this as a means of controlling wildfires in those places because they have to thin out the forests in this way that results in these piles, basically piles of debris and its branches, twigs, very small trees, these kinds of forest materials that fuel uncontrolled burning when wildfires happen. So, they thin them out and what they’ve been doing mostly is then just setting them on fire and that’s basically just releasing all that carbon dioxide into the air.
And so, the reporting I did, they were working on this project where they’re bringing in this machine into those forests and creating biochar on site and then they’re going to move that to local farms.
And so, it’s bigger than a backyard homesteader but smaller than this big commercial plant.
And I think that’s an interesting place where we might see a lot of growth because the material already exists and it needs to go somewhere and so it seemed like we might see a lot of growth in that realm specifically.
AOH:
And this was a national forest that you were talking about. And have you found or did you find that any other forest or any other areas, regions are interested in doing something similar or are they pretty much piloting this test and then, hopefully, they’ll spread the word?
LH:
I talked to foresters in two states, Montana and Colorado, and I do think the researcher in Colorado was part of USDA Forest Agency. And so, I do think there’s a lot of conversations happening among people who do that kind of work around the country. And even the guy in Montana, he had a person from Oregon who had the biochar machine come from there who was using it there to bring it to him. And so, it’s definitely happening in different parts of the country and I think of all the worlds where people are talking about biochar.
You hear about it a lot in agriculture but, in forestry, it seems like maybe even more of a percolating conversation.
AOH:
So, a regional approach to scale that’s not huge so that we’re not transporting these giant amounts of material across the country and creating more carbon dioxide in that way. And perhaps the local or regional organizations already have connections with one another where they can communicate and spread the word between forestry and farm, that would be interesting to see.
You mentioned a few challenges in using biochar as a farmer. For instance, you said that the size of the piece can really affect how much carbon it might capture or how long that might last. And then, also, it captures nitrogen as well which could potentially deplete the nitrogen in the soil.
Are any of these downsides overshadowing the optimism about biochar?
LH:
I don’t think they’re overshadowing it, I think it just points, like I said, to the need for more targeted research so that we understand exactly how to use it.
Because, yeah, the nitrogen thing is really interesting, one of the reasons people want to add it to soil is because nitrogen runoff from farm fields is a really big problem in a lot of farm states and leads to water pollution. And so, biochar can help do this amazing thing which is to hold on to excess nitrogen and prevent water pollution so that’s good.
But then it’s, well, if you add too much, is it going to steal nitrogen that the plants need, not the excess, but those nitrogen that you’re putting in your soil specifically to make your plants grow.
But I don’t think that’s a downside, I think it’s really just a matter of determining exactly what that number is, how much to really understand how to use it. And most of the challenges are like that, it’s scale and research. And I can’t really think of a downside that doesn’t seem like it could be solved by just a little bit more funding or research, really.
AOH:
Well, and, again, that seems like an area where regionality could really come into play because my soil in Alaska is not going to be anything like soil in Colorado and so there’s going to be differences in how it’s applied.
Can you talk a little bit about the capacity of biochar to store moisture in soil for areas that are experiencing drought?
LH:
Yeah, there’s very good research on its ability to help soils hang onto moisture. And the particles are just filled with all these little nooks and crannies and so the water just basically has a place to hang out, it seems like.
And yeah, in my reporting, I think that was one of the strongest benefits that has been identified so far is that, in the west, especially in places where farmers really need access to technologies that will hold water in their fields, this could be a potential tool that they could use.
And like what you said earlier, it sticks around for a long time so maybe you add it and it provides that benefit for many years.
Again, we need more research because what happens then if you till the soil, does that disrupt that benefit. So, there’s still a lot of questions but I think the potential for it to help farmers who are struggling with water access is really big.
AOH:
Have we seen its application used more in situations like no-till farming or those kinds of practices that are leaning towards or leaning away maybe, more accurately, from what we call conventional farming?
LH:
We haven’t really seen its application anywhere at this point. So, the funny thing about this is everybody’s talking about biochar. All this funding from the government is flowing towards research but there is very little data at the farm level of how farmers are using it and I can point to this place in the country where they’re really seeing benefits. It’s only really been done in research plots so, yeah, I think we’re talking about this at a time when it’s just really early and we don’t have those answers yet.
AOH:
That’s exciting. So, in your second piece on farming with trees, we have a few potentially unfamiliar ideas. So, can we start by defining agroforestry and its related systems like silvopasture, riparian buffer and alley cropping?
LH:
Sure. Agroforestry, it sounds very technical just like biochar and it’s so simple. I put in the piece agroforestry or just call it farming with trees.
It’s so simple but we’re so used to, you think of a farm, you picture a farm and it’s just endless fields and there’s really, often, maybe a couple trees around the edge but, otherwise, it’s just cleared out and the idea with agroforestry is just bring back more trees and shrubs.
So, having this term allows you to then create really specific systems that you can apply.
So, silvopasture, I would say, at this point, is the most … I don’t know if it’s the most popular, it’s definitely people are talking about it the most, I would say, right now. And so, silvopasture is a form of agroforestry where you graze livestock. Instead of in a completely open pasture, you graze them among some combination of trees. Sometimes the trees are in rows, sometimes they’re more along the edges, sometimes people create fences with the trees which I’ve seen in person and are very cool.
And then alley cropping is another big one, this is where farmers plant trees in between rows of row crops, what we call row crops like corn or soybeans.
And then riparian buffers, they’re actually very common and they’re thrown into this bucket of agroforestry but a lot of farmers have been doing this for a long time. It’s basically planting small trees and shrubs alongside waterways to prevent runoff from fields going into the waterway and then making its way to wherever, whether it’s to Chesapeake Bay or the Gulf of Mexico, and causing issues there.
So, yeah, it’s just multiple different ways of adding more trees and shrubs to farms and it’s this amazing thing because it seems so intuitive but we’ve been doing it the other way for so long, just clearing everything from the landscape and growing one thing or a couple things.
And we are not only in a climate crisis, we’re also in a biodiversity crisis and agroforestry is unique in that, the more we do this, the more we start bringing back a little bit more of an ecosystem on a farm and that can really help with biodiversity as well as trees store a ton of carbon.
AOH:
I just made a note to ask you about pollinators. Is there data about agroforestry and pollinators and how they might be in synergy?
LH:
Definitely. Pollinator habitat is one of the main reasons a lot of farmers are into planting hedgerows which is … There’s all these terms.
A hedgerow is basically a riparian buffer but maybe not along water, it’s just planting more shrubs on your farm. And yeah, anytime you bring back the diversity of plants like that, you’re going to just be creating habitat for pollinators and that’s a really big deal.
I don’t know about specific research studies on that but, just based on the way that we know agriculture and pollinator habitat works, it’s going to definitely provide a benefit.
AOH:
And these techniques are pretty ancient so why were they abandoned?
LH:
Well, production. Yeah, so Native American tribes used a lot of techniques that we would now call agroforestry.
A lot of times, it’s referred to as forest farming and they used controlled burning a lot, basically using fire to clear out parts of forests or the understory within a forested area and then maintaining the larger ecosystem while still growing food and foraging. So, a lot of indigenous cultures understood that that was a better way to do things because you were preserving that larger ecosystem.
And in the US, European settlers arrived and basically clear cut forests, they just cut everything down and there was and still is this idea that you should just plant as much as possible, as densely as possible on whatever land you have and that’s going to produce the most food at the most profit.
But I think, now, people are seeing that that produces a lot of impacts that are detrimental to the environment and to humans because we depend on that environment and, yeah.
And so, now there’s this recognition that that was probably not the best way to go and we need to start building some of it back.
The depressing part is, the farm that I was at in Pennsylvania, it was in this area called the Great Eastern Woodlands, those are never coming back. We’re never going to have that landscape again but we can at least try to build slightly more diverse systems and that, I think, will have a really big impact.
AOH:
I’m curious, as governments and nonprofits are ramping up funding for agroforestry, are they looking to indigenous knowledge bearers for leadership and expertise?
LH:
I wish they were doing that more. In my research, I found some great work happening in northern California where some tribes were partnering and leading some agroforestry work. So, the USDA has this program called the Climate-Smart Commodity Program that I mentioned in this story and they’re giving a lot of money, I think it’s $3 billion total to different climate-smart farming projects. And a lot of them are focused on agroforestry and several of those agroforestry projects do have tribal partners involved which is great to see.
But yeah, I think, overall, it would be great to see more recognition of that history and that work and, yeah, have more tribal organizations that are really, really leading on this and more funding flowing to those projects.
AOH:
In your story, you quote Keefe Keeley, executive director of the Savannah Institute as saying farmers are stewards of photosynthesis, one of our oldest and best technologies for getting carbon out of the atmosphere. And that quote stood out to me because it seems like, for a few generations at least, what we call conventional farming has been, unwittingly or not, party to resource extraction that is taking from the soil and not stewarding it.
Keeley’s perspective, it seems to share what Tim Sauder takes when he says his pastureland wants to be a forest. He’s giving that pasture its own voice which I think is a very cool way of putting it.
Do you think there’s a wider shift in perspective towards stewardship happening?
LH:
That’s a tough question. I guess, the fact that Keefe Keeley was at a USDA conference … So, that conference where I quoted him from is USDA’s big event of the year where they have all of the biggest players in commodity agriculture and the big meat companies and everyone, basically, in that room talking about how to grow food in the US.
And I think the fact that any of this is being talked about is a really big shift. So, for instance, I covered agriculture during the last administration and that same event, the USDA annual event, the Trump administration’s USDA actually didn’t use the word climate change, they actually didn’t even say it.
So, I guess there is a shift. Now we’re talking about having these climate-smart grants, we have this overall recognition that we need to be thinking about the climate crisis in terms of farming and in terms of both making farms resilient and then also reducing emissions from farms and that is fairly new and it is a shift.
I don’t think a lot of farmers are thinking the way that Tim Sauder is thinking at Fiddle Creek Dairy. He is seeing his role as this steward of the land and of his animals and his role in feeding people.
There are lots of farmers who feel that way but, the forces that support or, I guess, don’t support them, they’re … Yeah, I think that they’re still facing more obstacles than they are facing support in general and more money is falling to things that are not beneficial and are increasing greenhouse gas emissions versus this thing we’re talking about.
AOH:
Lisa, I’m curious about the idea of regenerative farming and how these two things, biochar and agroforestry, are maybe fitting into it now or in the future.
Is that something that you’ve come across at all in your reporting?
LH:
Sure. Regenerative agriculture is definitely the biggest buzzword in farming right now. It has so many different meanings, it’s hard to figure out how to talk about it.
Some people talk about regenerative farming as simply adding cover crops or doing no-till on corn and soybean acres and that has benefits compared to not doing those things.
But then, there’s also this thinking that regenerative farming should reduce or completely eliminate the use of pesticides and really focus on biodiversity and real ecosystem benefits and a whole different approach to the way we’ve been farming.
I think the overlap where all people who talk about regenerative farming always come together is that we should be thinking more about soil and improving soil instead of simply extracting from it as much as we can and both of these practices are about that.
Biochar, we’re saying, well, if we add this to soil, we can hang on to water which helps improve the quality of that soil, we can retain nutrients. Actually, we didn’t even talk about it. Another thing that biochar does is provide more space for microbes which is huge for soil health.
And then, agroforestry, same thing. You’re planting trees, you’re increasing diversity and bringing all kinds of critters that weren’t there before back to the farm, the pollinators, the birds, everything is just bringing more biomass and more diversity and that is going to benefit that soil.
And so, I do think both of these things fit, no matter what your approach to regenerative, both of these practices fit pretty squarely into it.
AOH:
Yeah. I noticed that you left the term out of both stories and I thought that was probably an intentional omission because it does get diluted and maybe a little bit greenwashed but it seems like an important idea or potentially important idea if we can land on some accepted tenets of it. Do you think so?
LH:
Yeah. I think, again, you can see the good and then the potential for it to be diluted. So, we weren’t talking about regenerative agriculture 10 years ago and that’s a great thing that this is a movement towards paying more attention to soil and, B, being regenerative instead of extractive.
Just that idea is pretty revolutionary compared to how we’ve been producing food in this country for the last several decades or, really, the last a hundred years. So, that’s good and, yeah, I think a lot of people that I interview and talk to think that this is all positive, that any … There’s two ways of thinking about it.
Any benefit to soil, no matter how small. And especially a lot of the smaller tweaks, you’re doing them on big acres so there might be benefit there.
But then there’s the thinking that, well, if we start calling everything regenerative, then producers like Tim Sauder who has this tiny farm and he is producing the highest quality milk you could ever produce and it’s expensive, he’s not going to be able to compete with a farm that is just planting cover crops on a conventional dairy and also gets to call its practices regenerative. Right?
AOH:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
LH:
And so, yeah, it’s a time where, I think, all of that is going to be debated a lot and worked out. There’s all kinds of certifications now that are going to … There’s a few that already exist and now there’s more that are coming. And so, I don’t know that it’s going to get simpler but I do think it’s a positive thing that everyone is, not everyone, that a lot of people are talking about it.
AOH:
Mm-hmm, okay. Well, let’s talk about microbes for a second since you brought that up. I imagine that the benefits for mycelium and microbes are important for both biochar and agroforestry. What did you find?
LH:
It’s funny, I don’t know anything about microbes and agroforestry, that would be very interesting … I’m like, “Ooh, that’s cool, we should look into that.”
But anytime you increase diversity, you’re going to help more microbes thrive. So, I can’t imagine it, it would be interesting to see some research on that.
But yeah, biochar, again, it goes back to the little spaces in the particles. They’re just so porous that you’re just creating more places for microbes to live, basically, which is very simple but that’s what’s happening.
And I think that there’s some research that shows benefits from adding biochar to microbial diversity and I’m sure that will be another big focus of research going forward because a lot of the focus on the funding coming in now is on research. And I think all of these things that we’re talking about are just going to suddenly have new research on microbes, on water holding capacity, on nutrients and, yeah, it’ll be really interesting to see that, hopefully, all come to fruition.
AOH:
Awesome. So, if you’re paying attention at all these days to agriculture and food, you’ve probably heard something about the Farm Bill. So, how did these ideas of biochar and agroforestry fit into that evolving legislation?
LH:
Sure. My favorite topic is the Farm Bill. I’m the only person who, it’s my favorite topic.
AOH:
That’s so great. I’m so glad you’re here.
LH:
Yeah, this is what I know a lot about. Yes, so the Farm Bill negotiations have kicked off, they’ve been a little stalled recently because of the debt ceiling negotiations but they are moving and there are a couple ways in which this conversation fits into the Farm Bill.
So, the first big one is conservation programs. So, conservation is one of the three biggest chunks of Farm Bill funding and, when we say conservation programs, I’m talking about programs that basically pay farmers to do things on their farm that improve environmental outcomes.
So, the two biggest are called EQIP and CSP, the Conservation Stewardship Program. And depending on the program, depending on the farm, you could apply for an EQIP grant for something as simple as building a fence in order to graze your cattle. There’s a wide range. It could be for waste storage, it could be for cover crops, I’ve mentioned cover crops. That’s a lot of funding and a lot of farmers use those programs, they’re always oversubscribed meaning more farmers want to participate than are able to get funding. And both of these things … So, actually, the USDA just proposed adding biochar as an approved practice. I think it was in 2020, it was fairly recent.
So, in some states, it is now possible for you to, as a farmer, apply to use biochar as a soil amendment and get funding for that.
And same thing with agroforestry, there are a bunch of practices that are approved. It depends on the state but, in a lot of states, you could apply to plant trees in an alley cropping system or put in … A lot of farmers use EQIP for riparian buffers, for example.
And so, during the Farm Bill negotiations right now, there’s a lot of talk about two things.
One, increasing funding in conservation programs in general. There’s also this big pot of money from the Inflation Reduction Act that is supposed to be used for conservation programs specifically related to climate. And so, there’s a lot of conversation around how is this money going to be used, how much money should we be putting into conservation programs? And at the end of the day, if more money gets put into those programs and more of that money goes to climate-smart practices specifically, then that would potentially mean more money to farmers who want to use biochar and/or put in agroforestry systems.
So, that’s the biggest way and then there’s also just little things. So, for instance, the Biochar Research Network Act, which I talk about in my story, is what we call a marker bill. So, basically, it gets introduced during this process and what they’re hoping is that it’ll get tucked into the larger Farm Bill and that would establish 20 research sites around the country to study biochar’s use on farms and all these things we’ve been talking about, study it in different sites with different soils and really get answers to some of these questions. So, yeah.
And I don’t think there’s any specific marker bills on agroforestry but, again, I think, if you look at the list of climate-smart practices in conservation programs, there’s just so many that fall under that umbrella that I do think it would add to farmer’s ability to implement these systems if there was more money available.
AOH:
And does it seem like these bills or additions are going to end up in the final product?
LH:
It is too soon to tell, unfortunately.
AOH:
What is the timeline anyway? This happens every five years, right?
LH:
It happens every five years. Technically, it’s supposed to be the … September is when it should be done by, it’s not going to be done by September.
The leadership is still saying that they expect to see a bill by the end of the year so we think that, maybe, by the end of the year. Like I said, then these other things come up and put … A month ago, I was like, “Oh, yeah, things are moving, they’re holding hearings,” and then this debt ceiling thing comes up and Washington gets consumed by something else so it’s hard to know.
On the conservation program stuff, it’s interesting because conservation programs in general are pretty popular on a bipartisan basis because you’re giving money to farmers, they’re doing great work.
They’re generally pretty supported by both parties but this extra funding for climate-smart work has been controversial.
And some of the Republican leadership in the house, GT Thompson, who is the head of the House Agriculture Committee, for instance, has indicated that they might want to move that money and not have it be specifically for climate because they think that the aims of conservation programs are larger and that it should be for any environmental outcome, not just climate.
So, right now, it’s hard to know exactly what will happen, especially because you can say, “Here’s what the Democrats are saying, here’s what the House is saying and the Republicans are saying.” The Republicans control the Ag Committee in the house and the Democrats control it in the Senate so it’s hard to know exactly how it’ll shake out at this point.
AOH:
Fascinating. Lisa, I’m curious, since you’ve brought us two really interesting stories, what are you thinking about and working on now?
LH:
So many things. Yeah, I’m always thinking about climate and agriculture and how the food system needs to change in this era we’re living through and how it will change, how it will be changed and how we’re going to continue to grow food and feed people given this crisis that we’re in.
And I don’t love the nitty-gritty of policy stuff but I cover it a lot because it’s important and it’s where things happen and a lot of money gets given out and that determines a lot of things.
And I think, right now, it is an interesting time because, like we talked about, there’s more tension to this world and it almost feels like a little bit of a pivotal moment where that attention could lead to a lot of real change and a lot of real funding going to good work and reconsideration of the way that we’ve been doing things that has been damaging the environment and shifting to a more regenerative system.
Or, it could happen that, essentially, everybody says, “Oh, all these big food companies now are on board with, quote, unquote, climate action because they have to be,” and it could just end up being a moment where they say they’re going to do things and they don’t and everybody forgets about it and we let it get away.
And so, I think what my focus has been on is just really paying attention to commitments companies are making and where this government money is going and just really staying on top of, is this funding and all this talk, is it really having an impact on the ground and what does that look like.
And, so far, it’s been early to know but, going forward, we’re going to be really following that.
For instance, with the climate-smart commodities grants, there’s billions and millions of dollars that are just being …The contracts were just signed within the last few months and so, in the coming months and probably years, I’m going to be trying to pay attention to, okay, well, all this money went to this grant and Tyson was involved and this person was involved and what happened? Did we figure out a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from meat production or not and who paid for it? So, that’s, I think, one of my focuses going forward.
AOH:
Awesome. Well, I hope you’ll update us at some point with what’s happening with biochar and agroforestry as well. Lisa, thank you so much for joining us.
LH:
Thanks for having me.
AOH:
We’ve been listening to senior staff reporter for Civil Eats, Lisa Held. Thank you for joining us today at Eat. Drink. Think. If you like this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and don’t forget to pick up your local Edible magazine. You can find show notes for today’s episode at ediblecommunities.com.
