The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) submits the following recommendations on proactive steps that can be taken through farm bill conservation program implementation to support climate change adaptation and mitigation in the agriculture sector. These recommendations reflect the reality of the relationship between climate change and agriculture, the President’s priority to address climate change, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s role both to enhance support for those practices and systems with the greatest adaptation and mitigation potential and to encourage the transition away from those with negative climate effects and less ability to cope with the pressure imposed by increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather events.
Our recommendations are based on eight broad principles:
(1) NRCS should promote energy conservation, increased energy efficiency, and on-farm solar, wind, and other renewable energy production as ways to mitigate agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and increase resiliency.
(2) NRCS should assist producers, especially livestock farmers and ranchers, in the transition to systems that keep the land in sod and other perennial vegetation, and should support rangeland management that promotes climate benefits.
(3) NRCS conservation programs should prioritize farming systems and conservation activities that build soil organic matter, increase carbon sequestration, and prevent denitrification.
(4) NRCS should promote farmscaping that supports resilience to a changing climate and promotes carbon sequestration in woody biomass and soils.
NRCS recommendations:
- Integrate climate and energy issues into conservation planning. This can be done through several channels: expanding the Energy Resource Concern to “Energy Conservation and Greenhouse Gas Reduction;” (2) including climate and GHG considerations when assigning environmental benefit scores to conservation activities in the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and to CPPE scoring more broadly; and (3) incorporating on-farm energy audits into comprehensive conservation planning. Regarding this last point, the 2014 Farm Bill authorizes NRCS to provide financial and technical assistance for comprehensive conservation planning as part of a CSP contract. We recommend that the comprehensive conservation plan specifically include a climate adaptation and mitigation plan that demonstrates on-farm benefits, including energy savings.
- Coordinate across USDA agencies to connect producers with the resources they need to assist in the development of on-farm energy resources, especially solar and wind, but also perennial biomass crops for bioenergy feedstocks and small-scale bioenergy digesters. In addition to working with producers on energy projects through conservation programs, NRCS should be equipped to provide producers with information regarding resources available through sister agencies, such as the Rural Energy for America Program and the Biomass Crop Assistance Program.
- Work collaboratively with the Farm Service Agency to engage in extensive outreach with retiring Conservation Reserve Program landowners to enroll in the Conservation Stewardship Program and transition those lands to grass-based and other perennial agriculture systems and bring those acres back into production without losing the valuable carbon sequestered in both the standing biomass and the soil.
- Update the Conservation Practice Standard GHG Ranking Tool to properly reflect the climate benefits of perennial vegetation associated with pasture and rangeland management. Intensive rotational grazing and prescriptive grazing offer soil health benefits through reduced erosion, in addition to numerous climate co-benefits such as carbon sequestration and avoided greenhouse gas emissions from anaerobic manure decomposition. CPS 528 Prescriptive Grazing should be added to the Ranking Tool to reflect these benefits. Similarly, there are several CSP enhancements that address rotational grazing, which rank among the top-scoring conservation activities. NRCS should make a concerted effort to promote these practices and work with producers to transition to pasture-based systems.
- Integrate the principles of the Soil Health Initiative, with the added perspective on chemical and physical soil disturbance, into both working lands programs (EQIP and CSP) and easement programs (ACEP). Once the Greenhouse Gas Ranking Tool is updated, NRCS could overlay those practices that rank high on the list with the most suitable practices for a CSP or EQIP applicant. NRCS could also overlay those practices with the practices promoted through the Soil Health Initiative, to demonstrate the climate co-benefits of soil health-enhancing activities. Finally, NRCS could use the Soil Health Initiative to increase promotion and education of the supplemental payment option for Resource-Conserving Crop Rotations through CSP.
- When ranking applicants for NRCS program, assessments of the conservation or environmental benefits index of different conservation activities should take net greenhouse gas emission and sequestration into account. Moreover, applicants for NRCS conservation programs should be made aware of the climate-specific benefits of various activities.
-Increase incentives for the use of legumes and organic inputs, like compost and manure, for nitrogen, as well as other conservation practices that reduce the use of synthetic nitrogen and improve management of unstable organic nitrogen. CSP includes enhancements that address this issue, such as ENR10 (Using N provided by legumes, animal manure, and compost) and ENR12 (Use of legume cover crops as N source), and applications containing these practices should be prioritized.