Advocating for Climate Measures in the Farm Bill

In this episode, Peter Lehner, head of the food and farming sustainability program at Earthjustice, gives his expert perspective on the upcoming Farm Bill and its potential impact on agricultural decarbonization in the US.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

As longtime subscribers know — indeed, as the name makes plain — Volts is primarily focused on the energy side the climate fight. I haven't paid much attention to agriculture over the years. I understand that agriculture is a huge piece of the puzzle, both for decarbonization and for sustainability more generally. It's just not really been my jam.

However! The Farm Bill — which requires reauthorization every five years — is likely to pass in coming months, and it is arguably the most important climate bill Congress will address this session.

To talk me through the agriculture/climate nexus and discuss opportunities in the upcoming Farm Bill, I contacted Peter Lehner. He is the head of Earthjustice’s food and farming sustainability program, and the author of Farming for Our Future: The Science, Law, and Policy of Climate-Neutral Agriculture.

We talked about how US agriculture has evaded environmental laws and become the source of 30 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, ways that the upcoming Farm Bill can be tweaked to better fight climate change, and what's next for agriculture decarbonization.

Peter Lehner of Earthjustice, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming on.

Peter Lehner

Great to be here, Dave.

David Roberts

As you may know, if you have read my work over the years or followed me at all, I'm pretty heavily, deeply into the energy world as the source of most of my time and attention in the climate fight. I know on some level, partially because I've been lectured by people numerous times over the years, that agriculture is a big piece of the puzzle — and land use and oceans, which are other things that I also don't spend much time on. And I fully acknowledge that they're important, they're just not my personal passion. However, I've felt vaguely guilty about that for years.

And I know the Farm Bill is coming up, which is a significant marker, I think, possibly the source of some significant action. We'll discuss that in a while. But at the very least a good excuse, I think, for me to check in and just sort of see like, what's the state of climate and agriculture, you know, action stuff, what's going on there? So, that's what you're here for, Peter, because you are the expert author of a book on the subject, numerous podcasts, been studying this for a long time. So before we get into the Farm Bill, just maybe — I know that the subject of the ties between agriculture and climate and carbon and methane greenhouse gases is very complicated.

You've written entire books on the subject. But I wonder, for people like me who have had their nose mostly in the energy world, if you could just summarize relatively quickly what are the big kind of buckets where agriculture overlaps with carbon and decarbonization and climate generally? What are the big areas of concern that people should have their eyes on?

Peter Lehner

Sure, you know, I should say, Dave, that I came to this really the same as you. I'd been working on energy issues for a very long time. For three decades, I've sued many power plants. I've worked on many different environmental laws dealing with regulation of the power sector. And what happened is, over time, doing general environmental law for New York State, for NRDC, for Earthjustice where I am now, I kept seeing the impact of agriculture as really being enormous and impeding our ability to achieve our environmental and health goals unless it was addressed. So that's why I'm focusing on this now.

But like you, I think most environmentalists focus much more on the industrial sector, the power sector, the transportation sector. And part of what I've come to realize is that we all should pay a lot more attention to the agriculture sector. And we'll talk about the Farm Bill coming up. But really the Farm Bill is the biggest environmental law Congress will address that most people have never heard of. Now why is that? So, I'll tell you quickly. First, agriculture uses most of our land. It uses about two thirds of the contiguous U.S.

David Roberts

Can I pause you there?

Peter Lehner

Sure.

David Roberts

That took me two or three seconds to catch up with that before my mind blew. Two thirds of the land of the contiguous United States is devoted to agriculture?

Peter Lehner

62%, yeah. And that's about using rounder numbers, about 400 million acres of cropland. About half of that is used to grow food that people eat, and about half of that is growing food that animals eat. And close to 800 million acres of grazing land, some of that is federal land, some of that is state land. A lot of that is private land. But all told, it's over a billion acres of land, almost all in the lower 48 is used for agriculture.

David Roberts

That is wild.

Peter Lehner

So think about it. If you fly anywhere and look out the window, what do you see? You really see agriculture, whether it be the irrigation circles or just the fields or whatever. That's what has transformed our landscape. And part of the result of that, of course, is agriculture is really the biggest driver of biodiversity loss. So much of biodiversity loss is habitat loss. And look, I've spent decades working on issues like grizzly bears and wolves. But what those issues are at bottom is agriculture because we are grazing in grizzly and wolf territory. And so much of habitat loss, whether it be land or polluted waters, is driving other biodiversity loss.

So in addition to that, what I was going to mention is the environmental laws that you're probably familiar with, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act have actually done a pretty good job of addressing air and water pollution from industrial sources, from the energy sector. But they really have not done a very good job addressing air and water pollution from agriculture, whether it be these hundreds of millions of acres of row crops. Or these hundreds of million acres of grazing. Or these more industrial scale facilities where thousands or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of animals are crammed together into buildings — those are called concentrated animal feeding operations. Those are now the largest source of water pollution in the country.

David Roberts

Did the laws pass over them or just inadequately address them?

Peter Lehner

A little bit of both. What happened was in 1972, say, when the Clean Water Act was passed, Congress really wasn't thinking that much about agriculture. But also agriculture has changed tremendously since then. It has become so much more industrial. So that a small number of facilities that are gargantuan produce, for example, almost all of our meat, but those didn't exist in 1970. And as you probably know, in the Clean Water Act, it did a good job dealing with pollution coming out of a pipe. But pollution, say, coming off of city streets, that's called non-point source pollution.

The regulation was much less strong, and they relied more on grants and education and sort of nudges, as we say. And much of agriculture — 400 million acres of cropland, 800 million acres of grazing land — that's not, by and large, water pollution coming out of a pipe. So essentially, the Clean Water Act doesn't cover it. And similarly, the Clean Air Act does a great job of addressing stuff coming out of smokestacks. And while there's some, like from these concentrated animal feeding operations, there's very concentrated air pollution coming out of the vents. But out of all of those acres of cropland and grazing land, those are called area sources under the Clean Air Act and are addressed much, much less.

But still, air pollution from agriculture, I bet this would surprise most of your readers, kills about 17,000 people a year. It's a major source of air pollution in this country.

And that is mostly methane or other criteria pollutants?

Methane is actually one of the ways agriculture drives climate change. It's actually other pollutants, largely ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, which come from overfertilization and animal waste. And ammonia is a major precursor to the fine particulate matter that gets into our lungs and causes disease and kills us.

David Roberts

Which we're finding out, as I've covered on the pod, is worse. You known, every time a new round of science comes out, we find out it's worse than we thought.

Peter Lehner

Yeah. And in a place like, say, the San Joaquin Valley in central California, which has some of the worst air quality in the country, almost all of that PM, that fine particulate matter, is driven by animal agriculture.

David Roberts

And I'm also going to guess maybe you're going to get to this, but that when you take wild land and make it into agricultural land, the land subsequently captures and holds less carbon.

Peter Lehner

Much less carbon. So one of the reasons why I think people don't realize that agriculture drives about as much climate change as our transportation sector is — and think about that for a minute, it drives as much climate change as our transportation sector — and yet most of the time there are conversations about climate change and conversations about agriculture. But until recently, those have been two separate conversations. Say in 2018, when we were working on the Farm Bill then, there was virtually no discussion of climate change in the 2018 Farm Bill.

David Roberts

I'll admit I don't think of it that way in the mental category in my head when I'm thinking about major sources.

Peter Lehner

Yeah, well, why is that? I think that's because when we think about climate change, most people think about climate change, you think about burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide.

David Roberts

Right.

Peter Lehner

And that's climate change for most people. Agriculture's contribution to climate change has some of that. Agriculture uses actually a fair amount of energy for, say, irrigation and tractors and of course, food processing later on down the road. But most of agriculture's contribution to climate change is from other sources.

David Roberts

Right. Which is to say that even if we clean up energy sources, which everybody is working on, and even if the energy inputs to agriculture, you drive the tractors with whatever, electric tractors or electric irrigators, whatever, even if it's zero carbon energy fueling agriculture, that still leaves most of agriculture's contribution to climate change untouched.

Peter Lehner

Exactly, that's true. And even more frightening, even if we do clean up our energy system and our industrial system to a no carbon situation where we hope to of course, that's where we're putting so much effort into, we will still almost certainly face catastrophic climate change because of the contribution of agriculture alone. In other words, if we do everything else perfectly and we don't change our agriculture system and don't address agriculture's contribution to climate change, we are blowing past 1.5 degrees centigrade, blowing past two degrees.

David Roberts

So you think just taking the U.S.: The U.S. can't meet its stated Paris climate targets without reforming agriculture?

Peter Lehner

That's basically correct. So let me explain a minute why this is the case. Agriculture's contribution to climate change: First, think about methane, which you've mentioned most people think about methane, oil and gas, right?

David Roberts

Yeah.

Peter Lehner

Actually, cows and animal agriculture emit more methane in the U.S. and around the world than the oil and gas sector. Most of that methane is called enteric methane. It's essentially belching and exhaling of cows. And their stomachs are different than ours. That's why they can eat grass in a way that you and I can't. But every time they breathe out, they're breathing out a lot of methane. So that is an enormous source of methane, which I'm sure your listeners know is more than 80 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over 20 years.

David Roberts

Nobody thought they're innovating a better cow, are they? That seems like fewer cows is the only solution to that. I mean, maybe we're going to touch on solutions later so maybe we should save this. But just like that doesn't seem like a technologically solvable problem. You just need fewer cows.

Peter Lehner

Most studies have shown that fewer cows, and therefore the consequent part of that is shifting diets to less beef-heavy is one of the fastest, most effective and cost-effective climate strategies and really has to be a part of any strategy. There are things you can do. Breeding has reduced the methane emissions per pound of beef. The way you raise the cows can make a difference. The way you graze them can make a difference. How long they live before they're slaughtered can make a difference. There is some research into feed additives that you'd feed cows, and that changes the bacteria in their gut to produce a little less methane.

David Roberts

Oh, interesting.

Peter Lehner

And all of these are important. There's not one solution. But I think what is unfortunate is sometimes it's viewed by industry as only a technical solution. And the reality is it has to be both technical and essentially demand side. So, the other way methane is produced is manure. There's all those animals. We've got about 50 times more waste produced by animals than by humans in the United States.

David Roberts

50 times more?

Peter Lehner

Yeah. Those animals produce a lot of waste. One dairy cow, for example, can produce about as much waste as 200 people.

David Roberts

Jesus Christ.

Peter Lehner

So all that waste, most of it sits in lagoons or essentially is handled in such a way that it creates a lot of methane. So that's another way that methane is produced and agriculture contributes to climate change.

David Roberts

When people talk about lagoons, I just want to clarify here, they just take all the manure and slough it into a giant pond of manure where it then sits. Is that what people are talking about when they talk about lagoons? There's not any fancy technical. It's just a big pool full of crap.

Peter Lehner

That's basically correct. And that's the dominant way in both pig farms and dairy farms, we handle our waste. To get technical, when you put the manure into a big pit like this, because it's wet, there's water, it's transported by water, it is anaerobic. That means it doesn't have oxygen. So as it decomposes, it releases methane. And that is a really significant source of methane all around the country and contributes both locally, but also obviously, majorly to climate change. And I should say rice, also, rice production, also, if you think about it again, you have the image of a rice patty, it's flooded. So you have organic matter decomposing in an anaerobic, without oxygen, system releasing methane. But by far, most methane is from cow belching.

David Roberts

That's the big source.

Peter Lehner

Yes.

David Roberts

Bigger than manure.

Peter Lehner

Bigger than manure. Although manure is also very big, I don't want to minimize that. And the two together, again, are more than the oil and gas sector.

David Roberts

That is wild. There's so much attention going to oil and gas methane right now, EPA rules coming, there's international treaties being signed, like on and on.

Peter Lehner

Yep. And there should be. We obviously need to address those sources of methane. I think that what is often forgotten is we also have to address these other sources of methane. So the other reason it gets confusing is the other two ways agriculture contributes to climate change are also very different than burning fossil fuels. The second is that almost all of that cropland uses a lot of fertilizer. By and large, in the U.S. and around the world, people put on a lot more fertilizer than the plants take up, and a lot of nitrogen is added to the ground that is not absorbed by the plant.

So where does that nitrogen go? Some of it runs off into the water, and then it causes eutrophication, algae outbreaks. It causes the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It seeps into groundwater: You have heard of blue baby syndrome, which is too much nitrate in the groundwater. But some of it also goes into the air. And some of it goes into the air as NOx, which is sort of a local smog causing pollution. And some of it goes into the air as nitrous oxide. N2O nitrous oxide, which is about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and also one of the major drivers of ozone depletion, stratospheric ozone depletion.

So this is a major source of climate change, nitrous oxide pollution alone, virtually all of which comes from agriculture, virtually all of which is this overfertilization and some coming from these manure pits that we talked about before. That alone is about 5% or six percent of U.S. greenhouse gases.

David Roberts

Oh, wow.

Peter Lehner

So again, it's not burning fossil fuels, but a major contribution to climate change. And then the last way agriculture contributes to climate change is what you alluded to earlier. When you convert land, say, native grasslands or forest in Brazil or forest in the U.S. to cropland, you take this carbon that is in those healthy soils or in the grass or in the trees, and you release it, and that goes into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. So you get two things: One is you get this slug of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when you convert land, this conversion of land from grassland to forest.

But then the second part, which EPA is only beginning to really pay attention to, is what you can think of as the lost sequestration capacity. Healthy land, grassland, forest, land is this very dynamic, wonderful system that is sequestering carbon and storing carbon. And by contrast, cropland is really — the way we treat it often is largely biologically dead. It has very little carbon life in it. And that's why we have to put so many fertilizers in it.

David Roberts

Is that just because of monocrops? Is that just an inevitable result of monocrops?

Peter Lehner

I'm not sure it's absolutely inevitable. It's in large part because of the way we grow in these sort of chemical dependent monocultures, for sure. So you have both this slug of carbon when you convert land. But, hey, look, a lot of our cropland in the U.S. was converted 100 years ago. Every year, that is not sequestering nearly as much as it could. So you were losing the sequestration capacity. That 800 million acres of grazing land — think about that, it's about 40% of the contiguous U.S. And it has been overgrazed for decades. There are reports of John Wesley Powell going out west and saying, "Whoa!"

He was sent out to look after exploring some more remote areas. But everywhere he saw cattle, he said the land is getting degraded. In 1934, Congress tried to address overgrazing and erosion and soil degradation. And then 1976, they tried to do it again, so far, really not to much avail, with the result that you have hundreds of millions of acres that aren't sequestering the carbon they could.

David Roberts

Yeah, this came up in our Biofuels discussion a few weeks ago, too. A lot of new thinking about biofuels is taking that sort of counterfactual sequestration into account.

Peter Lehner

Exactly. And you did a great podcast with my colleague Dan Lashof, and we're working together on biofuels. That was a great podcast you did there. So if you add all of this up, what you see is that agriculture has this enormous contribution to climate change, but it's so different than the way most people think about climate change. And what happens also is EPA sort of thinks about it differently. So, first of all, their classic greenhouse gas inventory puts, say, on farm energy in a different category. They don't put that in agriculture. They put that in energy, or they put that in the manufacturer fertilizer, which itself is enormously energy intensive and releases a lot of CO2.

That's in a different chapter. Land use conversion, that carbon that I was telling you about, they put that in a different chapter, and they don't even think about, in their greenhouse gas inventory about the lost sequestration capacity, this opportunity cost. So if you just look at the inventory, EPA says that agriculture contributes about 11% of U.S. greenhouse gases. But if you actually think of agriculture as a sector all, what really goes into agriculture, and you include the land use impacts, which, as I said, are usually left out, that's where you get that agriculture is basically in a par with transportation and is about a quarter drives about a quarter of climate change.

And then, if you include the rest of the food system, the processing, et cetera.

David Roberts

Food waste.

Peter Lehner

And food waste, of course, rotting in landfills, you've got about a third or more of climate change is driven by our food system. And that's why unless we change our food system, we're not going to address climate change adequately.

David Roberts

Wild, okay. I want to get to the Farm Bill, but one final question, which is just my — and again, this is sort of my impression from the outside over the year — is that the agriculture industry has a level of power and influence in political circles that I think most people don't appreciate. That sort of makes the oil and gas sector look like patty cakes. It's amazing. I will never forget that Oprah — I don't know if other listeners are old enough to remember this — but Oprah said on her show once, basically, "You know, beef's bad, it's not very healthy and it destroys the environment."

And got taken to task by the agriculture industry and they basically took her down and forced her to publicly apologize. And if you can take Oprah down, you've got muscle.

Peter Lehner

Yeah. And it is certainly true. There's no question that the conventional or industrial agriculture lobby is very powerful in Congress. I would point out that there's a lot of great farmers who are trying to do things right and are working to produce food, healthy food, in a sustainable way. And we work with groups like the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which is itself a coalition of a lot of these groups, I wish they had the political power that conventional AG does because they do great stuff and they are really examples of what we want to be doing, how we can produce food in a way that doesn't pollute our air and water and that rebuilds soil health.

But unfortunately, the political power is with the agrochemical industries, which are very dominant. They say the meat processing companies, four companies control 85% of the beef market. These are enormously politically powerful.

David Roberts

So the Farm Bill then, before we get into the details of what the Farm Bill might do or what you want it to do, let's just talk about the Farm Bill as such. This is something that they pass every year or a set number of years because it just like comes up periodically. Is this something they have to do every session?

Peter Lehner

No. So, the Farm Bill is so important, and for a long time, really, when it comes up, it's really only the farm community that pays attention to it. And I think what I hope you've heard is that everybody should pay attention to it. And that's why the Farm Bill is far more important than people realize. For all of us who eat, for all of us who breathe, for all of us who drink, the Farm Bill has an enormous impact. So what is the Farm Bill? The Farm Bill was first passed actually in the Depression in 1933. There was the Depression and hunger.

There was the Dust Bowl, there was the crisis on farms. And so Congress stepped in. And I can give you a long history and I won't. But basically Congress did two things. One, they tried to address the hunger and they also tried to restrict supply, pay farmers not to produce, to keep prices high. And sometimes also buy some surplus to give that to the hungry also, but as a way of keeping the surplus off the market and keeping prices high.

David Roberts

That's why the Farm Bill has this weird structure where it has food subsidies for the poor in it, which I think, on the surface, seems like just an odd artifact.

Peter Lehner

Yeah. And it's also essentially a political marriage. So, the Farm Bill, on one hand, provides nutrition assistance, now called SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, formerly Food SNAP, that helps feed about 45 million Americans every year, and that right now provides about $75-80 billion a year. It also then provides about $20 billion a year in farm subsidies. And ever since it was passed in 1933, it was amended a few times. But basically, it has to get reenacted, reauthorized every five years. And if it doesn't, these programs on which so many people depend basically stop. They won't continue without being reauthorized.

So the last Farm Bill that was fully enacted was in 2018, and so it expired September 30, 2023. There was still a little extra money hanging around, so we had a couple of months. But then what Congress just did a couple of weeks ago in the continuing resolution that funded the government up to January 19, they also agreed to extend the Farm Bill until September 30, 2024.

David Roberts

Such a rational —

Peter Lehner

Yeah, exactly. We're covered right now. But it ends up being enormously important because it provides this nutrition assistance for, as I said, 45 million Americans. Really important. And it also has a series of different programs that provide enormous subsidies to farmers. And those subsidies, when you put them together, have an enormous impact on what is grown, where it's grown, how it's grown, and all of that for the reasons I was just explaining about how agriculture affects our environment, and climate change has an enormous impact on the environment. And that's why the Farm Bill is actually the most important environmental law Congress is going to address in the next couple of years.

And unlike our other environmental laws that haven't been amended for decades, this one is amended every five years.

David Roberts

I'm so interested in the SNAP thing. I mean, it's a big safety net program, correct? That's been around since 1933, I am assuming, in fact, I know to be the case that conservatives hate social safety programs generally, and I bet they hate SNAP. So what is the magic sauce that has allowed this extremely large subsidy for poor people to survive what I can only assume are repeated conservative attempts to weaken or get rid of it? Is there some reason it has stayed in? How has it survived, I guess, is what I'm asking.

Peter Lehner

Look, I'm not the super political expert here, but what people have said who know this and have worked with this is, you essentially have a marriage. You have the Democrats that support the Nutrition Assistance Program, and by and large, Republicans support the farmer subsidies and neither has enough support to get either of those through separately. And in some ways there's something good there, which is that the Farm Bill has always been pretty bipartisan. And for example, right now Senator Stabenow, who is the Democratic Chair of the Senate AG Committee, and Senator Boozman who's the Republican ranking member of the Senate AG Committee, are really trying to work together because history is that this Farm Bill doesn't get passed unless it's bipartisan.

David Roberts

Definitionally it will have to be this time, right?

Peter Lehner

Exactly.

David Roberts

It's going to have to go through a Republican House and a Democratic Senate. I mean, is it viewed is it widely accepted as sort of must pass, like they are going to figure something out or is there any chance at all that it could just lapse?

Peter Lehner

I don't think there's really any chance it would just lapse because that would largely end these programs on which so many Americans, both the Americans who need it for food — and by the way, it's often thought of as though those are urban Americans and rural Americans are the farmers. That's not the case. There are people all around the country and in many places rural communities at even higher rates that depend on SNAP assistance, on food assistance. So this is really important to everybody. And of course producing food is important. So the farm safety net is important.

What could happen is, I suppose, even though I think both the House and the Senate agriculture leaders are saying they're going to work very hard to get a new Farm Bill out in the spring of 2024, if that doesn't happen, potentially they could just extend it for another year the way they just did.

David Roberts

That does seem like the way we do things.

Peter Lehner

Right. It's not ideal, but I don't think, and people who know this area better than I do, I don't think the chances of the law just ending completely is really in the cards.

David Roberts

So they're going to figure something out, so they're going to pass something. So this is a chance to get some good things through.

Peter Lehner

Right. And there's some good things in. And I should say one of the important elements here is the Inflation Reduction Act. And you've probably talked about that a lot and mostly focused on the many billions of dollars that went to clean energy programs. But the Inflation Reduction Act also put $20 billion into essentially Farm Bill programs, preexisting Farm Bill programs, which pay farmers to implement conservation measures. And those have always been oversubscribed, which means more farmers apply for this assistance than can get it. So the Inflation Reduction Act put an extra close to $20 billion over four years into these conservation programs, but with a twist, which we think is terrific.

Most of these conservation programs are for a wide range of resource concerns: water quality, air quality, habitat, and others. In the Inflation Reduction Act these have to be conservation practices focused on reducing net greenhouse gases.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Peter Lehner

So this was the first time — in the Inflation Reduction Act — that Congress really, in any way, really linked agriculture and climate change and said, "Here's $20 extra billion, but you got to spend it on climate change."

David Roberts

Right. So AG did not get completely overlooked then, in this last session, in this last round, because yeah, I hadn't really paid attention to that. I had kind of thought it was like the redheaded stepchild that got passed over. So there is $20 billion is not pocket change either.

Peter Lehner

No, it's a lot of money. As I said, right now, the core Farm Bill gives farmers about $20 billion in subsidies every year. But most of those subsidies are not for conservation programs. A lot of that is for what are called either commodity support, where essentially a farmer gets paid, based on what he grew in the past, if the market price or his revenue goes below a certain price. So it's essentially a price guarantee called the reference price.

David Roberts

It's an extremely Soviet sector of our economy.

Peter Lehner

Yeah. And it's largely almost three-quarters of that goes to corn and soybean, which of course, is largely used either for animal feed or for ethanol. And then we also have crop insurance, which, again, that makes a lot of sense. We all want to eat. We need food security, there should be crop insurance. In this case, the premiums are very heavily subsidized by the taxpayer. Over 60% subsidized. And again, over about three-quarters of crop insurance went to corn, soy, wheat and cotton, those four big crops. And what happens, the environmental impact of that is it encourages farmers to essentially plant in riskier areas, which tend to be the more ecologically sensitive areas, because if it works out, they get all the benefit, and if it doesn't work out, the taxpayer funded crop insurance pays them off.

David Roberts

Little moral hazard there.

Peter Lehner

Right, exactly. And then the last bit is these conservation programs, which got this big boost in the Inflation Reduction Act.

David Roberts

Is there any reason to think that that 20 billion is threatened in some way, or is that pretty secure? Is that part of the Farm Bill fight those subsidies?

Peter Lehner

You nailed it. Absolutely. Much of what we've been hearing are ideas of how to essentially — we think of it as a raid on that money, that $20 billion. And some would say, well, let's put it to a broader range of conservation issues like irrigation or something, and others would say keep it within agriculture, but instead let's use it to sort of lift, say, the price guarantee that peanut farmers get. And we have been pushing very hard to try to keep this money and keep it climate focused. And fortunately, Senator Stabenow, who, as I said, is the chair of the Senate AG Committee, has been very, very firm.

She has repeatedly said that it's not going to happen that we're going to lose this. Because this is really an extraordinary investment. It's big boost in conservation funding and the fact that it is climate focused is really important because this is where there has not been enough attention over the past and where there's really great opportunities. I think it's important just to pause for a moment and just remind there's a lot of things farmers can do, and some farmers are already doing, that can make a big difference in how much nitrous oxide you release, how much methane you release, how much carbon is stored in your soil. And the trouble is most of those practices are only used on about 2% or 3% of American farmland.

So we know what we want to do and this is a way to really accelerate the adoption of those practices.

David Roberts

So would you say that's the biggest priority here, the biggest fight, the biggest priority for the Farm Bill is preserving that money for its intended purpose?

Peter Lehner

Yes, with a slight caveat. One is we definitely want to save the Inflation Reduction Act money, but the Farm Bill money is separate. The Inflation Reduction Act directed additional money into Farm Bill programs. But the Farm Bill itself provides money. And so we're going to want to be sure that we continue what's called the baseline amount of funding for the conservation programs in the Farm Bill and ideally make sure that those are better targeted, also more closely targeted to climate issues. And actually the federal government itself, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resource Conservation Service has studied these practices that they're funding and they themselves have found that some of them are actually counterproductive.

Needless to say, we'd like to say let's not have the taxpayer subsidize practices that the government itself recognizes are counterproductive. Let's focus on the best practices, the ones that have the best climate and environmental impact. And since there's a lot of farmer interest in these, let's really put our money where it can make the biggest difference.

David Roberts

Yeah. So fights over the money and you mentioned also in your blogs on this subject, speaking of research, that AG research in general is undercooked, underfunded. Is there a chance to get more of that in the Farm Bill?

Peter Lehner

We are certainly hoping. And again, there's two or three elements of that under President Obama, he started these climate hubs which were really areas to focus on climate aspects of agriculture. There's been a lot of research but most of it has been on productivity and what you can think of as just classic conventional agriculture chemicals. So one is to get more research. Unfortunately, publicly funded research has dropped in the U.S. And when that gets its place taken by private funded research; it's not on things like climate change, it's on things like seeds that you can sell.

And then the other is that that research — so, we need more, we need it to be better focused on sustainable practices rather than on unsustainable practices. And we need it to be essentially guaranteed because research is a long-term process. If you just do it for a couple of years, you may not, especially in agriculture, things take time. And so, we need a long-term commitment to these climate hubs and to research and sustainable agriculture. There was a study done by, I think it was UC Davis — I'm not sure — that every dollar in agricultural research has over $20 in payback.

It's one of the most cost-effective ways we can spend research dollars. So that's a real opportunity for us.

David Roberts

And you also mentioned the crop insurance program, which I think most — even if you just explain that to a person on the street, the opportunities for that to encourage bad behavior seem quite obvious from the structure of the thing. Are substantial reforms to that on the table at all, or is that a subject of discussion?

Peter Lehner

I think it's a subject of some discussion and a lot of people in different ways want to make sure we get the best benefit. They recognize we do want crop insurance because it's important to recognize crops are sort of different. Most insurance is sort of trying to pool risk. So if my house burns down, I get covered. But if my house burns down, it probably doesn't mean your house is burning down. But with crops, if I have a bad crop, chances are my neighbor does too. That's why I think some amount of government involvement in crop insurance makes sense.

You really have to sort of spread the risk around. And of course, food security is really important for our country. So we want to keep crop insurance, but we also want to do it to incentivize behavior that minimizes risk. And in particular, as climate change is affecting farmers more and more with droughts and floods and changing weather patterns and increased pests, we'd like to ensure that our crop insurance system is encouraging farmers to use practices that minimize risk. Unfortunately, right now a lot of the practices that farmers use actually enhance risk. They make them more vulnerable to floods and droughts.

And the good news here is that many of the same practices that the Inflation Reduction Act will be funding that will help mitigate or curb climate change will also help farmers adapt or prepare for climate change or better respond and manage climate change. The same ones that mitigate can help build resilience. And that's a real opportunity.

David Roberts

And what about the Rural Energy for America program, REAP as it's called? This came up when I raised the subject on Twitter. This came up a couple of times. Is that on your radar?

Peter Lehner

It is not as much. So, I'm not an expert. But there again, there was money in the Inflation Reduction Act to help convert some of the rural energies, which I remember from my time working on energy are some of the dirtiest parts of the power sector and there's great opportunity in rural communities. One thing they have is a lot of land. And so it's a great opportunity to shift from, say, an old dirty coal plant to solar and wind. And I think that's what the Inflation Reduction Act funding will help accelerate.

David Roberts

And the final thing you mentioned in your blogs was transparency. This is another thing where on the energy side I've been following, there's a lot of talk about this, a lot of talk about like California just passed a law that forces large industrial users to report their scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. So there's a lot of work on transparency on the energy side, I'm guessing giant AG corporations are not super transparent. What can be done on that front?

Peter Lehner

Well, we need to keep pushing that. That is a real problem. And I think it's a problem both in the specifics that there's very little transparency and it's not over agriculture's contribution to climate change, but agriculture's conventional air pollution. I mentioned earlier that say these concentrated animal feeding operations are the country's largest sources of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, which are poisonous gases. And EPA for a long time exempted them from reporting under the federal statutes. And we actually sued EPA and said that exemption was illegal and the court agreed with us. And then the industry was powerful enough during the Trump administration to get Congress to amend the environmental laws —

David Roberts

Holy crap.

Peter Lehner

to exempt them from — and again, this is just reporting their poisonous emissions.

David Roberts

Is there any plausible cover story for that or is that just a pure power play like we don't want to?

Peter Lehner

It's hard not to see it as a power play because of course, reporting is, I think, by industry seen as the first step to potential oversight or regulation.

David Roberts

Heaven forbid.

Peter Lehner

We were talking earlier how nobody really understands how much agriculture contributes to climate change. And of course, if they don't understand that, there's going to be no pressure politically to address that contribution. And unfortunately, right now, agriculture doesn't have to report their greenhouse gas emissions. There's been a rider in Congress for almost a decade prohibiting EPA from making industrial agriculture report its greenhouse gas emissions. And there's already proposals in Congress that if the SEC rule requiring reporting ever comes out to try to exempt agriculture from that, there has been pushback in almost every way of having agriculture to report their emissions.

And the sad reality is these emissions are real. They're either causing climate change or they're causing local air pollution or both. And not reporting them doesn't mean they don't cause climate change. It just means we're not going to address them as effectively. So it's really important that people begin to understand that this is a sector that has tremendous impact and we've got to be much more open about it so that we can address it in a way that makes sense. And look, we all eat: We need to have a food sector. Nobody is saying that we should get rid of the food sector in any way.

Agriculture is super important, not only to the country overall, but to every state. But we also know enough today to be able to produce healthier food in a much more sustainable way.

David Roberts

Yeah, you've laid out some specific stuff that sort of climate aware people are pursuing here. Preserving the IRA money for conservation programs, beefing up those conservation programs, aiming those conservation programs more at climate change, beefing up research, reforming the federal crop insurance program, increasing transparency. Give me a sort of realpolitik assessment. How should we think about the chances of these good things happening? Unlike on the energy side, where nothing passing at all was always an extremely real and looming possibility here, something's got to pass. Right? So what do you think are the chances of this good stuff getting in there?

Like what's? Sort of the balance of political forces? And I'm thinking specifically about the House, the Republican House, which is, as you might have heard, insane and incompetent.

Peter Lehner

So I think breaking it into two pieces: Senator Stabenow is so strong on protecting the climate focused conservation funding of the Inflation Reduction Act that I would like to feel that we can think that that will remain. And that's really important. And that, of course, is going to be helping. I think it's important to remember this is money that then goes to hundreds of thousands of farmers who want to spend the money in good ways.

David Roberts

This is not against farmers. None of this is against farmers.

Peter Lehner

Not at all. More farmers have applied for these programs than could get it. Two out of three farmers in the past have been turned away because we didn't have enough money. So this is money that is going right to farmers doing exactly what they want and what we as a country want. So that's really great. I think 2018 may be a bit of a lesson for us. In 2018, the House of Representatives passed a Farm Bill with one party. The Republicans passed a very extreme Farm Bill, unlike any before. It had always been bipartisan in both houses.

And then the Senate sort of ignored that and passed a bipartisan bill that was really much, much better. And then the House came around and adopted the Senate bill. So I hope something like that may happen again. I think the Senate is going to be working hard to come up with a bipartisan bill that will make some climate improvements along the way. There's also, I should say, a long history of discrimination and of unequal access to Farm Bill programs for farmers of color. And this administration is doing a lot to try to address that, to really make sure the money is getting to farmers that have been underserved in the past.

And I think we will see some improvements on that score in the Senate Farm Bill. And my guess is that although there may be some noise at the House beforehand, one can be hopeful that at the end of the day, the House will go in the direction of a more reasonable bill from the Senate.

David Roberts

Yeah, it seems like clowning around and embarrassing themselves for a while and then just sheepishly doing what they should have done all along seems to be the pattern they've set so far. So maybe that'll happen again.

Peter Lehner

Yeah, that happened in 2018.

David Roberts

Yes, I know. It's like the House Republican special. I hate to be in a position where I'm depending on the U.S. Senate for anything good in life, but here we are. So a lot of this seems like I don't want to say small ball, but let's say there's nothing fundamental here on the table in the Farm Bill. We're nibbling around the edges, beefing up existing programs, tweaking existing programs. So I want you to imagine — free yourself from the fetters of politics for a while — imagine some bright future day when Democrats have another trifecta and they have, for whatever reason, power to do big things, another big swing at climate, because there are a lot, I think everybody sort of acknowledges, IRA was a big deal, but there are definitely pieces of the puzzle that IRA did not get to.

And so say there's Democratic majorities and Democratic will to do big things on climate in the next Farm Bill. Think big for me here, just for a few minutes. What kind of things would you like to see that would be more transformative?

Peter Lehner

Well, I would focus on two. One, I mentioned earlier we would have a crop insurance program that really benefits crop risk reducing behavior, which also is climate change mitigating behavior. And so instead of just having the conservation programs encouraging behavior or practices on farms that we want to encourage, you have the much bigger and much more important crop insurance program doing that.

David Roberts

And that's stuff like just rotating crops and —

Peter Lehner

Rotating crops, cover crops, adding trees to pasture land and to crops. Having a diversity. Part of the way you can be more resilient is having a diversity of crops if you have nothing but one crop, if there's any problem there, you're in big trouble. And diversity is both biologically much more stable, but it's also economically a lot more stable.

David Roberts

And we should note and this is, I guess, implied and obvious, but I'm just going to say it explicitly anyway if farmers were not completely insured against the risks of giant monocropping, they would naturally be moving towards more variety just to protect themselves, right? It's only because they are protected entirely by this crop insurance program that they're not buffering themselves more against risk in this way.

Peter Lehner

That's certainly what you're seeing, that the farmers that are using more sustainable approaches tend to be growing a much wider range of crops and products. So they have that economic as well as biological diversity. But the other big thing that would be great to change right now, the Farm Bill directly and indirectly, very heavily supports animal agriculture. And for the reasons that I mentioned, that is where most of the climate change contribution from agriculture comes from. It's the animal manure, it's the cows belching, it is the production of animal feed. And it's animal feed is very inefficient.

It takes about 15 pounds of grain to get a pound of beef. And corn is the most heavily fertilized with nitrogen fertilizer crop. And all of that nitrogen fertilizer, as I mentioned, not all of it, but a lot of it is running off as nitrous oxide. So all of this animal agriculture, which also uses up that 800 million acres of grazing land and therefore losing carbon, has this huge climate impact. It also, frankly, is unhealthy. It also isn't great for biodiversity.

David Roberts

Yeah, I mean, beef is bad. People hate to hear this and no one wants to say it publicly, but beef is bad down the line. Pick your lens: health, you know, ecology, economics, concentration of wealth. I mean, name it.

Peter Lehner

WRI has some great charts. They're a great organization that compares the climate, water and land use footprint of different foods. And you will see that beef is just far more than any other food that we have. So right now, the Farm Bill really heavily supports that and provides almost no support to plant-based alternatives to a healthier diet. And if you think of what we've done in the energy system, we tried to clean up coal plants, we tried to switch to inherently clean energy like solar and wind, and we tried to reduce demand by energy efficiency.

Right now, most of what we talk about in agriculture is just that first one, just trying to clean up existing production. We have to think about both shifting to inherently cleaner way of getting food and that is, for example, a plant-based diet or plant-based alternatives. And it doesn't have to be going vegan. This is just Americans eat many times more meat than any other culture. We could still have plenty of meat and eat much less than we are now, with much less of an impact. And the Farm Bill can make a big difference there.

People love to think that this is all cultural, but it's also economic. Right now, meat is cheap because taxpayers pay for a lot of the bill. And that can be balanced in a Farm Bill where taxpayer subsidies, the subsidies in the farm Bill are supporting a healthier, more climate friendly food system rather than a food system that is so focused on these products that have a very big climate impact.

David Roberts

Yeah, I hate that cultural argument. I just have to say you see that in transportation too. You have decades of public policy supporting automobile infrastructure such that average people just living normal lives have to drive all the time. And then you get a bunch of people saying, "oh, it's just cultural, Americans just like their cars." That's not really it. And I think it's really the same with beef. This whole idea that Americans just have some sort of inherent love of big steaks, big meat, it's so ridiculous. I always find that absurd, although that is a real third rail.

Peter Lehner

Yeah, that's where economics makes a difference. And right now, as I said, we're subsidizing foods that tend to have a larger environmental impact and frankly, are less healthy, and we could and should be subsidizing food that is healthier. For example, good old fruits and vegetables get comparatively much, much less support in the Farm Bill.

David Roberts

Yeah, that's crazy. When do you think, and this will really be the final question, but when I think about all the kind of cultural hot button issues that are involved in climate change and decarbonization, I mean, there are millions. Like, we just went through this gas stove nonsense last year. But no hot button issue is hotter of a button for some reason than diets and meat. Meat in diets is just like — we're talking about Oprah — just like you can't go there. So when do you think we'll reach a point where a mainstream politician will actually broach the subject, "hey, we should encourage Americans to eat less meat" and just say it outright?

Is that ever going to happen?

Peter Lehner

Well, Cory Booker is already saying that to some extent, and he's very aware of this impact. Part of the reason it gets so derailed is people tend to view it as an all or nothing. And we make food choices three times a day. There are a lot of chances to just slightly shift to a diet with more fruits and vegetables. And it doesn't have to mean you're going 100% vegan and just in the same way that we can shift our transportation system — and maybe you drive a little less and you take mass transit a little more — it doesn't mean you will never, ever get into a car again.

So I think the conversation about diets has been, unfortunately, torqued, and actually it makes even less sense. You will only buy a car maybe once every ten years, but, as I said, you make dietary choices three times a day, and you also have the health benefits of eating more fruits and vegetables. So it's a great opportunity. But again, I think it's important in terms of what policy can do is partly it's what foods say, for example, the federal government itself buys. But it's also in the farm Bill, which is so important to every environmental matter that we care about.

It can also be supporting healthier foods and more so than it does today. That way you'd have a farm Bill that is encouraging farmers to grow different foods in places with less environmental impact in a way that is more sustainable. And that's, again, it's why this Farm Bill, most people don't think about, has this environmental impact far in excess of virtually anything else that Congress will be addressing.

David Roberts

Awesome. Well, Peter, thanks so much for coming on. I've been meaning to do this for ages, and it sounds like this was the right time to do it. So thank you so much for clarifying this whole subject matter for me more. As you could tell, I wandered into it more or less ignorant. So this has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you for taking the time.

Peter Lehner

Thank you for your interest. It's great to spread the word on this; it's so important.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf. So that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe