The emphasis on monitoring, measurement and reporting that’s built into each of the projects in the five-year Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities initiative means that it will be well into the next president’s administration before the results can be fully assessed.
But it's not exactly clear how a second Donald Trump administration would approach the initiative should he win in November.
Trump has railed against Biden administration climate policies, dubbing them the “Green New Scam," and congressional Republicans have repeatedly criticized Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack for using his Commodity Credit Corporation spending authority to fund the projects.
But the Biden administration is counting on support from the agriculture community to ensure the projects are completed. Corporations, universities and non-profit organizations that include a broad array of farm groups are contributing significant funding to the projects to match the $3 billion provided by USDA.
“We want to build alliances with folks in agriculture and forestry so that they support this and that, hopefully, that manifests itself in Congress, administrations and elsewhere,” Robert Bonnie, USDA’s undersecretary for farm production and conservation, said in an interview with Agri-Pulse.
An underlying ambition of the program was to win enough support from partners across the ag sector and on both sides in Congress to sustain the program in the future. While Republicans have attacked the initiative's funding source, there has been little criticism of its partnership structure and overall aims, he noted.
The initiative has its roots in recommendations of the Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance, a coalition of farm groups and some environmental and conservation organizations that launched in November 2020, shortly after Biden’s election. In May 2021, the alliance issued a series of recommendations that included the idea of using a USDA-run “carbon bank” to fund pilot projects to establish carbon accounting guidelines and expand climate-friendly farming practices.Bonnie said that because funds for PCSC are already obligated to the projects it would be difficult for the next administration to try to claw them back.
Republican GOP lawmakers interviewed by Agri-Pulse indicated they didn’t have a clear idea on what the PCSC program’s future would look like under a second Trump administration.
The Senate Agriculture Committee's top Republican, John Boozman of Arkansas, said Trump is interested in ensuring farmers have tools to be resilient and successful and would take a “common sense” approach if elected.
North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven, who is the top Republican on the Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee as well as a member of the Senate Ag Committee, said the program's market focus may give it some appeal to a Trump administration, because it could generate new sales for the agriculture industry. But he said that anything that seems tied to progressive climate policy won’t catch on.
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“If there are ways to truly market and help farmers and ranchers in terms of marketing or with export markets, something like that, that's gonna have more traction than something that's framed as part of the Green New Deal,” Hoeven said. “That's just not gonna fly.”
Chuck ConnerChuck Conner, president and CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, noted the Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance was put together at a time when it was thought Trump had a good chance of winning the 2020 election.
He said the PCSC initiative is built around voluntary practices with incentives for farmers, which the Trump administration and its agriculture secretary would appreciate and want to carry on.
Bonnie believes the previous Trump administration’s record also suggests the initiative would have ongoing support, pointing out that then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue did “move the ball forward” in climate and conservation because of support from the agriculture community. He said he would hope for the same outcome with PCSC, if Trump is in office again.
In February 2020, Perdue announced an Agriculture Innovation Agenda that called for cutting U.S. agriculture's environmental footprint in half by 2050 while increasing production by 40%. Perdue said at the time that carbon pricing could encourage farmers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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