Articles Tagged with ''CCC''

The Department of Agriculture is distributing $1.5 billion to the nation’s school meal program operators to help them deal with supply chain challenges that are driving up costs.

Successive presidents have ramped up use of a Depression-era tool, USDA's Commodity Credit Corp., to pour billions of dollars into their policy priorities with limited input from Congress. Republicans, who handcuffed Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack's use of the CCC for years, are less resistant now.

Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack announces plans to finance a series of large-scale projects on climate-smart farming and forestry practices. He's also tapping his Commodity Credit Corp. spending authority to promote drought resilience, combat African swine fever, and assist farms and schools with supply chain disruptions.

Robert Bonnie, President Joe Biden’s pick to oversee USDA’s farm and conservation programs, insisted Thursday that the administration has the legal authority to use the Commodity Credit Corp. to incentivize climate-friendly farming practices.

Lawmakers are going to be looking into concerns that meatpackers are using their market power to drive down prices paid to producers.

Senate Democrats are proposing to create a new tax credit for clean fuels as part of a package of tax incentives intended to address climate change.

A broad coalition of farm and conservation groups says a USDA-run carbon bank should be used to test ways to establish carbon accounting guidelines, expand the use of climate-friendly farming practices and enable small-scale farms and minority producers to benefit from carbon markets.

A new report from the AGree coalition recommends alternatives for the Agriculture Department to consider in setting up a carbon bank that could be used to develop private credit markets and to assist producers who may be left out of them.

President Joe Biden's $2.7 trillion infrastructure plan would address some long-standing needs in rural America with substantial new funding for roads, bridges, waterways and broadband, but the plan doesn't provide the major boost in farm conservation spending that many ag groups say is needed to get more farmers to adopt climate-smart practices.

A priority for the USDA in the coming years will be judging the feasibility of setting up, executing and paying for a federal carbon bank to help farmers reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reward them for their actions, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Monday.