Farming conservation funds earmarked in 2022 now being challenged in Congress

When Dan Janski, a 30-year-old farmer from South Haven, Minn., planted cover crops on his family’s Stearns County farm in 2016, he said it was a eureka moment.

“My experience with climate-smart financial assistance really was a light bulb effect,” Janski said. “One idea just sparked another.”

Janski, a fourth-generation crop farmer, said he uses cover crops to reduce erosion and capture as much water as he can, preventing runoff. In his words, it’s been “better by the land, better by wildlife.”

That experimentation was given a nudge from Uncle Sam when $20 billion was earmarked for climate-smart ag programs as a part of the $1 trillion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). So when some lawmakers in Congress recently suggested those climate-smart funds be doled out more broadly to any type of farming endeavor, Janski and others raised the alarm.

“Most of what they want to reduce is funding that supports conservation practices,” Janski said. “I just don’t think enough farmers have utilized them to understand [the programs].”

Elected representatives in Washington, D.C., are wrangling over whether any new farm bill should repurpose climate dollars given farmers by the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the IRA.

When the law passed in the fall of 2022, the IRA deposited $20 billion to so-called “climate smart” agriculture programs, including within the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a voluntary, working-lands program that pays farmers and ranchers to upgrade equipment or take on new techniques that both help the environment and keep an operation running.

Now some members of Congress, including the House Agriculture chair, Rep. Glenn “G.T.” Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican, say farmers should have access to any unspent dollars to use for programs beyond those designated by USDA as “climate-smart.”

Thompson, in an opinion piece last month, called the IRA a “partisan exercise spearheaded by Washington elites ignorant of the American farmer’s needs.”

Last week, Congress passed the latest USDA budget through September, shaving $26 million off funding for the previous year’s $900-million-plus account for NRCS, the program that funds the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which helped Janski start his cover-cropping practice.

Bridget Collins, a senior policy adviser for agriculture with the Nature Conservancy, called the IRA’s funding of climate-smart agriculture programs “generational,” noting that the USDA typically funds conservation programs at $6 billion annually.

“It’s a win-win for a producer’s operation,” said Collins, listing off the practices, from grazing management to no-till, funded by the program. “Typically there are three or four applications for every one that gets funded.”

At present, a farm bill -- which funds crop insurance to child nutrition and is expected to top $1.5 trillion -- remains far off. But Janski hopes Congress retains funding for farming practices that store carbon and clean up the water, as he evangelizes to other farmers about sustainable practices.

“Our striving goal every fall is to have every acre planted green,” Janski said, “so that we have something living in the soil all the time.”