NAAA eNewsletter - 02/25/2022

The Agriculture Department (USDA) recently announced $1 billion in funding for a program aimed at helping farmers and forest landowners combat climate change by sinking more carbon into the ground. The program, Partnership for Climate Smart Commodities, will use funding from the Commodity Credit Corporation to establish climate pilots across the country—a major step in the Biden administration’s push to leverage agriculture as part of the solution on climate change. According to the EPA, the sector contributes about 10% of the country’s overall emissions.

The overall goal of the climate pilots is to implement climate-smart conservation practices on working farms and forests (such as no-till, cover crops, rotational grazing, reforestation) and then actually measure and verify the climate benefits of those practices, whether it’s sinking carbon into soils, capturing methane or releasing less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The third component is to “develop markets and promote the resulting climate-smart commodities,” per the USDA’s announcement.

The USDA defines a “climate-smart commodity”—a relatively new term—as an “agricultural commodity that is produced using agricultural (farming, ranching or forestry) practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions or sequester carbon.” Climate-smart marketing claims are already starting to pop up on food packages, along with other climate-related claims, such as low-carbon or carbon positive. The department appears to be going down a road of trying to formalize some of these claims so they have legitimacy and so farmers can potentially benefit from premium prices.

Funding will be available in two rounds. The first round, due April 8, will focus on larger projects worth over $5 million. A second round, due May 27, is for smaller projects that cost $250,000 to $5 million. A broad range of entities is eligible to apply, from state and local governments to commodity groups, businesses and tribal governments and nonprofits.

Over the past year NAAA has detailed to the USDA how aerial application is already a commonly used climate-smart farming practice. Using data presented at the 2020 Ag Aviation Expo by Dr. Senarath Dharmasena and data from the 2019 NAAA Operator Survey, NAAA calculated that the efficacy and timeliness of aerial applications protect 27.4 million acres of land from being converted into farmland every year. This protection occurs because of the higher yield benefit of aerial application, which would require additional cropland to make up the yield loss if aerial application was no longer an option. NAAA has also communicated to the agency that aerial application provides four times the productivity of ground rigs for conventional broadcast applications and 30 times the productivity of airblast sprayers for orchard applications. NAAA explained how this superior productivity helps to manage pesticide resistance and increase the efficiency of pesticides. The latest climate change research shows that increasing pesticide efficiency helps farmers adopt reduced tillage systems that can lower carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Precision agriculture also increases the efficiency of pesticide applications, and the numerous precision agriculture technologies used in aerial application, including GPS, flow control systems, prescription mapping and onboard weather monitoring, have been explained to the agency.

The other big contribution aerial application makes to improving the environment is by seeding cover crops. The cover crops seeded by aerial applicators sequester 1.9 million metric tons of CO2 annually, which would be the equivalent of removing approximately 412,000 cars with carbon-combustion engines from the roads each year. Climate change research has shown that growing cover crops on an additional 15% of U.S. cropland would further sequester 11.9 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent annually. NAAA has pointed out to the agency that because aerial application of cover crops can occur while the cash crop is still standing, it offers a significant advantage over ground seeding in terms of establishing a healthy cover crop.