Mother Jones
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Imagine you’re a policy maker in a large country in an era of increasing climate instability—more floods and droughts, driven by steadily increasing average temperatures. And say the policy you make largely dictated the way your country’s farmers grow their crops. Wouldn’t you push for a robust, climate change-ready agriculture—one that stores carbon in the soil, helping stabilize the climate while also making farms more resilient to weather extremes?
There’s no real mystery about how to achieve these goals. I profiled a farmer last year named David Brandt who’s doing just that with a few highly imitable techniques (spoiler: crop rotation and cover crops), right in the middle of Big Corn country. This peer-reviewed 2012 Iowa State University study tells a similar tale. The question is, how to turn farmers like Brandt from outliers into to trendsetters—from the exception to the rule. The obvious lever would be the farm bill, that twice-a-decade omnibus legislation that shapes the decisions of millions of farmers nationwide, while also funding our major food-aid program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which used to be called food stamps.
Well, after more than a year of heated debate, Congress has finally cobbled together a new farm bill, one likely to be signed into law soon by President Obama. Unfortunately, the great bulk of that debate didn’t focus how to steer the country’s agriculture through the trying times ahead. Instead, it concerned how much to cut food aid for poor people. The Democrats wanted relatively minor cuts; the Republicans, animated by the tea party wing, wanted draconian ones. The (relatively) good news: the new bill will cut SNAP by $9 billion over the next decade, vs. the $40 billion demanded by austerity-obsessed GOP backbenchers. My colleague Erika Eichelberger has more on this sad business of pinching food aid at a time of record poverty.
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