Legislation aimed to influence the next Food and Farm Bill was reintroduced in Congress today, offering a science-backed road map for supporting farmers and their communities to adapt to a changing climate and increasingly extreme weather events. The Agriculture Resilience Act, introduced by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) with 24 House co-sponsors and eight co-sponsors in the Senate, would help farmers reduce heat-trapping emissions from agriculture and buffer farms from the effects of climate change already underway. The bill’s introduction follows the Rally for Resilience, which brought together hundreds of farmers from across the country to ask Congress to make the climate crisis a priority in the next Food and Farm Bill.
“Our current system of industrial corporate agriculture damages our soil, pollutes our air and water, and leaves our food system vulnerable to extreme weather, all while contributing to the climate crisis,” said Dr. Stacy Woods, research director for the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “It’s a vicious cycle that hurts small and midsize farmers most, especially Black and Indigenous farmers and rural communities. We can’t keep expecting farms to bounce back and maintain a functioning food system under a worsening climate crisis. The Agriculture Resilience Act provides a suite of tools, including research, technical assistance and financial support that farmers, especially beginning and underserved farmers, need to build more resilient farms that can withstand extreme weather and be part of the climate solution.”
The Agriculture Resilience Act would dramatically increase investments in proven, but underfunded, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) conservation, technical assistance and research programs, with the goal of quadrupling food and agriculture research by 2040. The research would focus on topics like climate change adaptation and mitigation, soil health and carbon sequestration. The bill would provide grants to state and tribal governments to implement soil health management programs, prioritize funding for climate change adaptation and climate mitigation within proven voluntary conservation programs, and provide funding to reduce food waste and develop on-farm renewable energy.
“Research shows that existing voluntary USDA conservation programs are incredibly effective at helping farmers adopt practices with major benefits for them and their communities, but demand for these programs far outstrips current funding,” said Dr. Omanjana Goswami, interdisciplinary scientist in the Food and Environment Program at UCS. “This bill would invest in supporting farmers to adopt proven, science-backed practices like cover cropping, which builds healthier, spongier soil that holds more water, grows more resilient crops, needs less fertilizer and stores more carbon. Farmers know this, but cover cropping is used on less than 4 percent of U.S. cropland.”
The bill would also prioritize the emerging field of sustainable nutrition science—research at the intersection of agricultural production, climate change, soil health and human health—by funding projects supported by the USDA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) and Research, Education, and Economics mission area.
"Industrial corporate agricultural practices degrade our environment and our health, producing an overabundance of cheap food with little to no nutritional value at a massive cost to our health care system and planet,” said Dr. Alice Řezníčková, interdisciplinary scientist in the Food and Environment Program at UCS. “Sustainable nutrition science research can help solve some of our biggest challenges by exploring how to produce nutritious food in ways that are more sustainable for the planet and workers. This bill reimagines agricultural research by adding sustainable nutritional science as a clear priority, with specific focus on climate and equity.”
Analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that from fiscal years 2016 through fiscal year 2019, less than 25 cents of every thousand dollars in federal research funding went to research that addressed the joint climate and nutrition crises by making the U.S. food system healthier and more sustainable. The ARA would build on recent promising investments in this area of research through AFRI’s Sustainable Agriculture Systems Program.