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Invest in Our Land crop installation promotes climate-smart ag

Farmers continue to make investments in conservation that both improve on-farm resilience and mitigate climate change.  Lindsey Shapiro is the farm bill campaign organizer with Pasa Sustainable Agriculture. “A lot of them are very traditional classic conservation programs and practices that just have the added benefit of also, you know, sequestering carbon and in building on farm resilience,” she says.   

A crop art installation at Ag Progress Days, held in Pennsylvania, helped highlight those climate-smart practices that have been funded through the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. It took Stan Herd, the world-famous artist who created the piece, about 30 days to create.  He says the goal of the art piece is to encourage farmers to adopt climate-smart ag practices. ,

She tells Brownfield the IRA is a sound investment of government dollars. “Being able to support farmers and doing things on the ground that they want to do,” she says.  “But also playing an important role in helping to mitigate climate change is you get even more bang for your buck.”

Shapiro says her group sees the climate-smart list from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service as an opportunity for more farmers in her area to participate. “The NRCS programs tended to be larger contracts that were funded through NRCS and they didn’t leave a lot of resources left for a big swath of farmers in Pennsylvania,” she says.

Republican members of both the U.S. House Agriculture Committee and the U.S. Senate Ag Committee have pushed to reallocate the money to all conservation programs, not just those with climate-related requirements. 

AUDIO: Lindsey Shapiro, Pasa Sustainable Agriculture