Agriculture

Please join the Agriculture Action Team in CCL Community

BCL Agriculture Sector Lead - Klaus Mager (klaus@foodwiththought.org)

Overview: Agriculture is affected by the changing climate more than most sectors of our economy. Agriculture and land use practices also have a profound role to play in climate change mitigation. Soil is holding 2-3 times more carbon than there is in the atmosphere, and regenerative practices can sequester gigatons of carbon. The sector contributes approximately 10% of total US CO2e emissions today, but has the capacity to go carbon negative, buying precious time to convert the energy systems towards carbon neutral. These agricultural and land-use practices also offer farmers and ranchers a way to adapt to the climate changes already occurring today.

Our Strategy: We are supporting two bills: For those farmers and ranchers who accept human-caused climate change, the EICDA represents a needed means of risk-reduction for the future. The EICDA will increase the input cost of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer made with natural gas, and of pesticides made from oil. As designed this will create market incentives to reduce fossil fuel based inputs.

The recently passed Growing Climate Solutions Act (GCSA) is a major piece of bipartisan climate legislation. Find the cross-industry list of GCSA supporters here.

The GCSA's purpose is to provide the legal and regulatory frame to establish voluntary carbon markets which pay farmers on a per ton basis for the sequestration of carbon into soil. It does this through the free market by removing barriers to the use of existing and future voluntary carbon markets to compensate and incentivize farmers for their costs and efforts to transition into regenerative practices.

Read more about support for the bill here.