The Department of Agriculture said Wednesday it will establish a monitoring and data collection network to measure greenhouse gas emissions and determine how much carbon can be sequestered using certain farming practices.
The network, which uses $300 million in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, will help measure the results of so-called climate-smart or regenerative agricultural practices, a cornerstone of the department’s approach to responding to a warming planet. The research and data collected will also be important in measuring progress on President Biden’s goal of cutting greenhouse emissions in half by the end of the decade.
“It’s not just about promoting climate-smart agriculture, it’s not just about promoting sound science,” Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, said at a news conference Tuesday before the announcement. “It’s also about expanding sources of income for small and medium-sized producers.”
The Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping climate, tax and health measure Mr. Biden signed into law last year, earmarked about $20 billion to support existing agricultural conservation programs that encourage practices such as sowing crops and not tilling the soil. The department also provided billions in additional funding to agricultural projects that reduce emissions, in part by capturing carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases, from the atmosphere and storing it as carbon in the soil .
But skeptics warn that the effectiveness of these farming methods in mitigating climate change is unproven. Researchers have not determined, for example, how much carbon can be stored in the soil and for how long.
The $300 million investment aims to address the scientific uncertainty surrounding these practices. It will establish a network to analyze how carbon is taken from the soil across the country, create another dedicated to greenhouse gas emissions, and improve models to better measure agricultural conservation programs.
Construction of the networks will take place over the next eight years, and the Department of Agriculture will make the data public a year after collection, a spokesman said.
Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit advocacy organization, welcomed the move, calling the investment “a very important foundation that we should have laid 20 years ago.”
“We’re making the most of the tens of billions of conservation dollars we’re spending because we just don’t know which practices reduce emissions,” he added. “That’s a massive, existential, putting-the-planet-at-risk problem that the USDA is starting to address.”
Currently, the agricultural sector is responsible for about 10 percent of emissions nationwide, according to government data. But existing data collection systems contain gaps, are either outdated, or don’t provide details of individual farming practices, said William Hohenstein, director of the Department of Agriculture’s office of energy and environmental policy. .
The announcement comes as several Republican lawmakers is seeking to withdraw $20 billion in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act focused on agricultural conservation.
Mr. Vilsack warned that returning such funding would be a “huge mistake” because later initiatives, such as data collection networks, could encourage investment or growth in certain agricultural practices. More accurate measurements of their impacts could lead to more market opportunities for farmers from the government and private sector, he said. Those could take the form of higher prices for carbon credits or conservation easements, for example.
“We will collect a large amount of information, which will allow us in a consistent way to strengthen the credibility of the information provided, which in turn creates more confidence, which allows the markets that have developed, resulting in greater adoption and income opportunities for farmers, ranchers and producers, all of which also help create jobs in rural areas,” said Mr. Vilsack.
