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The Biden administration set out to make American farmers and farming methods central in its plans to address the climate crisis, but is instead spending billions of dollars on agricultural practices that have questionable benefits and, in some cases, may contribute to more greenhouse gas emissions.

Two new reports, published in the last week, build on previous analyses showing that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is directing funding and resources toward methane-reducing programs that may increase methane emissions, and “climate smart” farming practices that, in fact, may not be smart for the climate.

One report, from the Environmental Working Group (EWG), reviewed certain practices that the USDA recently added to its list of those eligible for millions in funding through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), one of the largest conservation programs the USDA oversees and a major beneficiary of taxpayer dollars.

Some of these practices, the group’s analysis says, don’t have climate benefits—and farmers soon could be getting more money for them through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which directs nearly $20 billion to farming practices that demonstrate a measurable climate improvement. Roughly $8.5 billion of that will go toward EQIP practices on the climate smart list. 

A second report from Friends of the Earth and Socially Responsible Agriculture Project says that the USDA’s spending on methane digesters, from the IRA and other conservation programs, has had the perverse effect of making dairy herds larger, which in turn produces more methane. 

Earlier this month,15 members of Congress wrote to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, criticizing the agency’s decision to add certain waste management practices, including equipment for biogas capture and waste separation facilities—things mostly used by large, industrial farms—to its climate smart list. 

While many environmental and farm groups have been critical of subsidies for digesters, which capture methane and turn it into biogas, the authors of the new report say they’re the first to link government-funded incentives with the expansion of dairy farms. The report, “Biogas or Bull****?,” says that herd sizes at facilities with digesters grew nearly 4 percent, year over year—24 times the growth rate for the overall herd sizes in the states they analyzed.

“This is some of the first quantitative evidence supporting the notion that digesters – in combination with policies that reward biogas production – drive an increase in herd sizes,” said Chloe Waterman, a senior program manager at Friends of the Earth. “Adding more animals to [concentrated animal feeding operations] exacerbates the harms of factory farming, including pollution, climate emissions and public health risks. This adds to the evidence that manure biogas undermines the administration’s climate and environmental justice commitments.”

The report notes that the Biden administration has signed onto the Global Methane Pledge, committing to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. But the findings suggest that even the administration’s optimistic estimates on agricultural methane reductions from digesters, which currently fail to account for the expansion in herd sizes, will fall short of that goal.

In response to questions from Inside Climate News, the USDA noted that most of the agency’s funding under the Rural Energy for America Program has gone to solar and energy efficiency improvements, and that it has funded 65 digesters so far.

The reports come two weeks after the USDA released its agriculture census, a survey done every five years. It found the number of big livestock facilities has grown, while small and mid-scale farms are going out of business. American agriculture is responsible for about 10 percent of the country’s total emissions, and raising livestock or grain to feed them is responsible for the majority of that total. Much of that comes from methane burped by cows, but when animals are raised in confinement facilities in large numbers, their manure generates additional methane in giant storage lagoons.

In 2022 EWG, a group that has long been critical of the USDA over its handling of taxpayer money, particularly for environmental programs and subsidies, looked into the agency’s track record of spending on climate smart practices. It found that the USDA gave $7.4 billion to farmers through its five major conservation programs from 2017 to 2020, but only a small percentage of that went toward climate-focused practices. 

The new research looked at 15 recent additions to the list of approved “climate smart” practices and found that those additional practices either don’t have climate benefits or could incentivize the build-out of bigger farms responsible for more climate pollution. Some of these additions involve irrigation equipment and waste storage facilities meant to improve manure handling.

“Eight of them are methods for irrigation and livestock management that likely don’t reduce emissions,” the report said. “One even increases emissions, according to USDA’s own data.”

(The report points out that “waste storage facility,” a structure that contains animal waste, increases greenhouse gas emissions, according to USDA’s own data.”)

Some of these newly designated practices are already getting most of the EQIP funding, making it appear that a bigger chunk of conservation dollars is going toward farming practices that have a positive climate impact than actually is.  EWG’s 2022 analysis found that 31 percent of EQIP funding went toward “climate smart practices between” 2017 and 2022. The agency’s additions to the list make it appear that 63 percent went to climate smart practices—a recalculation that EWG says misrepresents the agency’s spending to address climate change, because many of the practices added to the list have questionable climate benefits, EWG says

“Non-IRA, traditional farm bill EQIP money already funds these practices,” said Anne Schechinger, EWG’s Midwest director and author of the report. “So USDA could study the practices funded through that source of money to evaluate if they have climate benefits, without sending them funding from the IRA that is only supposed to go to practices that reduce emissions or sequester carbon in soil.”

EWG’s research was based on multiple Freedom of Information Act requests. In their communications with the agency, EWG also asked the USDA to clarify its methodology and data for determining what constitutes a climate smart practice, but did not get a response.

As the USDA was considering the new additions to the list last fall, an agency spokesman responded to a question from Inside Climate News about the process, noting that the agency has a thorough public review period.

“Since day one of this Administration, USDA has been dedicated to advancing climate-smart agriculture practices that help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon, and supporting their adoption by producers across the country,” said USDA press secretary Allan Rodriguez, in an emailed statement. “Unfortunately, EWG did not take into account the rigorous, science-based methodology used by USDA to determine eligible practices, nor the level of specificity required during the implementation process to ensure the practices’ climate-smart benefits are being maximized. As a result, the findings of this report are fundamentally flawed, speculative, and rest on incorrect assumptions around USDA’s selection of climate-smart practices. 

Schechinger explained that she did not take USDA’s data into account because the agency hasn’t made it public, despite her requests.

“The reason we did not take into account the science-based methodology used by USDA or the level of specificity about practice implementation is because this information is not publicly available,” Schechinger explained. “We can’t account for scientific literature that has not been made publicly available by USDA.”

In a statement, the  agency said it  is “in the process of making publicly available the underpinning literature, methodology, and assumptions for the inclusion of these practices.”