Biden’s climate-smart ag program was better than nothing. Trump killed it.

The ​“Eating the Earth” column explores the connections between the food we eat and the climate we live in.

Farms are a huge climate problem, so it was great that the Biden administration made a huge commitment to ​“climate-smart agriculture.” But some details of its first $3 billion initiative to make agriculture climate-smarter were not so great.

The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, launched by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in early 2022, provided generous grants to America’s least cash-strapped agribusinesses, including Archer Daniels Midland, JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and PepsiCo, as well as America’s most influential farm groups, representing corn, soybeans, cotton, pork, and dairy. A few of its 135 projects actually looked climate-harmful, financing emissions-boosting pseudo-solutions like biofuels, manure digesters, and grass-fed beef.

Far too many grants went to scientifically controversial efforts to sequester carbon in farm soils through trendy ​“regenerative” practices like planting cover crops and reducing tillage, and not enough flowed to simpler, evidence-backed strategies to reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions. And the Biden USDA’s well-intentioned efforts to make sure a large portion of the grants went to smaller farms, specialty crops, sympathetic nonprofits, and traditionally underserved communities often seemed to take precedence over reducing emissions.

I wrote a skeptical column about then-President Joe Biden’s climate-smart approach back in 2022, so I had mixed feelings when the Trump administration cancelled the climate-smart commodities program this April. It was clearly a flawed program. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had a point when she mocked it as slow and bureaucratic. While her primary complaint that it didn’t send enough money directly to farmers wasn’t my primary complaint — USDA sends plenty of money directly to farmers! — even some Trump-hating advocates of sustainable farming agreed with her critique of its ​“sky-high administration fees.”

But no one truly believes the program’s cancellation had much to do with flaws in its design or execution. Its fatal flaw, from the Trump perspective, was obviously its climate-smart premise; Rollins slagged it as ​“largely built to advance the green new scam,” in violation of ​“Trump administration priorities.” Those priorities are not a secret: This administration doesn’t believe agriculture policy should have anything to do with the climate, which is why it scrubbed the word ​“climate” from USDA’s website. It doesn’t care that agriculture generates one-fourth of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Nobody who’s concerned about the planet should be happy that an imperfect agricultural program was cancelled for the sin of trying to reduce agricultural emissions. As University of Iowa economist Silvia Secchi, one of the program’s harshest critics, puts it, ​“Regardless of my opinion of these grants, it makes no sense to kill them before we learn anything.” The Environmental Working Group published an analysis last year attacking Biden’s climate-smart approach, but vastly prefers it to Trump’s screw-the-climate approach. ​“Even if we didn’t love where all the money was going, it was better than just giving farmers subsidies,” says the group’s Midwest director, Anne Schechinger.

When President Donald Trump commits egregious transgressions — deporting a Venezuelan hairdresser to El Salvador or investigating the mayor of Chicago for bragging about his diverse staff — pundits often try to look balanced by criticizing the suboptimal behaviors he uses as excuses: Biden neglected the border; DEI went too far. There’s a reluctance to simply say: This is egregious.

Well, I spent the last six years reporting a book on how to feed the world without frying it, and I’ll say this: Trump’s belief that we shouldn’t even try is egregious. Biden and his team deserve credit for making climate-smart a priority. Trump’s USDA agreed to keep funding some of the climate-smart grants after farm groups protested their cancellation, but it’s not calling them climate-smart anymore, and it won’t pursue climate-smart investments in the future. It’s defiantly climate-dumb.

But I’ve also pointed out that it’s boring to harp on the badness of a climate-denial administration doing climate-denial things. And there are lessons we can learn from the politics and substance of the climate-smart partnerships — about mistakes that shouldn’t be repeated, and at least one remarkable success story that should be expanded worldwide.

What is climate-smart ag? A federal experiment to find out is over.

In my book, I tell the tale of a big internal Biden administration fight over climate-smart agriculture that never made it into the public eye.

On one side was then-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who wanted to pay farmers to adopt regenerative practices — like keeping soils covered and minimizing soil disturbance — that he believed would sequester carbon in their soils and help reverse climate change. He loved the idea of fifth-generation Republican dirt farmers who wore John Deere hats and drove Ford F-150s embracing kinder and gentler approaches to their land that would help them earn a premium for sustainably grown commodities and sell soil-carbon credits as an extra crop.

On the other side was White House climate aide David Hayes, who thought soil carbon was wildly overhyped — by the United Nations, environmentalists, foundations who seemed to cough up cash whenever they heard the word ​“regenerative,” celebrity-studded documentaries like ​“Kiss the Ground,” and even Big Ag and Big Food conglomerates eager to claim climate benefits for regenerative practices in their supply chains. Hayes pushed for at least half the climate-smart grants to go to less scientifically controversial efforts to reduce methane and nitrous oxide, which make up more than half of direct farm emissions.

Hayes was right about the science. It’s extraordinarily difficult to measure soil carbon accurately or ensure it remains underground. It’s also extraordinarily difficult to build more soil carbon without adding more nitrogen in the form of fertilizer or manure, which have negative climate impacts of their own. Indigo Ag, a carbon-market leader that announced a plan in 2019 to help regenerative farmers sequester a trillion tons of soil carbon, has gotten less than one one-millionth of the way to that goal. Regenerative agriculture also tends to produce less food per acre, which means it requires more acres to produce the same amount of food, which means it accelerates the global march of farmland into carbon-rich forests and wetlands.

“There’s just too much excitement about soil carbon,” Hayes told me.

But Vilsack won on the politics. Most of the climate-smart grants promoted regenerative practices designed to move atmospheric carbon underground and help build new markets where farmers could sell soil-carbon credits — and the same was true for another $20 billion steered toward climate-smart agriculture by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Cover crops and no-till were by far the best-funded practices, even though there’s at best mixed evidence that they can sequester much carbon. Biden even dropped a prime-time plug for cover crops into his first address to Congress.

If USDA’s soil-carbon obsession started the program on the wrong track, it strayed even further from its climate-smart mission by insisting that 40% of its grants go to underserved communities, and by promoting regenerative hemp, regenerative sorghum, and dozens of other alternatives to big row-crop commodities. Some of the resulting projects were just weird. One $20 million regenerative grant was divided among small farmers in New York, minority farmers in North Carolina, wine growers in California, and a nonprofit called Nature for Justice, as well as traditional big corn and soy producers in the Midwest and the giant agribusiness Corteva. It was hard to see a coherent strategy behind the grant, beyond spreading money across the country and checking all the Biden team’s priority boxes. In any case, the Trump team has cancelled it, along with dozens of other grants that explicitly prioritized equity and diversity.