Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in September unveiled a $3 billion fund seeding 70 “climate-smart” projects that reward farmers and corporations.
ADM, Tyson, Cargill, Edge Dairy, Iowa Select, the Iowa Soybean Association, the National Corn Growers, Iowa State and Purdue, Renewable Energy Group and others are leading or collaborating on projects ranging from $5 million to $100 million.
They involve paying farmers to plant cover crops, finding markets for “climate-smart” commodities, creating carbon markets, creating natural gas markets from manure digesters, carbon pipelines and more.
The Biden Administration tripled its investment in climate smart ag (CSA) with its announcement of the pilot projects financed through the Commodity Credit Corporation.
It’s a big deal — $3 billion is enough to get your attention through executive action.
Remember that the Trump Administration pumped at least $60 billion through the CCC to buy off soybean growers so we could fight a trade war with China. By comparison, the Biden ante on climate is small potatoes.
It’s enough sugar to get the corporations on board. The projects acknowledge that we cannot do anything in America without corporations. Regulation is off-limits — that is well-established political and legal gospel since Ronald Reagan. So we will send millions to ADM to get its contracted producers on board with CSA — however CSA is defined. Research universities controlled by Bayer have their hands on the wheels in these projects, ExxonMobil is a partner, and there’s no question that ethanol/pork/pipeline prince Bruce Rastetter figures to make a buck or two somewhere. Stine Seed is involved. It’s a who’s who of agribusiness.
That’s what it takes to grease the wheels.
A farmer operates within his chain. You raise corn for the chemical companies and pork for the meat complex. The government insures you and incentivizes you, and all your talking with the banker is predicated on it. You cannot change without permission.
When Cargill thinks cover crops are okay, the farmer can think that way. It reassures the ag loan officer when Farm Journal, a climate-smart partner, says it is the way to go.
When ADM eases out corn ethanol, it figures out another angle. Perhaps biomass to drive hydrogen production?
The traders will get theirs. That’s how America works.
Tom Vilsack and Joe Biden are go-along get-along fellows. They don’t want to upset the apple cart, just steer it.
Sure, it’s pork for the consolidators who got us where we are, spilling soil and choking on nitrate and losing farmers like so many cockleburs. Bill Gates will make a bundle as America’s largest farmland owner.
You can bet there will be a Solyndra in the mix — a bad bet that will be made to sound colossal by the spin machine. That’s why they call them pilot projects. There will be an environmental disaster from some manure project. And every partner will have to get what they believe is their share. If there are 70 projects, there are at least half as many investigative grift stories to be told about who gets what and how.
A lot of good stuff — exciting, even — is in there. Special help for disadvantaged farmers (we’ll see how much actually trickles down to Blacks in Georgia working in a chicken barn). There’s something called biochar — the refuse from heating biomass almost to the point of combustion to produce hydrogen — that offers tremendous possibilities for building soil health and crop productivity while burying carbon. It’s a start.
If paying farmers for environmental services is deemed a good thing by the lords of food and chemicals, it has a chance of actually getting written into the next Farm Bill even with Republican control of the House. The pilot programs that actually work can be incorporated into legislation when all the corporate cash is lined up behind them. Vilsack is cutting in the capital players on the front-end.
On first blush, it makes one deeply uncomfortable that the fox is running the henhouse. He is far less likely to eat the eggs if the fox remains otherwise well-fed. That must be the logic of it. We all know it has been so for the past half-century anyhow — that the money calls the shots, when corporations are defined by the Supreme Court as people in a Republic of and for the people. There will be regional food pilots, too, that will bloom in a flourish of hope for sustainable production diversity and fade for lack of oxygen in a system controlled by the few. If you want to dance, you have to pay the band. The price is $10 million here and $5 million there. You pray it adds up to a change in direction while we can still grow corn.
Art Cullen is the publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot. He won the the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 2017 and is the author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.” Cullen can be reached at times@stormlake.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2022
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