USDA will soon announce another round of climate smart ag projects to receive funding. Secretary of Ag Tom Vilsack mentioning those projects during the recent 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference. The first round of climate-smart ag funding awarded $2.8 billion to 70 projects. Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation Robert Bonnie says, “These are projects for historically underserved producers, smaller producers, efforts to get smaller farmers more innovative approaches together. So that’s coming out soon.” Bonnie says the programs will reward farmers who are early adopters and already have some of the climate-smart practices in place.
There was also 20 billion dollars of conservation funding in the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law in August. He says, “We’re going to take some public input on it. But we’re already working on ways to deploy those resources, our hope is early in the new year, to be able to start to get those programs up to the state to be able to deploy those to farmers, so coming coming quickly, this winter.”
USDA also announced additional disaster assistance with Phase Two of the Emergency Relief Program. FSA Administrator Zach Ducheneaux says Its revenue-based targeting crops not eligible under ERP One. “It will look at the revenue impact of climate related disasters for the years in question between 2020 to 2021. And ERP Phase 2 is going to pay based on that number, the difference between a typical year and the impacted year.” So far UDSA has paid out $7.1 billion for ERP one and ELRP for livestock.
Ducheneaux says it was announced along with the Pandemic Assistance Revenue Program. “It’s also going to be a revenue-based approach which will let producers choose either 2018, 2019 and measure the impact on their revenue for 2020 because of the pandemic.”
Ducheneaux also tells AgDay the agency is working to address the concerns red flagged by the Government Accountability Office about USDA making payments to ineligible producers in the initial COVID assistance program.
