USDA's Robert Bonnie Talks Climate Smart Agriculture, Carbon and More
Undersecretary Robert Bonnie
Robert Bonnie is Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm Production and Conservation (FPAC) at USDA. He grew up on a farm in Kentucky and has a long list of experience at USDA, including the position of Undersecretary for Natural Resources and the Environment under the Obama administration.
What are your goals for 2022?
We’ve been busy getting pandemic assistance and a lot of other programs out this year. As we look to 2022, we have some disaster dollars that are important to distribute. Obviously, we’ll continue to execute on USDA’s farm programs. We also have some things we want to do on the climate side as well.
Climate smart agriculture is all the buzz, but what does it really mean?
In some cases, climate smart agriculture could be producers who want to make their operations more resilient to drought. For others it could be farmers who are more interested in the mitigation side of reducing greenhouse gases. We see it as broad ranging and locally led. This is going to be voluntary. It’s going to be incentive based and market oriented.
Do you think the Commodity Credit Corporation could be a way to pay for some of that work?
The opportunity is around how do we create new markets by incentivizing climate smart commodities. We think there’s an opportunity to help finance the deployment of climate smart practices as part of commodity production and do it in a way that creates new opportunities. We know when you change a practice there are potential risks associated with it. We want to help finance those decisions.
Where do you think USDA fits in the development of carbon markets?
Folks might not know USDA provides a lot of data that tends to be used in these markets. We don’t want USDA to compete with the market. What we’d like to do is enhance it so more private investment comes into agriculture. There’s also a longer-term conversation about standards — the methodology and standards used. We don’t want to look like it’s a regulatory approach. I do think there’s a conversation with agriculture to be had about how do we remove some of the perceived chaos in the market and make it simpler for producers?
Are there blind spots in research that you’re hoping to remove?
We need to do a better job of tracking what agriculture and forestry are already doing. Agriculture is actually doing well in some places, but we don’t have the data to track it because we’re not doing the intensity of surveys we need, or we don’t understand where all the conservation practices are being applied. So, we need to do a better job of beefing up that data so we can make a better case on behalf of U.S. agriculture and more importantly, so we can provide better information to producers. There are also new technologies. We want to research and explore those things, so we understand them better and can provide more opportunities for agriculture to engage in them.
