Climate smart is game changer for U.S. agriculture

Date:10-25-2022

September 14, 2022 may go down as one of the most important dates in the history of U.S. agriculture. Rank it right up there with the moldboard plow, hybrid corn and mapping the genome. That’s the day Secretary Vilsack announced that USDA was awarding $2.8 billion to 70 different projects as part of its Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities program. This is the first round of funding–a second round should push the total investment to $3 billion and potentially beyond.

USDA has invested nearly $3 billion in climate-smart agricultural practices.

For several years, programs in the private sector have promoted food-chain-wide sustainable practices as a response to consumer-driven retail directives. A few verification processes have been put in place to validate the production practices, allowing retail brands to establish a point of differentiation on grocery shelves. In most instances, these are market-driven programs with little public intervention. When USDA made the commitment to invest nearly $2.8 billion into climate-smart agriculture, it jumped into the sustainability market in a big way.

In the announcement, Secretary Vilsack laid out the two-pronged approach that is the basis of the program: be the leader in climate-smart agricultural production and grow the market for those products. By doing this, USDA is taking a page from the private sector playbook: use and validate climate-smart practices to differentiate products from competitors.

Except the competitors aren’t two companies vying for the U.S. consumer pocketbook. For a long time, U.S. agriculture has relied on export markets to soak up excess supply and buoy American commodity markets. So the competition is with other countries in the acquisition of a larger share of the global food market.

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