Climate-smart agriculture is the future of food production. Here’s what that means.

Last week, US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack was in Denver to discuss significant federal funds coming to Colorado to support climate-smart agriculture – an initial investment of $2.8 billion.

With all this funding coming in, KUNC’s Rae Solomon wanted to understand what climate-smart agriculture means. She did some research and recently sat down with KUNC’s All Things Considered host Beau Baker to share what she found.

BAKER: What is climate-smart agriculture?

SALOMON: It’s the idea that agriculture is deeply intertwined with climate change, and then it is also a set of agricultural practices guided by this fact.

The idea that food production is already impacted by climate change. It’s not something so far in the future: climate change is creating new challenges – droughts, floods and soil erosion, to name a few – for agricultural producers d ‘today.

Bill Hohenstein is director of the Office of Energy and Environmental Policy in the Office of the Chief Economist of the United States Department of Agriculture. He was instrumental in shaping federal policy on climate-smart agriculture. According to him, climate-smart agriculture is a three-pronged concept: “Improving productivity to feed the world, adapting to the climate change we see and the climate change we expect to see. And recognize the role of agriculture as a contributor to these emissions.

An important part of climate-smart agriculture is that there are things producers can do on their farms and ranches that make them more resilient, help them adapt to climate change, and increase their productivity and remain profitable in the face of climate challenges.

Marlen Eve, Deputy Administrator of the USDA Agricultural Research Service, has a broad approach to climate-smart agriculture. “From a research perspective,” he said, “anything we do to help growers make better production decisions in the current environment they face is really climate-smart agriculture. climate.”

And the good thing is that some of those same production decisions can also help mitigate climate change.

BAKER: And so, in practice, what do those decisions look like?

SOLOMON: It varies by region, but here in Colorado the focus is on soil health, meaning the quality and vitality of the soil, its nutrient content, its microbiome, the amount of moisture it retains.

According to Marlen Eve, there are many ways farmers can take care of the health of the soil they manage. “They leave more residue on the soil surface to protect the soil from erosion and increase infiltration of their soils,” he said. “No-till is an excellent practice that can be quite climate-smart. And the cover crop is going to be important.

No-till farming means growers farm without turning over or disturbing the soil. Cover crops are what they sound like – it’s the practice of growing something all the time to avoid bare, exposed soil. Bare soil can easily be blown away and more moisture can evaporate from the surface. This is what farmers try to avoid.

The more advanced components of climate-smart agriculture that tend to soil health include integrating livestock into fields – like letting livestock graze on cover crops, with the side benefit of all that fertilizer natural they bring with them.

BAKER: And these practices help mitigate climate change?

SOLOMON: Yes! Jane Zelikova, soil scientist and executive director of the Soil Carbon Solutions Center at Colorado State University, says it works on two levels. On the one hand, some of these climate-smart practices reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, farmers who do not plow their fields make fewer passes with a tractor in the rows. Less tractor driving uses less fossil fuels.

On the other hand, Zelikova also points out that healthy soil can remove carbon from the atmosphere. “Somewhere on the order of 10% of global annual emissions can be somehow recovered from the ground,” she said.

This is because healthy soils tend to be high in carbon. So all of these soil health practices, like no-till and cover crops, help keep or put more carbon in the ground.

“There is an incredibly close relationship between soil carbon and soil health,” Zelikova said. “In fact, soil carbon may be the best predictor of a healthy soil system. Soils that contain a lot of carbon also tend to have very good water infiltration rates. very good soil aggregates.They tend to have tight cycle nutrients.

BAKER: So how is all of this reflected in Colorado Ag?

SOLOMON: Well, in Colorado, some farmers and ranchers have been using climate-smart farming practices for a long time, even though they never called it that. Farmer groups organized around no-till practices since at least the late 1980s, for example. But now concerns are growing about the impact of climate change on agriculture, so there is more urgency.

What’s happening right now is a series of climate-smart agriculture pilot projects that the USDA is funding to the tune of $2.8 billion nationwide. Seventeen of those pilots are here in Colorado. But Colorado’s flagship pilot project is a soil health initiative called STAR programwhich stands for Saving tomorrow’s agricultural resources.

Cindy Lair, head of the Colorado State Conservation Board and the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s Soil Health Program, manages the STAR program. She described the stars as a rating system. “One star would be what about 80% of agricultural producers do — conventional farming without thinking about climate and soil health,” Lair said.

The goal is to encourage growers to fight for more stars by doing more for the health of their soils. The STAR program also offers financial motivations for farmers who are curious about adopting new soil health practices.

But what is interesting with this program is that it does not only concern producers. Ultimately, the STAR program will be the entry point for consumers to engage in climate-smart agriculture, creating a market for climate-smart raw materials – at least that’s the point. The idea is to tap into consumers’ concerns about climate change and build their understanding of how food is produced. So at some point you might see products in the supermarket that have a STAR rating, which gives consumers insight into how they were produced. The people behind these efforts are banking on consumers’ willingness to pay more for food raised more sustainably.

It should also be noted that the recent Inflation Reduction Act included a $20 billion more for climate-smart agriculture, and these pilot projects will show how that is spent.