“Misuse of scientific and technical knowledge presents a major threat to the existence of mankind.”
—MIT 1968 faculty statement which resulted in the founding of UCS
On Wednesday, September 27, anyone driving north along Route 9W through Lake Katrine may have noticed a digital advertisement on a roadside billboard. A dirty farmer, a chicken coop and a flock of hungry chickens are standing alongside a message urging the reader to protect farms against extreme weather.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a national organization with a foothold in Washington, D.C. and a network of over 25,000 members, is behind this bit of drive-by commercial activism. The organization’s contention is that the U.S. food system should be providing healthy, sustainably produced food for all instead of damaging our health, our land and water, our communities, and our farmers and food workers.
The message on the front of the billboard, according to Sophie Ackoff, campaign director for UCS, has everything to do with the federal farm bill up for reauthorization on September 30. The organization would prefer that the current emphasis on crop insurance within the bill be shifted toward incentivizing sustainable farming practices instead.
Thus incentivized, UCS’s ideal farmer would apply for subsidies to plant cover crops or to do rotational grazing, plant wildlife buffers, or use irrigation practices that save water. UCS endorses a variety of practices to managing farmland and its crops so as to withstand increasingly extreme weather fluctuations.
The message is timely. In May of this year, unseasonable frosts and freezes shocked crops throughout the Hudson Valley, only then to be followed by heavy rain and flooding in July. The result was a substantial loss of crops locally and throughout the state.
UCS endorses a variety of practices to managing farmland and its crops so as to withstand increasingly extreme weather fluctuations.
Last month, state agriculture commissioner Richard A. Ball designated 31 counties, including Ulster, Columbia, Dutchess and Greene, as natural disaster areas. Emergency USDA loans were made available to impacted farmers.
As climate change intensifies, Ackoff argued, business as usual became a less and less rational strategy. Attempting to do the same thing over again only served to placate those grown comfortable under the old model. It rewarded those who were slow or unwilling to recognize the need for change. In business as in biology, the watchwords have ever been “Adapt or die.”
“Like, if they lose all their corn in a flood and they get that money back for planting the corn, the next year they’re going to plant the corn the same way,” predicted Ackoff. “They’re not going to use a cover crop, there’s no reason for them to do that. If they just receive money after the loss, it’s just continuing the status quo.”
“Twenty billion dollars in funding was provided in the Inflation Reduction Act last year,” said Ackoff. “And there’s a lot still on the table.”
Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow, chair of the Senate Agricultural Committee, wants to protect the funding for climate resilience. The Republicans want part of that money used instead, for crop insurance and commodity titles.
Besides nutrition programs like SNAP or WIC, the most money in the farm bill is allocated to crop commodities that get extra subsidies.– crops like cotton, corn, wheat and rice. “That’s primarily benefiting larger commodity operations,” explained Ackoff. “So many of the farms in the Hudson Valley don’t even have crop insurance because they’re growing 60 different vegetable crops. Crop insurance isn’t built for them.”
Any federal Inflation Reduction Act funding in the farm bill will be included in future baseline spending.
“If they include that funding in the farm bill in the next five years, and each five-year period after,” said Ackoff, “they’ll be able to use that money to continue conservation programs. Whereas if they don’t include it in the farm bill, USDA will still be able to spend that money, but it’ll be done when it’s done.”
If it’s not included, the money dedicated to conservation programs would not be continued.
Ackoff acknowledged that Hudson Valley farms benefit from crop insurance for dairy, apple orchards and corn, for instance. But she said conservation programs incentivized farmers to use climate-smart practices that will be most beneficial for them in the long run, Conservation will also provide them greater economic incentive.
“They do they pay for some of it,” says Ackoff, “and then the conservation programs pay for the rest of it.”
The billboard comes on the heels of a local campaign urging congressmember Marc Molinaro to oppose cuts to food-stamp benefits (SNAP) and additional work requirements for recipients. Seventy-six percent of the farm bill funding presently goes to nutrition programs like SNAP
“Our hope is that Molinaro will be driving around meeting with farmers and see this ask to protect the climate conservation funding in the farm bill,” said Ackoff of the Lake Katrine billboard. “He’s a target for us nationally because he is a moderate Republican on the House Agriculture Committee.”
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