The $144 billion Agriculture Department spends less than 1 percent of its budget helping farmers adapt to increasingly extreme weather
a sweeping, interagency plan for studying and responding to climate change.
Meanwhile, the National Climate Assessment has repeatedly warned that human-driven global warming will likely have dire consequences for American agriculture and make things particularly volatile in the Midwest, which has long been one of the most productive breadbaskets in the world.For decades, USDA avoided tackling climate change head on, even as the department invested in research that raised warnings for farmers and ranchers and the food system as a whole.
There are several relatively simple changes farmers could make to become more resilient, which also have the benefit of drawing down carbon. Producers, for example, can reduce or eliminate tillage, which not only prevents soil carbon from being released into the atmosphere, but also helps improve how soil holds up to too much or too little moisture.
The hubs were set to be locally-tailored, serving seven specific regions that each contained several states, with the exception of the Caribbean Climate Hub, whose mission was primarily to help Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The hubs were to be housed in USDA labs or offices in the Forest Service or the Agricultural Research Service.
Weeks into the transition, a new concern emerged for staff working on climate adaptation and mitigation within USDA: What are we allowed to say? At the time the emails were revealed, USDA strongly denied the suggestion that climate terms had been censored, arguing that there had been no directive from political appointees to do so. A spokesperson told POLITICO at the time that it was “unclear why career staff behind the memos had raised the issue to staff.”
“It’s selective depending on who they’re talking to,” Pingree said in an interview. She recalled a recent House Agriculture Committee hearing where Perdue made a joke about needing to give Pepto Bismol to cows to cut down on their flatulence -- taking a shot at the Green New Deal debate -- but other times when she’s pressed him on climate change and soil practices he has changed his tone.
For much of the past century, Oswald’s family and farmers in the area lived in relative peace with the Missouri River. That started to change dramatically in 1993, when both the Missouri and Mississippi rivers flooded and sunk more than 300,000 square miles of the heartland under water -- a catastrophe that killed dozens of people and caused $15 billion in damages.
What happened this year was a “perfect storm” in many ways, he said. It had already been one of the wettest years on record in much of the Missouri River “Dams aren’t supposed to collapse,” Oswald said. “But they’re also supposed to be managed so that they don’t collapse. When you have as much rain and snow as we had, then man has to take that into account. If they don't, why, this is the kind of thing we get. This ignorant denial of the fact that, yeah, the climate has changed and things are different now, is just going to lead to more of this.
In recent years, two of the USDA agencies that had been supplying funds for the hub network have pulled their financial support: the Risk Management Agency and Farm Service Agency, according to documents obtained by POLITICO. Despite these challenges, USDA said the department has managed to keep the overall budget for the climate hubs largely flat — at nearly $11 million total for all ten locations — since 2015.
Officials who work on climate issues within USDA are often conflicted about whether the hubs and their resources should get more promotion in the current administration, according to more than a dozen interviews with current and former staff. On one hand, they see their work as more urgent than ever, but on the other there’s a sense that ignoring the hubs may be key to their survival in a politically hostile environment.
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