When it comes to agriculture and climate change, there’s one thing that might bring Republicans and Democrats together, says POLITICO: regenerative farming.
What’s happening: “Democrats and Republicans have been bitterly divided over whether measures to address climate change should be part of the half-trillion-dollar farm bill that Congress will write next year. But a push to include funding for so-called regenerative agriculture is appealing to GOP lawmakers who are watching farmers contend with sky-high fertilizer prices and other mounting costs,” POLITICO reported over the holiday weekend.
Regenerative agriculture, in a nutshell, recognizes farms as part of a larger ecosystem. Also called “climate-smart agriculture,” practices include low-till or no-till farming, planting cover crops, and crop rotation, which can draw carbon from the atmosphere and put it back in the soil.
Biotech can make these practices even more effective—with tools like gene editing crops to have bigger, deeper roots, allowing them to suck up even more carbon and replenish the soil.
BIO has long called for climate-smart farming practices—which can benefit farmers, the environment, and our food supply. However, we need to incentivize the adoption of these technologies and remove barriers to accessing them.
What’s next: The current Farm Bill expires at the end of September 2023, and the new Farm Bill will be a key priority of the House and Senate Agriculture committees in the new Congress. We’ll keep an eye on this issue and opportunities to discuss how biotech can benefit everyone.
More Reading:
More Agriculture and Environment News:
Bloomberg: U.S. avian flu outbreak worst on record with 50 million dead birds
“The highly pathogenic virus was found at a commercial turkey farm in South Dakota [last] week, resulting in tens of thousands of birds being killed to avoid further spread. That pushed the 2022 total depopulation figures above 2015 when 50.5 million birds were killed, USDA data shows.”
