1. Federal Research Programs

Congress appropriated more than $2 billion to agricultural research and development in fiscal year (FY) 2018, making up less than 2% of the federal

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research expenditures.⁹ The overwhelming majority of these funds go to two USDA agencies: the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and the Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

About 20% of ARS’ FY 2020 research budget is allocated to environmental research, which includes research on climate change.¹¹ ARS’ climate change research is focused on adaptation, however, with relatively few resources allocated toward mitigation.¹² The majority of ARS’ funding should be reoriented to research projects that include mitigation components; however, this does not mean that ARS will not be able to meet other research priorities at the same time. For example, 27% of ARS’ 2020 budget is dedicated to livestock and crop production.¹³ The agency could increase its support for research that advances production and mitigation simultaneously, such as projects to develop productive livestock breeds, better plant materials for cover crops, and high-yielding crops that facilitate lower emissions and sequester more carbon. This research would help farmers prepare for a decarbonized economy, while helping the United States meet its emissions goals.

NIFA administers dozens of programs authorized through the Farm Bill and other pieces of legislation. While NIFA does not release total expenditures on climate-related research, all available evidence indicates that relatively little NIFA funding goes to climate mitigation.¹⁴ In response to a Freedom of Information Act request we submitted, we found that NIFA’s Division of Global Climate Change had only six full-time employees in 2016—well below the agency average of 11 full-time employees per division.¹⁵ Only one of NIFA’s 12 research divisions had fewer employees.¹⁶ President Obama’s 2017 budget for NIFA’s main competitive research program, the Agriculture and Food Research Institute (AFRI), included $15 million for a program area focused on “climate variability and change.”¹⁷ The Trump

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Administration, however, ended five different AFRI program areas in FY 2018, folding all them into a single program called “Sustainable Agricultural Systems.” The new program received less funding than its predecessor programs, falling from $144 million for the five programs in FY 2017—the last year that they were fully funded—to a proposed $134 million for the Sustainable Agricultural Systems Program in FY 2020.¹⁸ Of the Sustainable Agricultural Systems Program’s five goals, only one—land stewardship—is focused on environmental concerns.¹⁹ On its own or with direction from Congress, NIFA, like ARS, should steadily increase funding used for climate mitigation and adaptation, shifting research funding to projects designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or increase carbon sequestration while improving soil health and resilience.

Both agencies should also prioritize funding for research into agroecology, which has a much greater potential to mitigate climate change than conventional systems.²⁰ Research into agroforestry and perennial agriculture in particular is severely underfunded.²¹ Because research into these systems is unlikely to develop highly profitable products for agrochemical and seed corporations—agroforestry and perennial farmers do not need new seeds each year and require much lower rates of chemical inputs—privately funded agricultural research in this area is likely to remain minimal.²² A USDA report on agricultural research spending, for example, found that agricultural research in several critical areas—including the environment and nutrition—relied entirely on public funding in 2013, the most recent year analyzed in the report.²³ Publicly funded research into these practices will be critical for kick-starting these systems, ultimately bringing farmers, consumers, and local communities significant social, environmental, and economic returns.²⁴

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More agricultural research will also be critical for maintaining agricultural productivity as weather patterns become more extreme and unpredictable due to climate change. As farming is perhaps the sector hardest hit by changing weather patterns, farmers have a particularly strong interest in adaptation to, and mitigation of, climate change. Many adaptation measures work in concert with mitigation strategies, though that is not always the case.²⁵ For example, adaptation strategies for livestock often include the expansion of cooling and ventilation systems, which increase energy use and may therefore result in higher emissions, depending on the energy source.²⁶ By contrast, adding trees to pasture land in silvopasture systems helps to both cool livestock and reduce climate change. Government-funded research into adaptation practices should be increased and priority should be given to those practices that reinforce mitigation strategies.

Congress will need to significantly expand funding for agricultural research in order to achieve climate neutrality while maintaining crop and livestock productivity. Indeed, agricultural productivity is expected to stagnate without significant increases in public funds for research even without taking climate change into account.²⁷ In 2018, despite this urgent need, relative funding for research was at a historical low, with 2% of USDA’s total budget devoted to agricultural research.²⁸ Between 1940 and 1980, a period when agricultural productivity rose dramatically—in large part due to research funded by USDA—USDA directed about 4% of its budget to research.²⁹

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Public funding for agricultural research is also declining in real terms: between 2003 and 2013, public funding fell from $6 billion to $4.5 billion after adjusting for inflation.³⁰ (See Figure 1.) Prior to this period, the public sector enjoyed much larger investments in agricultural research than the private sector.³¹ Private-sector investment in agricultural research increased rapidly as public funding began to decrease, however, and by 2010 private expenditures had surpassed public expenditures for the first time since the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) began tracking funding in the 1970s.³² In 2014, the most recent year for which data are available, private-sector

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funding was almost 50% higher than public funding.³³ As a result, North America is the only region in the world where private agricultural research spending is higher than public spending,³⁴ and the United States now devotes only a tiny share of its total public research budget to agriculture—much less than almost every other advanced economy in the world.³⁵ This has important consequences because, as discussed above, private-sector research primarily supports practices that require the purchase of agrochemicals or other patentable products.

Several surveys of publicly funded agricultural research have concluded that public research into sustainable systems is, as one such survey put it, “woefully under-resourced.”³⁶ In light of the challenge presented by climate change—and the current dearth of funding for sustainable farming systems—Congress should at a minimum restore the research budget to at least its prior level within USDA. Devoting 4% of USDA’s budget to research in 2018 would have resulted in almost $3 billion in additional funding for agricultural research.³⁷ Public funding would once again exceed private funding, if only slightly, and agriculture’s share of total public research spending in the United States would be closer to the level of investment enjoyed by other advanced economies. Such an investment would have significant economic benefits: every dollar spent on publicly funded agricultural research yields roughly $20 in benefits.³⁸ USDA should allocate these funds to develop the tools, measurement protocols, crops, and practices necessary to achieve climate neutrality in agriculture. While significant, this is only a fraction of the amount spent annually on crop insurance and other subsidies, which has ranged from $17 to $55 billion in recent years,³⁹ and which could, over time,

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be reduced if the research points to practices that make farms more resilient to climate change.

Congress should also increase funding for on-farm research and farmerto-farmer information sharing regarding innovative carbon-farming practices. The Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program, which provides funding for on-farm research and efforts to increase knowledge about sustainable agricultural practices among farmers and agricultural professionals, provides an excellent model for future efforts.⁴⁰ Administered by NIFA, SARE is the only USDA competitive grants program that focuses exclusively on sustainable agriculture.⁴¹ Its annual funding ranged from $27 to $37 million between 2016 and 2019.⁴² Given SARE’s important role in developing and disseminating sustainable practices—many of which are climate friendly—Congress should dramatically increase its annual budget, while also specifically appropriating funds for SARE to use to support the development of carbon farming.

The 2018 Farm Bill created a new funding source for on-farm research through the Conservation Innovation Grants program.⁴³ The new subprogram, called On-Farm Trials, provides $25 million for on-the-ground conservation activities, whose effectiveness will be evaluated by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and its research partners.⁴⁴ NRCS identified four high-priority funding categories for the program in 2020: irrigation management technologies; precision agriculture technologies and strategies; management technologies and strategies; and soil health demonstration trials.⁴⁵ The agency should create a new, permanent priority for climate mitigation and ensure that projects with mitigation components receive a plurality of available funding.

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