Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, a Harrisburg-based nonprofit, is the lead partner on a new $55 million federal grant that will help small-to-mid-scale and underserved farmers adopt, study and market agricultural practices designed to be good for the climate.
The grant is part of a $2.8-billion initiative from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to fund 70 pilot projects demonstrating “climate-smart” agriculture. Interest in expanding conservation practices that both help store carbon and build resilience against climate extremes is even greater: Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said there were over 1,000 applications for pilot projects, worth $20 billion in requests.
Pasa’s partnership includes 20 organizations in 15 states from Maine to South Carolina that collectively serve about 20,000 farmers that practice sustainable agriculture.
Hannah Smith-Brubaker, Pasa’s executive director, said the project has four parts: on-farm research studies on soil health, nutrient density and financial benchmarking; expansion of a software platform that allows farmers to analyze data about their farms and their peers’ as well as to calculate the carbon benefits of their practices; paying farmers and giving them technical guidance to adopt conservation practices; and creating regional food system maps that will allow farmers to verify and market that their products are “climate smart.”
For Pasa, which has an annual budget of around $2.6 million, the $55 million project is the largest grant it has ever led. It expects to hire about 20 people just to run the project and each of its partners plans to hire staff to implement it as well.
Ms. Smith-Brubaker, a former Pennsylvania agriculture deputy secretary, said the program is unique in supporting farmers who have already adopted climate-smart techniques, not just newcomers to the idea.
“I see this as a way for farmers who are already really committed to these principles being able to install additional practices on their farm,” she said. “I think that's a way of ensuring that this project will live well beyond the five years because you've got highly motivated farmers doing it.”
This interview was edited for space and clarity.
PG: What kinds of practices are considered climate-smart farming practices?
A: It could be cover cropping. Under agroforestry, it could be anything like planting trees in a pasture to provide shade, but also to sequester carbon. It could be planting buffer areas between rows, for example, to slow down erosion. It could be pollinator areas. Really anything that is going to benefit the climate in addition to the farmer's production.
PG: So the focus is both on climate mitigation, sequestering carbon, as well as climate adaptation and managing impacts?
A: Yeah. We are really trying to build soil organic matter, because a lot of our research has shown that building soil organic matter makes it so that not only can the soil absorb more water, which helps in droughts, but it slows the water down so that there's not runoff and our top soils aren't washing into the streams. Also, hopefully, that is preventing flooding downstream.
One of the key aspects that we've been looking at is that for every percentage raise of soil organic matter on an acre, an additional 20,000 gallons of water can be absorbed by that farm. So if you think about all the acres of farmland just in Pennsylvania, that's an enormous amount of water absorption that's really going to help with flood mitigation.
PG: One of the goals is to demonstrate that these climate-smart farming practices are also good, possibly, for increasing sales. How are these practices good for the bottom line?
A: There are ways that the installation of climate-smart practices actually helps with production. But we're really hoping to translate for the consumer that this isn't just about what happens on the farm. It's good for everybody. We're hoping that consumers will pay for products that are produced on climate-smart farms as a way to contribute to climate mitigation.
PG: The description of your project says it will serve small-to-mid scale and underserved farmers who are uniquely impacted by climate change. What makes those farms particularly at risk for climate impacts?
A: On one end of it, we are going to be working with a lot of urban and Indigenous farmers and they have their own unique impacts. It could take a whole day to talk about all the things that urban farmers face in terms of climate, because the climate tends to be so much more extreme in urban centers.
One of the Indigenous communities we're working with, their entire community is considered a Superfund site. I hadn't really appreciated this before, but when Indigenous communities on the East Coast were forcibly removed and moved mostly to the Midwest, they were moved to a significantly different climate. And so a lot of the younger Indigenous farmers don't have the generational support for some of the practices that are unique to their communities. One of the unique aspects of this project is an Indigenous practices learning library, which will be a video series available to all Indigenous farmers about climate-smart practices, which, of course, we know are all Indigenous practices. All of sustainable agriculture is based on Indigenous practices.
On the rural end of things, we're increasingly surrounded by development that is removing a lot of buffers, forested areas, a lot of the things that tend to keep our soil cooler. With a changing climate, we know in the Northeast, it's extreme drought with deluges of rain mixed in. That’s not going to change. That’s just getting more intense. And because our farmers are small-to-midsize and diverse, we have a lot going on with very few resources. Farmers in that situation, even if they want to install some of these conservation practices, often make the decision not to because of lack of technical support and lack of funding.
PG: Can you talk about one of these practices that you've adopted on your family’s farm [Village Acres Farm & Foodshed in Juniata County]?
A: Most recently, we've installed eight acres of agroforestry practices, which is essentially planting trees and shrubs in our pastures for our animals and for production. It provides shade for our animals, it sequesters carbon, but we're also producing nuts and berries. My sister-in-law has a cut flower business and so she has floral plantings in there as well. So it's adding a whole new enterprise to our farm. It’s better for our animals, it's better for our soil, it’s better for our overall farm system.
First Published: October 17, 2022, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: October 17, 2022, 1:01 p.m.
