USDA grants support climate-smart farmers in state By Christine Souza
of Agriculture. The grants support efforts such as manure management to reduce methane emissions, regenerative practices in almonds and collecting data to develop a national soil inventory. Projects from the second funding pool will be announced later this year. The goal of the program is to reach more than 50,000 U.S. farms and encom- pass up to 25 million acres of working lands to sequester more than 50 million
metric tons of carbon dioxide over the lives of the projects. Grant recipients from California dis- cussed details of individual climate-smart projects during a meeting of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture. Denise Mullinax, executive director of the California Dairy Research Foundation, presented information about a project that provides financial incentives to dairy pro- ducers who adopt manure management
practices to reduce methane emissions. “Eighty-five percent of the $85 million will go direct to dairy producers for the im- plementation of those practices,” Mullinax said. “We’re going to target greater than 50 dairies. The way we structure the grant to enable us to do that is provide up to $1,000 per cow with a maximum of $1.5 million per dairy facility.” Mullinax said that there is the potential of match funds through the CDFA Alternative Manure Management Program. “For a single project, a single dairy project could receive up to $2.25 million for the imple- mentation of these practices,” she said. The project, Partnering to Invest in Building Markets for California’s Climate- Smart Dairy Producers, has four compo- nents. They incude implementation of cli- mate-smart practices, on-farm research, outreach and education and development of climate-smart product markets. Grower-owned cooperative Blue Diamond Growers received a $45 million grant to incentivize growers to adopt cli- mate-smart and regenerative practices, which will lead to verified claims, busi- ness-to-business reporting and green- house gas quantification. “We’re thrilled to have this opportunity. The almond industry is well poised to ad- vance climate-smart practices,” said Alicia Rockwell, Blue Diamond Growers director of government and policy affairs. The $45 million grant awarded to Blue Diamond is over a five-year period starting in October. Climate-smart practices that qualify for funding help sequester carbon and attract pollinators include cover crop- ping between orchard rows, conservation planting outside of the orchard, hedgerows and whole-orchard recycling. Whole- orchard recycling involves chipping the orchard when it is at the end of its lifespan and the material is plowed into the soil to sequester carbon. “We do have many domestic and inter- national customers now specifically ask- ing us for climate-smart activities that they can utilize in their supply chains, so this is a perfect opportunity for us to take these practices, identify what they’re doing on farms and connect them to both domes- tic and international markets,” said Dan Sonke, Blue Diamond Growers director of sustainability. Grant funds of $20 million awarded to Elevated Foods benefit urban farmers in Orange County and across the U.S. to meet needs of small and underserved producers of fresh fruit and vegetables. Partners pro- pose to implement practices on hundreds of thousands of acres planted to fruit and vegetables in key U.S. growing regions. “The thing that really excites us is, as we know, this grant program is spread out across all of agriculture,” said Steve Brazeel, co-founder and president of Elevated Foods. “We were obviously concerned that specialty crops wouldn’t have as much sway as some of the bigger commodities.” Brazeel explained that Elevated Foods plans to use climate-smart practices and technologies that have been adopted by See GRANTS, Page 15
California agricultural entities are among recipients of a federal grant pro- gram intended to increase market oppor- tunities for U.S. commodities produced using climate-smart production practices. Seventy projects—including 20 from California— received in grant funds through Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities under a first pool of $2.8 bil- lion in funding from the U.S. Department
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6 Ag Alert October 19, 2022
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