Seeding Change to Manage Climate Change: Growing Insights from Four USDA Programs to Support Climate-Smart Agriculture

In 2022, the U.S. authorized one of the single largest investments in the history of agri- environmental programs worldwide. Among its provisions, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 directed $3billion (bn) in funding for the new Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities (PCSC) to promote climate-smart agricultural practices and markets across the country. Additionally, the IRA directed another $11bn to the historically oversubscribed Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), and nearly $5bn to the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP). This manuscript evaluates the PCSC’s added value compared to these existing programs and extracts lessons from their implementation. Using administrative data and program design documents, we assess and compare the structures and investments of each program, focusing on support for Historically Underserved Producers (HUPs). We find that past funding through EQIP, CSP, and RCPP primarily benefited states with more producers, and nearly 40% of the funds obligated in existing conservation programs supported practices that USDA already classified as climate- smart. Despite progress in enrolling more HUPs, retaining them requires addressing the disproportionate share of canceled and terminated contracts occurring among these groups. Furthermore, the shift towards partnership-style initiatives across conservation programs could enhance the impact and cost-effectiveness of funding, as well as it may unlock opportunities for Copyright 2024 by Elinor Benami, Anne Bell, Kent D. Messer, Wei Zhang, and Michael Cecil. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. more tailored agreements, particularly for tribal communities. Prior monitoring, reporting, and evaluation methods used in these programs often focus on the numbers of producers served, dollars obligated, contracts issued, or acreage covered paired with physical models used to estimate program impact. To make effective use of this unprecedented infusion of funding into conservation agriculture, however, we suggest novel, state-of-the-art evaluation techniques. Such techniques include deploying randomized experiments and leveraging project-relevant geospatial data merged with program administrative information to generate rigorous impact evaluation on producer behaviors within these programs as well as their corresponding economic and environmental impacts In so doing, this funding offers the chance to help build the evidence-base for strategic use of future conservation funding as well as help de-risk future investments for other types of financial services—thereby accelerating the transformation to sustainable agri- food systems in the US and beyond.