Kristina Villa runs a small farm, called Villa Acres, east of Nashville. Neat lines of sweet potatoes alternate with arugula and cucumbers, bordered by tall grasses, wildflowers and trees humming with bird calls. It boasts 50 different fruits and vegetables throughout the year.

As the season shifts, Villa rotates her crops instead of using fertilizers and pesticides.

“Each season, and each year, we put them in a different place, so different things are taken from the soil at a time,” Villa said.

This practice is called “conservation crop rotation,” and it is considered planet-friendly since agrochemical use emits greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide, which warms the planet 300 times as much as carbon dioxide.

Villa employs many such techniques on her farm, which she oversees with her husband, Anthony, to bolster biodiversity and avoid environmental degradation. Her effort is considered “regenerative” agriculture, often highlighted as a potential climate solution.

But Villa’s farm is not the norm.

Agriculture is a major source of climate pollution

Tennessee has about 2 million cows, nearly 200 million chickens and several hundred thousand pigs, goats and sheep. To feed these animals, farms produce a lot of corn and soy, which are also transformed into ethanol or shipped overseas to become processed food.

This system represents most of American agriculture, which accounts for 11% of climate pollution annually.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture supports this farm dynamic with annual subsidies for insurance, mostly, and funding for conservation. Conservation dollars are intended to help farmers reduce soil erosion, water pollution and climate change through specific practices.

Between 2017 and 2020, USDA issued $7.4 billion to farmers for conservation, but only a fraction of it backed practices that the agency defines as “climate-smart,” according to new analysis from the Environmental Working Group.

Researchers examined the agency’s two main conservation programs, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program. Nationally, about a quarter of EQIP payments and 0.3% of CSP payments went to climate-smart practices. In Tennessee, about 40% of EQIP payments supported climate-smart practices, almost entirely due to funding for cover crops, which are plantings outside the cash crop growing season.

These two programs are being touted by the Biden Administration as key ways to help farmers mitigate greenhouse gases, according to Anne Schechinger, who led the environmental nonprofit’s report.

“If the programs are actually going to make an impact on the climate crisis, we know that more funding needs to go to these climate-smart practices,” Schechinger said.

Small farms are excluded from government grants

Courtesy Kristina Villa

Villa Acres in Sparta boasts about 50 different types of fruits and vegetables each year.

Large, industrial farms have more resources to apply for grants repeatedly, and not always with success. USDA funded just over one in four applications for EQIP in 2019.

Villa says it is difficult for small farms like hers to apply for government funding. Even the application form checkboxes are often limited to corn, soy and livestock operations.

“It is all geared towards the type of production, that bigger-scale industrial ag, that is not growing food for communities,” Villa said. “It’s just not practical for the small farmer. And unfortunately, it’s the small farmer that deserves governmental funding the most who are not able to apply for it.”

In Tennessee, the majority of conservation funding supported practices considered neutral to the climate. The Environmental Working Group said some practices supported are harmful to the climate.

Between 2017 and 2020, about $10 million went to fences, more than $6 million went to livestock pipelines and roughly $4 million went to water facilities through EQIP in Tennessee. Congress requires half of all EQIP spending to be used for livestock-related practices.

There was also more than $23 million given in cropland and pasture “annual payments” through USDA’s other conservation program. In response to EWG’s Freedom of Information Act requests, USDA sorted these payments by land use but did not disclose the practices or enhancements that they funded.  

On the other hand, well-known climate solutions got minimal support in the state. Conservation crop rotation only got $3,000. Upland wildlife habitat management got $179 and riparian herbaceous cover got $61, at the lowest end.

‘Climate-smart is a way to greenwash’

The livestock industry emits significant climate pollution, due to cow burps, manure from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and the production and processing of the feed. Fossil fuels power the heavy equipment, and then there’s all the land use changes — like deforestation.

Conservation grants can lessen this impact, but the industry can’t reverse damage through the current systems, according to Villa.

“The term ‘climate-smart’ is a way to greenwash and bring Big Ag back into the public’s good graces,” she said.

Financial resources are needed to help more people have access to farmland and allow them to invest in soil health, added Villa, similar to funding activity from the Agrarian Trust.

Congress just allocated an additional $11.7 billion for USDA’s conservation programs between 2023 and 2026 through the Inflation Reduction Act, and the agency said climate mitigation will be a major focus for the programs.

“The Inflation Reduction Act’s focus on climate mitigation will enable us to increase access to (National Resources Conservation Service) programs and take our support for climate-smart practices to the next level,” a USDA spokesperson said.

USDA is also investing $8 million to support the monitoring of carbon in soil to assess how their climate-smart practices are affecting carbon sequestration. This is part of USDA’s new Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities program.

Findings from this research could help USDA prioritize appropriate practices, Schechinger said, but she also suggested there is opportunity for broader transformation instead of just improvements to the current methods of farming.

“We need to be looking at the whole system,” Schechinger said, “and what major changes could be made to reduce emissions from agriculture.”