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📜 The recent unveiling of the Farm Bill by the Republican House Agriculture Chair Glenn Thompson includes significant progress on U.S.’ support for carbon dioxide removal (hashtag#CDR), notably for biochar.
💰 The Farm Bill is a massive omnibus legislation covering everything from conservation efforts, nutrition assistance, agriculture, and forestry. It has an estimated budget of $1.5 trillion over the next decades.
🪨 The bill draft significantly promotes CDR technologies, mainly biochar, thanks to bipartisan efforts such as the Biochar Research Network Act (hashtag#BRNA) of 2023 that has advocated for broader legislative support for biochar in the past two congresses.
The draft farm bill pushes biochar projects in the following ways:
🌲 Initiate performance-driven biochar projects focusing on research, development, education, and demonstration across all USDA Forest Service regions to promote the use of biochar and its commercialization over the next two years.
👷 Establish priorities for projects that foster commercialization, job creation, and technological innovation in biochar applications, emphasizing partnerships for extensive field testing and product development.
🌱 Specify feedstock requirements primarily from forest restoration activities, cap funding assistance at 35% of capital costs for biochar facilities, and aim to achieve project goals within a five-year period.
🔎 This bill could become highly contentious due to several factors. It proposes to shift as much as $14 billion from the unspent Inflation Reduction Act's conservation funds to the Farm Bill, while simultaneously removing the mandate for emissions-reducing practices. This shift could disproportionately affect small farms by accelerating consolidation trends. Moreover, it proposes modifications to the nutrition assistance programs (hashtag#SNAPs) to the order of $27 billion which could further fuel debate across party lines.
⚠️ The legislative timeline and challenges remain significant. Congress failed in 2023 to pass a new farm bill and provisions temporarily extended it until the end of September 2024. However, given that this is a presidential election year, many informed observers remain skeptical about the bill's completion before the November election. It is more likely that the bill will be addressed during the "Lame Duck" session following the election or once a new Congress is seated in early 2025.
📣 Stay tuned for more updates as we monitor the progress of this critical legislation that affects a wide range of sectors and populations across the US. And make sure to join the US Biochar Coalition (USBC) to be part of the solution to climate change in the U.S.
Check out the draft bill here: https://lnkd.in/dPrmBGFT
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