Every five years, farmers and agricultural lobbyists descend on Capitol Hill to debate the farm bill, a massive food and agriculture funding bill that helps families afford groceries, pays out farmers who’ve lost their crops to bad weather, and props up less-than-profitable commodity markets, among dozens of other things. The last farm bill was passed in 2018, and in 2023, Congress extended the previous farm bill for an additional year after its negotiations led to a stalemate. That extension expires today, and Congress seems poised to settle for another one.

House Republicans and Democrats’ primary dispute is over how much funding will go to food programs like SNAP and the Thrifty Food Plan. Another reason for this unusual standoff — in past cycles, the bill passed easily with bipartisan support — is a grant authority called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which has become a flashpoint for a fight over the relationship between agriculture and climate change. At first glance, the program might not sound all that controversial: It “helps farmers, ranchers and forest landowners integrate conservation into working lands,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, funding a wide variety of conservation practices from crop rotation to ditch lining. In contrast to other huge programs in the farm bill, such as crop insurance, EQIP costs only around $2 billion per year, which is measly by federal spending standards. So why is it such a sticking point?

The Biden administration’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act expanded EQIP and three other USDA programs with billions of new dollars for on-farm improvements, but the bill specified that the money had to go to “climate-smart” conservation practices. This was stricter than the original EQIP, which allows farmers to use money for thousands of different environment-adjacent projects. 

Democrats and climate advocates view EQIP as a potential tool to fight climate change, not just a way to fund the building of fences and repairing of farm roofs. Agriculture accounts for 11 percent of American greenhouse gas emissions, a share that’s projected to rise dramatically as other sectors of the nation’s economy such as transportation continue to decarbonize. To help the farming sector keep pace with the nation’s emissions targets, 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) included $20 billion in subsidies for farmers who engaged in agricultural practices designed as “climate-smart” — a category defined by the USDA, which administers the subsidies. These practices include installing vegetation breaks to reduce fire risk, electrifying tractors, and planting “no-till” crops, which reduce greenhouse gas emissions by cutting down on soil disturbance.

Farmers and politicians of both parties have embraced the additional EQIP money from the IRA, but the boost was a one-time infusion, slated to run out in 2026. Now, as lawmakers debate making the expanded environmental program permanent in the looming new farm bill, Republicans and Democrats are clashing over what “climate-smart” means, and whether the money should be “climate-smart” at all. 

Earlier this year, the agriculture committee chairs in the Senate and House, which are controlled respectively by Democrats and Republicans, released competing farm bill proposals. In May, the House committee passed its version, but that has still not gone to the floor for a full vote. Nevertheless, the two proposals differ significantly on the fate of the IRA’s $20 billion conservation boost.  

But with each passing year that a new farm bill isn’t passed, the amount of IRA money that’s available to permanently reallocate into its conservation title will diminish, as more of the infrastructure funding is spent. With Congress now out of session until after November’s election, the two chambers will have a short window to pass their versions of the bill and then reconcile them together by the end of the year. If they fail to do so by January, Congress’s next two-year cycle will begin, and the bill dockets reset — so lawmakers will have to start from scratch and renegotiate the bill drafts in committee. Even with yet another short-term extension, the fight for next year will pretty much be the same: If Republicans get their way, they will negate perhaps the most significant attempt in recent history to control the environmental and climate impacts of the nation’s massive agriculture industry. If Democrats succeed, they will safeguard the IRA’s climate ag money from a potential repeal if Donald Trump wins the election, and the money will also be incorporated into the bill’s “baseline,” making it likely to stick around in future farm bills.

Though the moment for some action this time around has all but passed, the arguments over whether and how to direct climate-specific funding to the agriculture industry are instructive for any future opportunities to make some progress. In February, Representative Glenn Thompson, the Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the House agriculture committee, proposed stripping the “climate-smart” label from the IRA money, criticizing it as a needless bureaucratic modifier. This would more or less negate the intention of the Inflation Reduction Act, funneling the unspent portion of the $20 billion from that bill into EQIP’s catchall fund and allowing it to fund grazing fences and other ordinary improvements.

“These dollars, riddled with climate sideboards and Federal bureaucracy, should be refocused toward programs and policies that allow the original conservationists — farmers — to continue to make local decisions that work for them,” Thompson wrote. 

Ashley House, the vice president of strategy and advocacy at the Colorado Farm Bureau, took a softer line than Thompson, but still expressed some concern that the guardrails could lock farmers out of useful EQIP money.

“I think the anxiety and hesitation when you talk about EQIP dollars being contingent on what climate smart imperative is, what’s under that umbrella? If we find something helpful in five years and it’s not on the list, do we still get our money? I think that’s the anxiety and hesitation, as opposed to, we just don’t want to participate in something that’s climate-smart.”

But if all the money can be used for anything, then the chances that the agriculture industry meets the goal set by the Biden administration — to cut the 10 percent of the country’s emissions generated by agriculture — dramatically decrease.

The Senate’s proposal, authored by Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow, who is retiring after this term, would import the funding from the IRA as it currently is, protecting the climate guardrails. Stabenow’s public position has been that the climate guardrails are a “red line” without which the bill won’t pass, and she has said she plans to stake her legacy as a legislator on the passage of a farm bill with the guardrails intact.

“If you remove that protection, many of those funds could go toward practices that are good for conservation but not also good for climate,” said Rebecca Riley, managing director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s food and agriculture program. Perhaps of greatest concern to climate advocates is the fact that, under normal circumstances, 50 percent of EQIP funds are legally earmarked for livestock operations, which are among the most emissions-intensive agricultural sectors. So if the climate guardrails are removed from the IRA dollars spent through EQIP, they will be subject to this provision — and effectively used as a vehicle to further subsidize factory farming.

But some researchers have criticized even those “climate-smart” agricultural policies that the Democrats are fighting to keep funded as themselves giveaways to the agricultural industry with dubious value for the climate. For instance, the USDA has given the “climate-smart” tag to projects that sequester carbon in soil. Many climate experts argue that the emissions benefits of these soil sequestration projects are overstated and difficult to verify. Funds are also available to cover practices like the installation of anaerobic digesters to convert manure into biogas — a practice widely opposed by climate advocates, who say it encourages emissions-heavy factory farming.

The agriculture industry operates with deeply entrenched standards of operation, and the practices and policies that would make meaningful reductions in farming emissions and can be scaled to the whole industry are still being tested. That’s why Erik Lichtenberg, an agricultural economist at the University of Maryland who has studied the USDA’s conservation program, argues the USDA should cast a wide net at first.

The federal government has only distributed $2 billion out of the $20 billion in “climate-smart” funding from the IRA, so it’s too early for Democrats to claim this money as a success and for Republicans to claim that the climate guardrails are too onerous. “It makes sense to experiment and be very broad, because we can afford some failures in a search for successes,” Lichtenberg said. 

But he also noted that, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, the best possible conservation technique is afforestation, which turns active farmland into carbon-absorbing forest. This echoed an argument by the agricultural historian Ariel Ron, who wrote in a recent essay on this year’s farm bill that “the surest way to do ‘climate smart’ agriculture is simply to convert excess farm acreage into new forests.”

For many environmentalists, water use is just as big of an issue as emissions, and there is similar uncertainty about whether and how EQIP affects water use on farms. Agriculture is the largest water user in the dry western United States, accounting for more than 80 percent of water consumption in some basins; in some other cases, the industry causes household wells to go dry. EQIP has long doled out funding for farmers to make their operations more water-efficient by lining canals with concrete or installing new irrigation machinery, but some research suggests that the program hasn’t had its intended effect. 

Anne Schechinger, an agricultural economist at Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit focused on farming and environmental issues, says this is in large part because farmers in the West need to use their entire water allocations each year or else risk losing their water to other users.

“Farmers still have to use their water allocation, even if they reduce the water use each time they irrigate,” she said. “It’s like, ‘I’m using less water, so I can water more frequently,’ so then you’re still using the same amount of water.”

The difficulty of measuring EQIP’s effects on climate and water usage has made the debate over this year’s farm bill difficult — and this debate will not resolve itself. 

Editor’s note: The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council are advertisers with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.