A new report from the Sun Journal examines Rep. Chellie Pingree’s Agriculture Resilience Act, a comprehensive bill that would “transform agriculture nationwide” by creating “healthier soil that could sop up carbon from the atmosphere” to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions. With her proposal, the nation could “reach net-zero agriculture emissions” in two decades.

Rep. Pingree’s bold vision calls for farms “to become more sustainable in ways large in small,” and enjoys support from a wide range of stakeholders––from Maine farmers in Androscoggin County to former Vice President Al Gore. With this bill, Rep. Pingree is advocating for a new approach, one that “puts science in the driver’s seat” and “gives farmers a better shot at making a good living while providing consumers with the food they need.”

To learn more about Rep. Pingree’s Agriculture Resilience Act, click here.

Sun Journal: Chellie Pingree aims to transform American agriculture

By: Steve Collins

August 30, 2020

Key Points:

  • Most politicians who care deeply about agriculture hail from the Great Plains, with their seemingly endless fields of corn or soybeans, a region that has long been the source of much of America’s food. Yet U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree lives on an island in Maine, surrounded by water rather than wheat.
  • Despite her ocean views, the 1st Congressional District Democrat is the primary champion of a bill that would, if adopted, transform agriculture nationwide by pushing farms to become more sustainable in ways large and small.
  • At root, what Pingree wants is to create healthier soil that could sop up carbon from the atmosphere, reducing greenhouse gases that are steadily warming the planet.
  • Her Agriculture Resilience Act calls for sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are undermining traditional weather patterns and creating a growing problem for anyone whose livelihood depends on predictable trends, especially farmers.
  • Former Vice President Al Gore said Pingree’s proposal “rightly puts farmers at the center of a comprehensive plan to achieve net-zero emissions from the U.S. agricultural system by 2040” by harnessing science “to advance regenerative farming practices in order to protect and enhance soil health while removing carbon from the atmosphere.”
  • In a prepared statement, Gore said that under her plan “American farmers can continue to provide healthy food sustainably, while playing a leading role in solving the climate crisis.” In Pingree’s view, there isn’t much choice.
  • The nation has to take a new approach to agriculture that puts science in the driver’s seat, she said, and gives farmers a better shot at making a good living while providing consumers with the food they need.
  • Pingree said there is more Republican interest in the issues her bill confronts than most people realize and that some of the traditional lobbying powers in the industry have grown more sympathetic to the idea that agriculture needs to address the climate crisis. “The market is changing,” the lawmaker said, and some major players in it “are getting behind some of these notions.”
  • It surely stands a far better chance if Democrats, who already hold the U.S. House, are able to seize control of the U.S. Senate and the White House after November’s election.
  • Sinisi, who chairs the Androscoggin Valley Soil and Water Conservation District, said he’s happy that Pingree is pushing policies that would help small farms, promote sustainability, improve soil health and help minimize the staggering amount of food waste in America.
  • He said the giant farms out West have different needs than the many family farms in Maine, but they all share a need to keep a warming climate from racing out of control. Plus, he said, farmers everywhere want to find ways to keep agricultural land productive instead of being turned into house lots.
  • Tans warned this summer that “if we do not stop greenhouse gases from rising further, especially CO2, large regions of the planet will become uninhabitable.” Dire predictions like Tans are one of the reasons Pingree is determined to address the issue.
  • She said farmers already know the problem “is bigger than my farm” and are ready for reforms that offer them a path forward. Pointing out that agricultural activities represent 8.4% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, she said her bill would change the equation completely. She said that within two decades, under her proposal, the nation could “reach net-zero agriculture emissions.”
  • [Pingree’s plan] would at least quadruple the amount of federal research money, with edicts to spend the cash on “climate change adaptation and mitigation, soil health, agro-forestry, advanced grazing management and crop-livestock integration, other agro-ecological systems, on-farm and food system energy efficiency and renewable energy production, farmland preservation and viability, food waste reduction and related topics to accelerate progress toward net zero emissions by not later than 2040.”
  • The bill calls for an end to the conversion of farmland to development by 2040. It would also encourage farmers to use more cover crops that don’t leave the land barren and exposed to erosion during the winter and spring, a rising concern as ever more violent storms slam rural America. Pingree’s measure seeks to stop the creation or expansion of waste lagoons for confined animals, which would encourage grassland by better grazing management.
  • The bill would require energy audits and energy improvements on every farm, as well as the expansion of “on-farm clean renewable energy production” with infrastructure that doesn’t hurt the land, soil, water or food production.
  • Pingree said the virus exposed something that insiders have long known but the public didn’t really grasp until they saw stores with nothing to sell. It showed everyone, she said, “how fragile our supply chain is.” From slaughterhouses that had to close because of the risk to workers, to crops buried in the ground because they couldn’t be shipped or sold, the pandemic slammed a shaky system. Pingree said the solution, which her bill would help to address, is clearly to decentralize agriculture, to make sure food doesn’t travel so far.

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