Unfortunately, after five years and two committees, the plan published by the Maryland Department of Agriculture falls far short of the extraordinary opportunity the legislation presents.
I was a member of the committee, a diverse coalition of farmers and organizations dedicated to agriculture and the environment, that advised the state on its soil health program. My colleagues and I are deeply concerned about climate change. We sincerely believe in the crucial importance of soil health in contributing to your solution.
For more than two years, committee members offered many creative ideas that would transform Maryland agriculture, closing the gap between current and achievable results. Unfortunately, the state largely ignored our suggestions. Most are not mentioned in their final report. Instead, it proposes only incremental modifications to its current practices, with no new incentives to use them.
Without a doubt, the practices proposed by Maryland provide a solid foundation for soil health. No-till farming, cover crops, various crop rotations, and rotational grazing are the cornerstones of regenerative agriculture. However, these practices have also been promoted by federal and state departments of agriculture for many years.
Some have already been widely adopted in Maryland. For example, nearly three-quarters of the state’s 1.4 million acres of farmland use no-till, leaving few acres available for conversion. As a result, the committee felt that additional no-tillage investments would not offer significant benefits.
Other practices must be changed if farmers are to receive state and U.S. Department of Agriculture subsidies. Based on research showing that a wide variety of cover crops accelerate sequestration, committee members recommended that the new program requires a minimum of five species in the cover crop mix to receive an enhanced subsidy.
The biggest challenge for most soil health practices is that they are rarely used by farmers despite current subsidies. For example, Maryland uses cover crops on only 41 percent of available cropland. Although this is more than any other state, there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Additionally, most other soil health practices are rarely adopted. The committee heard compelling testimony about the need for better training for the state’s field staff to aggressively promote the program’s core practices and help farmers select and implement the most appropriate ones for their farms.
And even the most experienced farmers will benefit from education, technical assistance, and learning networks as they convert to novel practices.
Finally, the state must use the full range of incentives, not just direct subsidies to producers. Taxes and tax credits, financial penalties, pay-for-performance, and market-based approaches were mentioned in our meetings, but none of these were seriously considered by the state.
I’m not sure why Maryland chose a limited approach. Fiscal restrictions do not explain it. The state anticipates a $7.6 billion budget surplus by the end of 2023. The legislature passed tax cuts in the session that ended Monday with bipartisan support.
Instead, Maryland could have chosen its course based on the conclusion that its current soil health measures are sufficient to meet the state’s climate change goals. The state projects that about half a million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents will be sequestered in agricultural soils per year, about half of 1 percent of its annual emissions.
Agricultural soils, however, may capture and store much more carbon than Maryland forecasts. For example, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that the soil can sequester more than 10 percent of all anthropogenic emissions. So Maryland’s soil could have the potential to sequester 20 times more carbon than the state estimates, a difference equivalent to the emissions of 2.25 million passenger cars.
Unfortunately, even the state’s small estimate is almost certainly too high. For example, Maryland expects nearly half of its sequestration to result from conversion to no-till or reduced-tillage methods. In reality, although no-till cultivation reduces emissions, it is not reliable in net sequestration.
Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warn of the catastrophic consequences of climate change that are inevitable on current trajectories. Whether through ignorance, negligence, or simply bureaucratic inertia, Maryland has opted for a business-as-usual approach that will not be enough to avert the coming cataclysm.
