On this second day of the USDA Ag Outlook Forum, USDA is encouraging producers to get involved in their Climate Smart Partnership program.
Undersecretary Robert Bonnie says that they are interested in deploying climate-smart technology on farms and developing the tools needed to provide technical assistance. He also says that they want to make conservation voluntary and incentive-driven for producers.
“This is a commodity program that’s going to help producers produce climate-smart practices by deploying those climate-smart practices, and then, we want to help finance the measurement, monitoring, and verification that goes along with that,” Bonnie explains. “So, whether a group of producers want to come forward and produce-- maybe they want to produce climate-smart cotton, or climate-smart soybeans, or maybe they want to look at the potential of the carbon markets. We want to support all that we want to be flexible. We want to allow for innovation.”
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