According to the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, "Perennial agriculture, which refers to the production of crops that are harvested multiple times and live for several seasons, offers a unique opportunity to drastically reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, while providing varying environmental and societal benefits. Perennial agriculture historically been practiced by Indigenous and Black populations, and comprises four types of practices which include: perennial forage crops...; tree crops integrated into agroforestry including alley cropping, ... forest farming, and multi-story cropping; perennial fruits and vegetables; and emerging perennial grain crops. Perennial agricultural systems offer significant environmental and climate change mitigation benefits compared to the annual-crop systems that dominate agriculture today. Perennial agricultural practices also are more resilient to extreme climate conditions. Perennial crops generally have deeper roots and longer growing seasons and therefore capture and retain more rainfall, reduce erosion, store more soil carbon, demand less fertilizer and herbicide, require less tillage, decrease nutrient and chemical runoff,  and contribute to more diverse and supportive habitats for insects and wildlife. They not only have negative net values for global warming potential, but also demonstrate much higher resilience to variable climate conditions than annual crops."The more promising practices are converting annual crops to perennial crops (as opposed to converting forests to perennial crops). However, not all these benefits are demonstrated across all farms; hence the need for more research and technical assistance to farmers.

The Farm Bill is a super important piece of legislation. The estimated expenditure for the next 5 years are $648 billion, which is about $160 billion larger than the Inflation Reduction Act expenditures. The Farm Bill only gets reauthorized every five years and the next reauthorization is in 2023.  Watch for Farm Bill congressional hearings near you. NY, CA and other big ag states are also conducting Farm Bill hearings sponsored by the state agriculture departments. I testified at one and found our state folks very open to communicating messages re climate to their USDA colleagues working on the Farm Bill.

By the way, if any of you want to work with me more on the Farm Bill, my name is Marianne Krasny and my email is mekrasny@gmail.com. I am posting numerous Farm Bill actions on Climate Action Now.

Thanks for supporting strong climate action in the Farm Bill!