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Farmers for Soil Health receives $95M climate-smart grant

The Farmers for Soil Health initiative has been awarded a $95 million grant from the USDA to help farmers increase the use of climate-smart practices.

Program coordinator John Johnson tells Brownfield the grant will help advance cover crops and conservation tillage in 20 states. “We want to double the number of acres using cover crops in the US on cropland by 2030,” he said. “The baseline back in 2017 was 15 million acres. We want to double that to 30 million acres.”

The project is part of the first pool of the Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities funding opportunity announced last week. 

The program will offer farmers three years of declining cost share payments to help them transition to utilizing cover crops.

Johnson says FSH will also develop a new digital platform that gives farmers an ‘eco-score’ for corn and soybeans produced with these conservation practices. “We’re hoping the marketplace will take advantage of this and actually – in addition to our cost share payments – provide a premium for the corn and beans produced from these fields.”

Farmers for Soil Health is a collaborative effort of the American Soybean Association, National Corn Growers Association, National Pork Board and the United Soybean Board.