A new initiative aims to help wool and cotton producers practice better climate smart land practices that build drought resilience, improve soil health, and can increase profitability of family ranches and farms.
The program, funded through the Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, provides for $30 million over five years. Cotton will be the focus in the South and in California, while wool will be utilized in New York, California and in the Great Plains region of Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota, said Linda Poole, Northern Great Plains Wool Project Coordinator for the National Center for Appropriate Technology.
“The program is designed to bring together greenhouse gas reduction, emissions and sequestration, along with equity, social justice, including benefits for historically underserved groups – who, in our case – in the northern Great Plains – most of our historically underserved groups are going to be small limited resource beginning-,veteran-tribal members,” she told the Daily Yonder.
Poole said soil health is key to profitability and drought resilience.
“The type of practices that we’ll be looking at is people who have farmed land trying to incorporate cover crops into their crop rotation will be part of it, no till or reduced till, if they are people who are already doing that,” she added. “A lot of us with sheep in the northern Great Plains are dealing with drought and at the same time wanting to intensify our grazing, so that we can build soil health. And what that really means is that we’ll be doing prescribed grazing plans that will also require infrastructure investments.”
In terms of the social justice component, Poole said over half of the people who have been onboarded so far are from historically underserved communities. Each of the 100 producers who will sign up to the program over the fives years will create a carbon farm plan, Poole said. Technical and financial assistance will be offered to the producers.
Poole said there are several reasons why a program such as this one is needed now: Textiles are responsible for somewhere between 5% and 14% of the global annual climate contribution.
“Then, if you think about what’s going on with microfiber contamination, in our waterways, in our land, even in the uterine lining of human mothers – it’s like, this is a really big thing, not just for carbon, but also when you think about overall health,” she said.
Further, sheep, Poole said, can be a “wonderful entry point to people who want to have livestock integrated in their businesses and their families. They’re little, they’re not really dangerous, they’re affordable.”
Jeff Clark is a registered targhee wool breeder in South Dakota. He’s the first producer in South Dakota to take part in the program.
“The reason that I reached out to them about this program was mainly because of my experience in my previous position, creating the carbon farm plan and seeing the benefit on the margin that we saw on selling our fine wool, through that program that that carbon plan allowed us to develop,” he told the Daily Yonder. “And quite frankly, the carbon plan implements a lot of best management practices that people should be doing anyway.”
He said a lot of producers are hesitant to take part in any program related to “climate.”
“[I’m] just being honest,” he said. “And I was that way until I stepped out and moved this way, and really dove into that world and started to really look at what what it meant, what these people were doing, what are the actual effects of these emissions versus not, and I’ll be honest, I came to the conclusion that livestock are not a problem.”
He added that there’s a lot of big corporations and entities that are involved in the sustainable agriculture world that reap a lot of benefit from added margins from marketing.
“And it’s my goal that smaller producers will be able to better understand and utilize these resources and in order to increase their margin and make their operation more sustainable, but by sustainable, you could cross that right over to profitable,” Clark said.
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