By Grace Hussain for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Terri Dee for Illinois News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Every five years or so Congress is tasked with renewing the Farm Bill, including subsidies, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and major farm conservation programs. The Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 - the current iteration of the Farm Bill - expired last year. Yet thanks to Congressional extensions, the policy continues limping along.

Some food systems experts believe that there won't be a new Farm Bill this year with a presidential election looming. There's a chance the existing legislation could be extended far longer too, all depending on whether Trump or Harris wins in November.

One of those experts is Jonathan Coppess. Born into a family of corn and soybean farmers, Coppess has spent much of his career working on various Farm Bills - both as Chief Counsel for the Senate Agriculture Committee and as head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Services Agency in 2009. Today, Coppess teaches agricultural policy at the University of Illinois, where he leads the university's agricultural policy program.

Sentient's Grace Hussain interviewed Coppess about the Farm Bill, agriculture policy and how a Trump or Harris will impact the future of food policy.

Grace Hussain

Why should the average consumer care about the Farm Bill?

Jonathan Coppess, JD

Well, the average consumer should care about the Farm Bill for a lot of reasons. Firstly, the bill provides assistance to low income families and households and individuals to buy food when times are tough. Certainly with the cost of groceries that we've all been living through, that's very relevant to, frankly, and unfortunately, over 40 million Americans on average, every month are getting assistance through that program. I think that's probably the first and foremost thing. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - which is reauthorized in a Farm Bill - is the biggest program helping put food on the table of households that are struggling. So that's one reason.

On the other side is the food system is farming, and this bill provides direct assistance to farmers, particularly when prices are low. This year, we're seeing crop prices take a nosedive because we expected a record harvest this year. The Farm Bill helps farmers manage risks like this through crop insurance.

Then what I like to think of as kind of the bridge policy is conservation - helping farmers do a better job on their land to avoid soil erosion or help clean up water and those sorts of things. Those policies all have varying degrees of direct impact on consumers and food prices and food availability. And of course, research and rural economic development. It's more indirect, but investing in research for food and agriculture is going to pay dividends down the road.

You know, often there's a bit of a misconception that Farm Bills have direct price impacts at the grocery store, and they don't. I mean, everything's much more indirect through the entire food system. But clearly, as we saw during the height of the pandemic, agricultural policy impacts things that, in turn, impacts different stages of the food system, and these can really influence what the consumer gets. We are in a constant state of trying to keep the wheels on the Farm Bill.

Hussain

The Farm Bill was up for renewal last year, but it still hasn't been renewed. Why do you think that is?

Coppess

That's not an easy question to answer. There's a variety of reasons that include the dysfunction in Congress and the partisan gridlock that we see in everything. One of the things that concerns people like me who spend far too much of their time on the Farm Bill is that it's long been bipartisan, and has long relied on this sort of strong coalition that moves it through Congress - even when Congress doesn't function on other policy areas. To see the Farm Bill stall is kind of a troubling indication of just how difficult things have become in Congress.

I would say that probably the single biggest barrier is that there's a really expensive demand being made by some in the sector. Some of the farm groups want to increase subsidy payments. The Congressional Budget Office scored that this summer, finding that would cost anywhere from 30 to $40 billion more over 10 years. The proponents of that policy don't have an offset for that cost. So that makes it really tough to move the legislation forward.

The partisan fight over the Food Assistance Program, coupled with this demand to increase subsidy payments to farmers, really just makes it impossible to keep the coalition together to approve the bill.

So the House bill came out of the committee, but it has no chance. The support for it is very narrow, and the votes aren't there, so we're not going to see it move. On the other side, the Senate, frankly, hasn't even started. They haven't even done the first critical steps of producing a bill to consider.

Hussain

So from your perspective, is either presidential candidate better on the Farm Bill and food systems?

Coppess

Well, I would say there are some important differences, but I think all of that has to be taken with a large grain of salt, in that farm policy doesn't rise to the level of the presidential campaign. If it even gets an offhand mentioned somewhere during the campaign, that would be a surprise. It's a big congressional effort, so the presidential campaigns, typically, they're not too wrapped up in it.

That said, it's also fascinating because, for example, Governor Walz - he's on the Harris Walz ticket, the Democratic ticket - was in the House of Representatives for the last three Farm Bills, so he's actually worked on the 2008, 2014 and 2018 Farm Bills. It's pretty rare to have somebody at that level with this much in-depth knowledge. I think that campaign certainly has more Farm Bill experience.

I have to tread lightly here, knowing all of the sensitivities that are in these discussions. I would expect a Harris-Walz administration to probably continue the Biden administration's policies in the agricultural space. Many of the priorities that we've seen in the Biden Harris administration - things like helping farmers manage the risks from climate change and manage the conservation challenges they face, in addition to some of the other risk management tools. I think their administration, particularly given the focus of Governor Walz and Vice President Harris, will be very supportive of continuing and maybe even improving the food assistance that working and low income families need. I would expect kind of a more traditional type operation of these policies without any major disruptions, and probably emphasizing some things more than others - like conservation and climate - which is what we've seen in the last four years.

We also have experience with the Trump campaign as an administration. When he was president, Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill into law. What's probably most notable there was the trade conflict that the Trump administration started with China that resulted in retaliation. Then the Trump administration's USDA took a very unusual step, to create its own direct payment program to farmers, and over the course of two years, paid well over $20 billion in ad hoc payments to farmers.

That's an indicator of two things. First, a higher likelihood of more trade disputes and conflicts and challenges arising in a second Trump administration. Second, more payments to farmers, which can seem like a really important policy, but can have long term consequences in that this could turn out to be more bad medicine over the long run.

There's also been a lot of tension on Project 2025. If there's anything that could be rather uniquely concerning about a second Trump administration, I think it's in that mindset. He's disavowed parts of the document, but I think what it signals is a willingness to really shake up the executive administrative operations. That includes everything from clearing out civil service employees to making creative use of statutory authorities. The concern there is that we've gotten very used to having a largely functioning federal government. For example, the USDA does a myriad of things - everything from food inspection to farm subsidies and SNAP. It is entirely possible that - whether intended or not - the sort of disruptive efforts that seem to be outlined in Project 2025, and in the campaign rhetoric, would completely upend operations.

Without some of the agency expertise, how do you run some of these programs? For example, crop insurance is extraordinarily complex. If you get mad and fire everybody that runs crop insurance, it's gonna be hard to make the program function. I think bigger concerns are around any of the ideas around the Food Safety and Inspection Service and having inspectors on the meat lines. A Trump administration causing disruptions in that area would be, frankly, probably really problematic for many consumers. I would also expect them to go after the SNAP program, which further complicates the coalition, and really makes it hard to get Farm Bills done.

This is somewhat over-generalized, but what we have is one side that represents the standard in terms of Farm Bills and farm policy, while the other option has the potential to be extraordinarily disruptive, chaotic and, frankly, destructive. I don't want to make an overstatement, but let's be honest. The Trump administration is cause for that kind of concern across the board, so it wouldn't just be USDA. And I wouldn't expect them to go after USDA first - other than maybe SNAP, school lunch programs and other hunger assistance programs.

I also think that one of the things that maybe doesn't get talked about enough is just how that kind of disruptive and chaotic mindset ripples through all of government and how it functions, potentially creating a lot of consequences that may or may not have been intended, but certainly aren't going to be well received by the public.

Hussain

So you started touching upon this a little bit in your answer, but could you talk a little bit more about what the outcome of the election could mean, if, for example, we have a Democrat-majority Congress, but a Republican for President or vice versa?

Coppess

Which party controls which house of Congress and the gavels at the committee level - that's the biggest component for a Farm Bill. So, I mean, it's fairly clear, right? The Republicans in the House from 2012 through 2014 struggled to get a Farm Bill done. In fact, it was in 2013 that the Farm Bill was defeated on the House floor for the first time since 1962 - frankly, it has been all tied up with this fight over the food assistance programs. So I would say there are concerns with Republican control of the House.

In the Senate, typically, that's tempered quite a bit. We don't see even conservative members of the Senate go after SNAP the same way - certainly not at the committee level. Whoever has the majority is going to have a pretty tight majority, and so I wouldn't expect the Senate to be too radical in terms of the SNAP program. The caveat is, if you had both chambers in Republican hands, I would expect a budget reconciliation effort that would probably cut a lot of things. It could really upend the way the system operates.

The biggest challenge I would expect if there are Democratic majorities is that you will have new agricultural committee chairs in both the House and the Senate. I worked for Chairwoman Stabenow when she took over the gavel in 2011, and it was a lot of work getting the pieces moving in the right direction, let alone put together. The next Congress will really need some time, regardless of whether it's both houses or one house in the Democratic hands.

I think there's also a lot of potential policy differences between the two parties in either chamber. So again, the House has really emphasized paying farmers more - increasing payments to farmers. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has been more balanced between keeping farm programs running, crop insurance up and functioning, but also investing in conservation and supporting the food assistance policy.

Hussain

Have you been keeping your eye on any Congressional races that you think could have an impact on this legislation?

Coppess

I'm an amateur political consumer, but I don't know that I have any great insights on races. One big issue is going to be leadership changes. Who's going to have the gavel? Who's the chair of each committee?

I'm in Illinois, so I've got to watch the Illinois congressional races. My Congresswoman is Nikki Budzinski (D-IL), and she has been very active on the Farm Bill and actually voted against it for a lot of reasons. I think she's done a really good job working on this. Any race I'm going to watch closely is going to be the one I'm going to vote in or vote on.

Outside of that, there's some big changes happening, particularly that Chairwoman Stabenow (D-MI) is retiring, so she's not up for reelection. Her seat in the Senate will be open. That'll be an important one to watch.

I think another really important race is in Ohio. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has been in the Senate since 2006, and he's been a key member of the Senate Ag Committee. I'm a little biased, but I think he's an incredible legislator and has a really great handle on these things. He brings a lot of good ideas, knowledge, experience and expertise. If he were not coming back, that's another kind of institutional experience loss.

Hussain

Is there a world in which we don't get a Farm Bill passed at all?

Coppess

I mean, we're not going to get one passed this year. I think we're heading for an extension, and I actually think the biggest question is whether you extend it for a couple years to allow the next Congress a little breathing room as everything gets settled. If you're asking whether it goes away, that's highly unlikely. It's more likely we just keep extending.

I think the bigger risk in terms of how these policies could or would or should develop, is what we've seen with appropriations bills, in which they're just constantly extended and kicked down the road, because they can't get together on it. I think there's a scenario in which extending this just gets easier and easier to do rather than actually reauthorize things. I think there is some real risk that we don't see improvements in the policy, because it just gets into this extension habit.

I don't foresee anything just going away again unless there's a major change. A second Trump administration may be the exception - if they had both houses of Congress - where you'd see some really drastic changes pushed through under budget rules.

Hussain

What do you think the chances of the PLANT and EATS Act making it into law via the Farm Bill?

Coppess

I'm not as familiar with those acts specifically. I don't have a good read on their chances. I would want to know some of the political dynamics around them, but I don't think either of them are difference maker type legislation. They're not going to prevent a Farm Bill from passing. It really, at this point, boils down to the farm subsidies and the food assistance.

Hussain

So you've talked a bit about this coalition between conservation, food assistance and subsidies. Can you speak at all to the tension within the Farm Bill between farming and conservation, specifically, given the environmental impact of food production and the livestock that much of the subsidized grain and corn is fed to?

Coppess

The conflict isn't necessarily about conservation policy so much. The conservation policies are helping to reduce some of the environmental challenges and problems that we see with modern agriculture. The challenge is really around funding. In my personal opinion, Congress doesn't put enough money into conservation for the demand by farmers and the need that we have out there. Finding those additional funds seems really difficult.

Now the other side of that question is just the pressure coming down across the food system, whether that be for less of a climate impact or better efforts to address climate change. You mentioned livestock. Certainly, the livestock issues have been huge for a while, and they appear to be continuing to increase. Part of that is the consolidation issue. We just have a few large meat packers, for example, and the consequences of consolidated animal feeding operations with large amounts of manure and animals housed in very tight, confined facilities. You have everything from the challenges of antibiotic use to keep those animals healthy to the welfare of the animals living in those conditions.

California pushed for changes to the way we raise hogs for pork, which is very controversial with farmers. They don't like to be told how to farm, but they also don't like the idea that people think they're mistreating the animals. You will hear many talk about their care for the animals, and how this is the best system for them. It certainly hits pretty close to those producers.

The next piece was that there's a similar kind of tension and conflict, or issues around row crop production and the concerns that things like herbicide drift or soil erosion or overuse of water or nutrient pollution and waters. Again, those conservation policies are there to help with the practices that should help with those issues. But there's a struggle for farmers who are in a tight, tough and competitive market. Again, they don't want to be told how to farm, and they also don't like the idea that consumers think they're not doing a good job as stewards of land and resources. That's a real conflict. That's tough to work out. It's where we do find value in these policy discussions about what are the priorities for farmers and how best to help farmers during tough times and with things like natural resource challenges, but we're not really having that discussion at this point in time. That's one of the things lost when the Farm Bill is not reauthorized.

Hussain

Is there anything else that you think readers should be paying attention to?

Coppess

I think probably what I would end on is just reemphasizing, across the board, the importance of this effort, not just the policies specific to the Farm Bill, but of the ability of Congress to do these big, difficult, complex bills and work through coalitions. It's a basic function when it comes to the policy.

I also want to reemphasize that one of the things that we're really not doing a good job of is prioritizing and emphasizing the conservation needs and the demand by farmers for funding.

We too often allow prices and economic challenges to be such a driver and such an emphasis, because it seems more immediate. But we've seen over the history of this how not doing a good job with conservation policy - with helping farmers manage those risks and challenges at the natural resource level - really can have huge costs and cause problems later on. They may have more immediate problems, but ignoring conservation certainly can come back to bite us as a nation. In an ideal world, we'd not only have a functional debate and reauthorization process, but we'd also be having a real and intense conversation about the priorities for helping farmers and how those priorities impact things like soil and water.


Grace Hussain wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Grey Moran for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Danielle Smith for Mississippi News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Timothy Robb peers into a microscope to reveal the underground realm of the living and dying within a fistful of soil. On the glass slide, he sees clumps of golden-brown minerals and organic matter particles, like pebbled splotches of ink. Nearly everything else in the landscape is a microbe, a motley crew of roving shapes, preparing to eat or be eaten. Hairy orbs of protozoa glide around in search of snacks in the flecks of bacteria scattered all around. A nematode, a microscopic worm, thrashes through the scene in a hurry. A tubular strand of fungi stands still, perhaps absorbing the dust of dead plants.

"This is called shadow microscopy," says Robb, the co-owner of Compostella Farm in southern Mississippi, bringing the microorganisms into focus. It's a way of viewing living specimens under an oblique light, so they appear backlit and magnified, like a shadow box theater. Just prior to this, he diluted the sample in water and shook it, like a "hurricane or earthquake, any biblical catastrophe motion for that soil." This broke apart the soil's structure so he could see everything holding it together, like the dark brown curl of fungi.

"This is what a really good, healthy fungi strand looks like," he says. Its uniform, segmented structure, thickness, and color are often good signs, though he adds that it's not a hard and fast rule, just clues that this might be an architect of healthy soil.

As a vegetable farmer, Robb is mostly in the business of life. But his interest in building healthy soil led him down into this shadowy world of decay, where microbes shuffle carbon and nutrients in an endless cycle that sustains all life on Earth. This world appears chaotic at first glance, but Robb insists that it is elegant. An orderly marketplace, really. He's been working to understand and strengthen this underground economy to replenish his soil.

Researchers have increasingly recognized how essential fungi are to sequestering carbon in the soil and some have come to appreciate the outsized role they play in supporting crop health, mitigating climate change, and even sheltering crops from disease. As fungi's vast benefits come to light, more farmers are tapping into this vital network, learning how to work with beneficial fungi to encourage its growth in the soil, swapping tilling for microscopes.

This growing interest in fungal networks on farms quietly challenges the underpinnings of U.S. agriculture. The prevailing model involves taking care of the crop's nutritional needs with chemicals, bumping up the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in an effort to maximize the yield of the crop. Farm ecosystems are controlled with herbicides that kill weeds and fungicides that kill the fungi in the soil. Common practices, like tilling the soil, disturb the fungal networks and then deepen the dependence on chemical inputs.

"We're reliant on these cheap inputs that are no longer cheap," says soil ecologist Adam Cobb, whose research focuses on mycorrhizal fungi. He notes that farmers are then subject to the whims of a global market, which tends to skyrocket in price during geopolitical conflicts.

These chemical-based practices degrade the soil over time, stripping it of its ability to cycle carbon and nutrients without its supportive network of decomposers. But working to both protect and encourage fungi on farms is a way to reverse course. Robb sees his work of coaxing beneficial fungi back into the soil, which he largely learned from an online program called the Soil Food Web School, as both a challenge to mainstream agriculture and as a way forward to restore agricultural soils.

"It's a criticism of how agriculture is currently conducted," says Robb. "And it's a methodology of introducing the microorganisms that are absent from the soil-the chain of organisms that release different minerals from rocks, clay, or silt particles in the soil."

The Nutrient-for-Carbon Exchange

Fungi are effectively merchants of carbon. In the soil, they give plants the water and nutrients they need, while the plants provide fungi with carbohydrates (i.e., carbon) from photosynthesis. Fungi can act like a second set of roots, extending the plant's ability to draw in water and nutrients.

Mycorrhizal fungi, which encompass thousands of species, can form large, underground networks, connected by branching filaments called hyphae, threading through the soil in every direction. One type of this fungi, known as arbuscular mycorrhizal, attaches directly to the cell membranes of a plant's root, facilitating a smooth delivery. Other microbes in the soil, like protozoa and nematodes, participate in this cycling, too, digesting fungi and bacteria to release their nutrients in a more available form to plants.

"The microbes engineered habitats around the plant roots that would be high in organic matter and make it more efficient for them to be able to obtain water and nutrients that they could then-in this carbon economy-essentially sell it to the plant," says Kris Nichols, a leading researcher on soil microbiology. "It's really an economic relationship."

This relationship becomes especially interesting when business is booming-when the plants are delivering a lot of carbon into the soil that is used to build larger and larger fungal networks while distributing carbon across the soil profile. The carbon accumulates in the soil in many forms, from fungal cell walls to soil aggregates, or pellets of very alive soil that Nichols describes as "little microbial towns," like economic hubs.

When these microbial communities develop, mycorrhizal fungi use their hard-earned carbon to build a protective coating around them, sheltering them from disturbances while more stably storing carbon. To the naked eye, these pellets look like crumbs in the soil.

The accumulation of carbon in the soil effectively slows the carbon cycle, causing carbon to linger in the ground for a longer period of time rather than quickly releasing into the atmosphere, where it takes the form of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas driving climate change. That's the goal of what's been popularly described as "climate-friendly farming," or regenerative agriculture: keeping as much carbon in the soil for as long as possible, in part by keeping these underground networks undisturbed.

And increasingly, fungi have gained scientific recognition for their essential role in slowing this life-ending and -giving cycle. A recent study found that the world's mycorrhizal fungi store the equivalent of a third of fossil-fuel emissions.

How Farmers Can Tap Into Fungal Networks

Peering through the microscope, Robb's task is relatively simple: He counts and measures each microbe-fungi, nematodes, protozoa, and bacteria-to understand the microbial relationships in the soil and gauge its health. He also looks for the indicators of beneficial fungi and a diversity of microbes: different colors, lengths, and shapes.

There's no shortage of bacteria on the slide. It's common for agricultural soils to be dominated by bacteria, which Robb is hoping to shift on his farm, building a more balanced ratio of fungi to bacteria in his soil. It's not that bacteria should be scorned; they too are important decomposers that collaborate with fungi. But it's hard to beat fungi at its game, rightfully a kingdom of its own. Fungi, more complex organisms, are more efficient at storing carbon across vast networks in the soil and more effective at delivering nutrients for certain plants.

The ratio of fungi to bacteria depends on the plants, explains Robb. He mostly grows salad greens across 3 acres of farmland. For his bok choy, mustards, and kale, he's aiming for a 1-to-3 ratio of fungi to bacteria, but his lettuce requires a bit more fungi, closer to 1-to-1. He steeps the compost like a tea, extracting the microorganisms in water, and then runs it through his irrigation system.

"You're introducing millions of fungi and bacteria species to the soil. And that's as far as the management really needs to go, because once the plant gets established, then it's controlling [the relationship with the microbes]," says Robb. He's essentially just giving a plant options, a pool of microbes at its service.

In addition to applying compost tea, Robb supports fungal life by creating mulch from wood chips, which the fungi help decompose.

Robb shows me a pile of wood chips softening in the sun. It's just 3 months old, but already threaded with fine white hairs of saprophytic fungi, resembling a cobweb. "When you can see it visually like this, what you're actually seeing are like thousands of strands wrapped around each other," says Robb, given that hypha are just several microns in size.

Before planting, he'll also coat his seeds in a mycorrhizal treatment, a powder of spores. This inoculates this critical, network-building fungi in the soil. So as soon as the plant germinates, the fungi will be available to swap nutrients for carbon. Periodically, he'll feed the fungi, adding liquid kelp, fish hydrolysate, and humic and fulvic acids to encourage its growth.

Every month or so, Robb peers at a soil sample under the microscope, assessing his progress. It has been about a year since he bought his first microscope and began surveying the local microbes. Most of his soil still isn't where he'd like it to be, still dominated by bacteria, but it's steadily improving. He essentially started from scratch on sandy soil that couldn't hold onto much water or nutrients.

The most visible marker of improvement, at least to the naked eye, might be the crops themselves. A couple years ago, he observed "a precipitous decline in the quality" of his vegetables. They were yellowing and stunted. His lettuce was drooping. Disease was a regular occurrence. This prompted him to look into how to build soil that could hold onto more nutrients, which led him to fungi.

So far, his focus on improving decomposition has improved the health of his crops-now, rows of mostly bright green, leafing, upright crops emerge from dark brown, lush soil.

A Symbiotic Relationship That Predates Humans

The critical relationship between fungi and plants dates back 470 million years, when aquatic plants first transitioned to land. It was a barren landscape, without trees or soil, just endless sand, silt, and clay.

"We had a very mineral land base, but we didn't have soil," said microbiologist Kris Nichols. As plants began washing up on shore, it's thought that mycorrhizal fungi helped them siphon nutrients and water, providing what they needed to move to land, in a symbiotic relationship for the ages.

"We know that this relationship existed," said Nichols. "We have the genetic markers and we have the fossilized plant roots to be able to see, structurally, that it has been this same type of relationship for hundreds of millions of years."

It has taken a while for the role of fungi in supporting plants and soil health to gain mainstream scientific recognition, however. Elaine Ingham, a pioneer in the field of soil microbiology, recalls facing pushback in the early 1980s when she proposed researching the role of soil microorganisms for her dissertation at Colorado State University. She met with her professors to propose her field of inquiry, only to be sternly dismissed.

"They'd look me in the eye and say, 'You don't know what you're talking about. Bacteria and fungi in the soil-they're just there. They don't do anything,'" she recalls. "All of them agreed that I was endangering my ability to get a job at the other end of my research project."

But Ingham was undeterred. "I wanted to understand what bacteria and fungi in the soil were there for," she says. "In all the literature I looked at, you couldn't find anything about what these organisms in the soil actually do." With the blessing of her advisor, she was allowed to pursue a dissertation project, along with her husband Russell Ingham, studying how soil fungi, bacteria, and nematodes interact with plants.

It was the start of her life's work to help peel back the layers of the mysterious world of microbes within the soil. To date, the vast majority of the millions of fungi species on Earth remain unknown by scientists, but it's now abundantly clear that many fungi play a critical role in soil health. Ingram, who grew up on a farm, now works with farmers to reintroduce soil fungi through the Soil Food Web School.

Robb came to learn how to work with fungi on his farm when he stumbled upon the school by chance in a footnote of a book. He attended the program without a background in science, but it didn't take him long to feel comfortable behind a microscope. It was an "aha moment" when he realized his soil was depleted of fungi and other microbes-with this, he had the clarity of a diagnosis.

The Vast, Untapped Potential of Fungi

While the Soil Food Web School is one approach, there are practically infinite ways to work with beneficial fungi and microorganisms on farms. Many practices associated with regenerative agriculture and long-standing Indigenous methods encourage fungi. Even if not measured with a microscope, there are signs of fungi at work-like dark, spongious soil.

"We never leave our soil bare. It is always covered with straw, leaf mold, or wood chips," says Leah Penniman, the co-founder of Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York. "We like to think of these wood chips as encouraging the fungi from the native forest around to come into our fields and partner with our orchards and with our crops."

In 2006, when she started Soul Fire Farm, the soil was very degraded and the organic matter-which includes soil carbon-was only at 3 percent. But they've since increased it to 10 percent to 12 percent in some areas. "That has been through a partnership with fungi," Penniman says. Slowly but surely, fungi have emerged from the forest, building carbon in the soil.

Robb also thinks of the forest on the outskirts of his fields. The trees have a relationship with mycorrhizal fungi and microbes that take care of all their needs, without any human intervention. "Those are nitrogen-rich plants, and nobody's applying fertilizer," he says.

He currently adds organic nitrogen to his farm, but hopes to add less and less, allowing the fungi and microbes to increasingly take over in tending to his crops.


Grey Moran wrote this article for Civil Eats.


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By Jessica Kutz for The People Sentinel.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for South Carolina News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

It’s high noon on an overwhelmingly hot summer day in Allendale County, and the air conditioning is blasting inside Rachael Sharp’s truck. Looking out at her farm through the windshield, Sharp opens up one of many agriculture related apps on her iPhone. With the push of a button, her irrigation systems nearly half a mile away tremble to life, spraying water onto a vast field of soybeans.

That’s the future imagined by precision agriculture, an umbrella term for the new agricultural technologies transforming farming; artificial intelligence (AI), satellite imagery, cloud computing, remote irrigation, drones and self-driving tractors are becoming the future of agriculture. With billions of dollars of private and public investment behind it and the hope of it helping agriculture mitigate and adapt to the global climate crisis, precision agriculture makes bold promises. 

Locally, some farmers have described the rollout of precision agriculture as a welcome opportunity, while others experienced it as overbearing. But on Rachael Sharp’s family farm, precision agriculture is a mixed bag.

“We’re saving on input costs because we don’t put as much water, nutrients or fertilizers out and there’s not as much left in the environment at the end of the day,” Sharp said, her iPhone open to the Climate FieldView app, which shows her satellite-generated graphics of which parts of her farm need water. “But it spits out so much information that sometimes it feels overwhelming.”

Precision agriculture technology is being marketed aggressively to local farmers — at trade shows, in emails, and over phone calls — with the main promises being the ability to cut costs, get higher crop yields and optimize their farming techniques.


“We went to [a trade show] last year and I bet we saw 35 different people offering precision ag tools and products,” Sharp said. The previous year, Sharp said, only several people were selling precision agriculture products. “It was crazy overwhelming.”

For local farmers on shoestring budgets, these promises are enticing, as recent crises have forced American farmers to grapple with higher input costs on fertilizer, seeds and fuel, as well as unstable markets to sell their harvest. In 2022, American farmers dealt with a 50% rise in the cost of fertilizer after its main ingredient, natural gas, spiked in cost when Russia invaded Ukraine. As climate change worsens, increasing temperatures are forcing farmers to make decisions regarding what seeds to plant and when to plant them.

“We’re looking at planting a soybean [seed] that doesn’t take as long of a growing season,” said Rachael Sharp, noting her concern for what future temperature changes could mean for her farm. “We’ve adjusted to planting it earlier and getting it out of the field earlier because you’re not gonna have as much [growing] time. Our winters these past two years have been so mild, so the oats don’t have the fertilization they need.”

At a time of destabilization for local growers, precision agriculture’s tools offer a way to navigate the instability. Through the use of nodes, soil probes, sensors, drones and satellite imagery, precision agriculture collects data regarding soil chemistry, seed usage, crop damage, weather patterns and other variables. Then, using cloud computing, algorithms, and machine learning, these data are then analyzed to show farmers which areas of a field need the most, or the least, attention.

“In a sense, it’s like micromanaging a field,” said Michael Plumblee, Assistant Professor of Agronomy at Clemson University, who has been involved in the local rollout of precision agriculture. “Rather than treating everything across the field as the same, we identify different management zones within the field.”

Precision agriculture digitizes almost every step of the farming process, from tilling and sowing to irrigation and fertilization to pest control and harvesting.

“There’s enough precision agriculture technology now to make better actions with the limited resources we have, [since] we don’t have infinite water, infinite fertilizer, and infinite labor,” said Vicente Ossa, the marketing manager for WiseConn, a precision agriculture company that sold its automated irrigation system DropControl at a July trade show in Barnwell.

The global market for precision agriculture is expected to grow from $8.5 billion in 2023 to $14.9 billion by the end of 2028, according to a market research report by BCC Research. North America, the report says, has the highest market share in precision agriculture globally.

As climate change creates increasingly unpredictable growing seasons, warmer winters and threatens crop yields in the southeast, data analysis will become an important part of helping farmers make better decisions, according to Kevin Royal, the precision agriculture specialist at the Edisto Research and Education Center in Blackville.

“Farmers place their bets on what variety to plant based on what they think the weather’s gonna be like this year from the field conditions and from historic data, but that’s where the AI comes in,” Royal said. “Based on historic patterns and projected temperature changes, it gives you recommendations.”

Using data gathered from a field, artificial intelligence can be used to help farmers adapt to climate change and reduce a field’s emissions. For instance, targeted use of nitrogen fertilizer cuts down on excessive use; nitrogen fertilizer creates nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. 

Algorithms and machine learning are increasingly being used in farming operations as agriculture increasingly becomes an industry of data; by 2021, 87% of farms were using some form of AI. However, artificial intelligence itself is a growing emissions source, as the energy-hungry data centers that power artificial intelligence will consume twice as much energy in 2026 as they did in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.

The technological innovations of precision agriculture will play a key role in adopting the practices that keep agriculture on track to meet emissions reductions targets, according to a World Resources Institute report. Precision agriculture is being used to track and reduce energy usage, particularly from groundwater irrigation, which farmers are increasingly relying on as rainfall patterns become less predictable. By using less water in irrigation, Sharp has cut down on energy consumption; irrigation pumping accounts for 16% of all greenhouse gas emissions from energy use in agriculture, forestry and fisheries in the United States.

“In South Carolina, we spend a lot of money irrigating,” Jose Payero, an irrigation specialist at Clemson University who has developed an app that allows farmers to insert field data and energy variables. Payero led a demonstration on irrigation energy consumption at a farm field day in Blackville on September 12. “You can calculate what the cost is per acre, and the total cost for your farm, depending on your energy source,” he told a crowd of farmers.

Precision agriculture is also helping farmers confront local ecological issues. As previously reported by The People-Sentinel, booming populations of wild deer and pigs in the region have caused widespread damage to local farms, pushing local farmers into the red.

“Now they can actually figure out what percentage of that field has been damaged by wild pigs and how that may increase over time,” said John Mayer, a research scientist at the Savannah River National Laboratory, who has studied wild pig populations for decades. “That’s one of the major ways precision agriculture [is] able to help with the wild pig populations.”

In Rachael Sharp’s fields, wild deer have been a persistent issue, but satellite mapping now shows how parts of the field are more damaged by deer than others. “It sees things that the human eye wouldn’t see until probably much later, which has been helpful because by that point in time it’s too late.”

Although Rachael is joining farmers in adopting precision agriculture technology, other farmers, such as her 76-year-old father Don Sharp, are cautious. Despite the purported benefits of precision agriculture, its technologies are expensive to adopt, and Don Sharp shares the concerns of many local farmers about growing corporate control over small farms.

“I think in another 30 years small family farms will be out of business and corporations will own [their land],” said Don Sharp, who has been farming the same land since he was a teenager in the 1960s. At that time, there were roughly 3.5 million farms in America; now, there are 1.89 million farms in America.

Just getting precision agriculture into rural areas faces numerous challenges. Its technologies require high bandwidth speeds for uploading and downloading data collected from farms, creating a major barrier for local farmers; as with many rural communities across the United States, rural counties like Barnwell, Allendale and Bamberg counties have inequitable access to broadband.

“We need to double the food supply for the world in the next 50 years, but we’re basically out of agricultural land, so broadband will be essential for precision agriculture,” said Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at PennState.

But the lack of broadband in rural areas is beginning to change. In November 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which contains $42 billion in funding for a nationwide buildout of broadband infrastructure, called the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program.

“Last fall, we just got high speed internet through the infrastructure grants [and] we are so thankful for it,” said Richard Rentz, a farmer from rural Bamberg County. “It has been a game changer in a lot of ways.”

The deployment of broadband infrastructure on Rentz’s farm has allowed him to begin precision agriculture practices like variable rate seeding, which involves using data to plant seeds in areas of a field that have higher productivity.

“[Precision agriculture] has been saving us on everything,” Rentz said. “When you start varying lime and varying fertilizer, the payback is pretty quick, and even with variable rate seeding, the payback is relatively quick. … Certainly it saves on everything.”

For Tony and Steve Douglas, two brothers who farm in nearby Aiken County, lack of internet access has created numerous problems. While using automated steering on their tractor, which is connected online via cell phone tower, connection will frequently drop.

“You know how a signal is,” Tony Douglas said. “You be down in the bottom [of a field] and the cell service drops to your tractor and it messes up your rows. Then you gotta drive around and try to find a signal. It was really frustrating.”

Internet and broadband accessibility will be one of the biggest barriers for implementing precision agriculture, according to Royal.

“As we’re becoming more dependent on moving that data from the field to the cloud, wireless broadband is a big issue,” said Royal, who serves on a working group at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that encourages the adoption of precision agriculture. “Broadband can help or hinder your adoption of precision ag. In some places it’s great and in some places, it’s really tough.”

Farmers in America and in rural counties like Allendale are also getting older; the average age of an American farmer is 58.1 years old, and roughly 58% of farmers in Allendale are over 65, according to USDA statistics. Older legacy farmers like Don Sharp are less familiar with technology, and fear being left further behind; even 37-year-old Rachael struggles to understand the new technology hitting the market.

“A lot of people that are coming into farming now, they don’t know anything but using tech to make decisions,” Rachael said. “Fear shouldn’t be the reason farmers are adopting these technologies but it feels like it is.”

But learning gaps and an aversion to new technology is something that precision agriculture companies are beginning to adjust to. Development of new innovations in precision agriculture will only be as good as farmers’ ability to utilize them, Ossa said, so working with farmers to improve technological literacy will be a key step in moving forward.

“We had a client who was very old and not close to technology at all and didn’t have a smartphone,” Ossa said. “We were able to simplify it in a way that an everyday guy can use. He understood the value that we are bringing and got a phone.”

But as coordination between precision agriculture systems improves and artificial intelligence learns more about farms, the need for humans to make decisions about agriculture will continue to fall, according to Royal.

“With machine learning, you’ll eventually have a local bot or a service you subscribe to that’ll take years worth of data and help you build a more dynamic map of where your good yields can be or where your poor yields are projected to be,” Royal said.

Despite its acclaimed benefits, the Sharps have noticed that precision agriculture systems frequently fail to understand characteristics about their land that they have accumulated through decades of farming.

“They definitely overpromise and underdeliver,” Sharp said. “They tell you all these wonderful things it's going to do for you and that can be true, but we’re already trying to raise crops and a lot of farmers don't have time to sit down and learn. I think the Silicon Valley people think everybody knows as much as they know.”

For now, Don Sharp still keeps an inventory on pen and paper. Although he is not against utilizing precision agriculture, he worries of a future where the farming lifestyle continues to be pushed out of both agriculture and society.

“I always say that he who plants a seed beneath the soil and waits for it to grow believes in God,” Don Sharp said. “You don’t really have that type of farmer anymore. They’re a dying breed.”


Jessica Kutz wrote this article for The People Sentinel.


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As Colorado experiences more frequent extreme weather events, prolonged drought and loss of biodiversity because of a changing climate, farmers and scientists are developing more resilient and sustainable practices to mimic what Mother Nature has been doing for thousands of years.

Liz Carlisle, associate professor of environmental studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara and co-author of a new study published in the science journal Frontiers, said agroecological farming can create tightly connected cycles of energy, water and nutrients, if farmers get the resources they need.

"If we want to have a more sustainable food system, we really need to invest in that next generation of farmers and their development of knowledge," Carlisle urged. "And really think of them as the most important resource in farming."

Most of today's farms rely on fossil fuel-based inputs such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and soil is essentially just a place to stand up crops. This new approach prioritizes a living, healthy soil and aims to replace nonrenewable chemicals with people who know how to tap into natural ecosystems.

Carlisle pointed out new farms planted in wooded landscapes would look a lot like an actual forest. There would be multiple layers of crops, including trees. Farming on Colorado prairie lands could include regenerative grazing patterns created by native bison and other herbivores.

"Agroecological farming systems are really trying to work with nature -- and the services that nature provides, in terms of pest control and fertility -- rather than working against nature," Carlisle explained.

Over the past century, as family farms have been swallowed up by large corporations, farming in the U.S. has trended in the opposite direction. Carlisle noted people with deep ties to their lands have been replaced by chemical-centered practices in an effort to lower labor costs, and entire rural economies have paid the price.

"It's worth investing a little bit more of our tremendous wealth as a society in the people that do that critically important work," Carlisle contended. "And the landscapes that they are caring for."


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