What would you do with $1.5 trillion? How about giving farmers $100 an acre for 5 years? To receive that “bonus” farmers growing corn, soybeans, wheat, and related crops would get to sell all tillage equipment and possibly their biggest tractor.

They would commit to continuous no-till (or even including strip-till) and cover crops for 5 years. What a deal!

Unfortunately, farmers won’t get the $1.5 trillion in the proposed Farm Bill, which is stuck in Congress with no current breakthrough yet on a final vote. Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow released draft language of a proposed Farm Bill on Nov. 18 but it’s very late in the game with a new administration taking over, observers point out.

And regardless of the total amount, a large amount of the funding will likely be for SNAP, previously known as food stamps. While farmers will receive a small percentage of every dollar that SNAP recipients spend on groceries, we can still ask why it’s called the “Farm Bill.”

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that barely passed Congress in 2022 totaled $891 billion, mainly intended to reduce the impact of climate change. The USDA-NRCS received 2% ($19.5 billion) over 5 years to support conservation programs intended to reduce global warming. For NRCS, that is a HUGE amount of money.

But suppose USDA had received most of the IRA funding and used it to fund the “$100 an acre for 5 years” plan. The result of storing carbon in the soil on 878,560,000 acres could…