Agriculture

The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) Healthy Soils Program (HSP)  launched in 2017 and has since invested $17.8 million in farmers and ranchers to promote soil building practices as a climate change mitigation and adaptation strategy. This year’s highly anticipated grant cycle is coming up, featuring many improvements and $28 million—more available funding than ever before. Despite program and application upgrades, the process of applying, implementing and monitoring can still be time consuming and burdensome for many farmers. Technical Assistance (TA) providers—including recently launched program that supports TA providers specifically for CDFA’s Climate Smart Agriculture programs—exist for this purpose. Many past HSP incentive and demonstration grants have been supported by local organizations, like Resource Conservation Districts (RCDs). The Resource Conservation District of Greater San Diego County manages the Tijuana River Valley Community Garden, providing ...

The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) recently proposed a number of improvements to the Healthy Soils Program (HSP), which should ease the application process for farmers. This is good news that comes ahead of the next round of funding for the program, which will make available a record $28 million in grants to farmers and ranchers (nearly twice as much as the last round). The proposed improvements, summarized below, were included in CDFA’s recent draft Request for Grant Applications (RGA). The final Request for Grant Applications is expected to be released in February, which will officially kick off a 4-month rolling application period. If you have ever considered applying to the program, this will be a good year to do so! We are excited about the proposed improvements because they align with our recommendations to address a number of barriers to scaling up the program identified in a survey we conducted of technical assistance providers in May of 2019. We are ver...

Governor Proposes New Climate Smart Agriculture Funding Sources but Falls Short on Dollars Invested Governor Newsom unveiled his state budget including $12.5 billion in climate change investments. Climate Smart Agriculture programs will get a boost in funding for some key programs. Overall, the Governor’s proposal aims to diversify the funding sources for climate investments in the state but leaves short a number of key programs to help farmers become more resilient to greater weather extremes and address climate change. “We commend Governor Newsom for thinking outside the cap-and-trade box and identifying new much-needed sources of funding for addressing the climate crisis, including for Climate Smart Agriculture,” said Jeanne Merrill, Policy Director with the California Climate and Agriculture Network. “We urge him and the legislature to be more ambitious and make larger investments in our rural communities and our food supply. Reaching the state’s net carbon neutrality goal by 20...