While we applaud recent investments from the federal government that have finally begun to tackle the climate crisis, the Biden Administration’s hallmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), massively missed the mark when it comes to bad incentives for agriculture. Instead of prioritizing truly low-carbon regenerative and plant-based agriculture, the IRA includes hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies and tax incentives that giant meat and dairy companies are using to entrench animal factories across rural America.
Today in Washington DC, legislators introduced a new bill that would help address the harms of massive confinement factory farms and invest in sustainable food systems. The Industrial Agriculture Conversion Act (IACA), introduced by Rep. Alma Adams (D-NC) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) offers a positive vision for a future of American farming without massive CAFOs. Farm Forward strongly endorses the IACA and we join more than 100 environmental, public health, family farmer, consumer, and animal protection organizations in doing so.
At a high level, the bill directs the United States Department of Agriculture to provide grants to carry out genuinely climate-smart conservation projects. Specifically, the IACA will create a slate of new tools to enable farmers to build a more sustainable and humane agriculture system. This is a common sense bill that is supported by a significant majority of Americans—according to a survey commissioned by the ASPCA, 82 percent of Americans support the government offering CAFO farmers money to help cover the costs of transitions to more humane systems of agriculture. In that same survey, there was little support for the government’s current policy of reimbursing profitable corporations for mass culling their flocks after bird flu outbreaks (38 percent).
And according to recent polling conducted by Data for Progress on Farm Forward’s behalf, large numbers of Michigan voters reject the idea that state climate policy should be influenced by factory farms and fossil fuel interests.
And that’s what the IACA is about—moving away from financing that helps the factory farming industry.
Among other provisions, the bill:
The Industrial Agriculture Conversion Act is the latest in a series of proposed legislation aimed at building a saner, more sustainable, and humane food system. Bills like the Farm Systems Reform Act and the Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act both, in different ways, would take important steps toward regulating factory farming and reducing its harm. Together these bills offer a bold vision for the future of American agriculture that puts factory farms where they belong—in the rearview mirror.