When Debbie Stabenow retired from Congress last year, she ended a 28-year run of advocating at the federal level for sustainable food systems.
The Democrat from Michigan, who served four terms in the Senate after two terms in the House of Representatives, is fond of saying, “You don’t have an economy unless somebody makes something and somebody grows something.” Over the course of her career, she proved to be a skilled negotiator — securing incremental, bipartisan changes to the nation’s farm bill, the legislative package that defines United States agricultural policy roughly every five years.
Stabenow secured funding for urban agriculture, farmers markets, and growers of so-called specialty crops — such as tree nuts, fruits, and vegetables — which are defined in opposition to commodity crops like soybeans and wheat. In her final years in Congress, she argued that the farm bill should evolve to include more climate solutions. Stabenow pushed to keep or expand funding for programs that incentivized farmers to adopt land practices that help reduce emissions, like planting cover crops in fields during the off-season and restoring wetlands on their property. But last year, she found that just the mention of the term “climate” caused talks to fall apart.
“I could not get my counterpart to negotiate,” Stabenow told Grist at a recent conference in northern Michigan, referring to John Boozman, the Republican senator from Arkansas who worked alongside her in the upper chamber’s agricultural committee. “Unfortunately, the term ‘climate’ has been so polarizing,” she added. (A representative for Boozman declined to comment for this article.)
Stabenow’s career — the ways she managed to expand the farm bill and the ways she couldn’t — speaks to how difficult it has become for lawmakers to fund climate initiatives. Now, she warns that those elected to the 119th Congress should be wary of attempts to roll back environmental progress.
The U.S. agricultural sector contributes about 10 percent of the nation’s climate-warming emissions, according to an estimate from the Environmental Protection Agency. Just over half of those emissions come from the way farms manage agricultural soils, which can release nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Livestock — and the manure they produce, depending on how it’s stored — are also major sources of methane emissions on farms.
Historically, most farm bills have focused neither on reducing agricultural emissions nor on the impacts of the climate crisis on farms, such as the way severe storms, drought, and extreme heat impact crop production. But in recent years, there have been more discussions in Congress and among farmers about whether and how the farm bill should adapt to address these dynamics.
“We’ve seen increased impacts since the last farm bill was passed,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which advocates for equitable food systems. He added that “farmers know” when their work is being hampered by climate change.
Today, there’s still no new farm bill, even though it’s more than a year overdue. Last year, Congress extended the 2018 farm bill until September 2025, along with around $31 billion in aid for farmers.
Passing the omnibus bill, which encompasses programs as diverse as food stamps, rural economic development, and ethanol, didn’t always take this long. Stabenow worked on five farm bills and during that time was able to increase funding and create programs for U.S. farmers big and small. “I had a lot of clout because of my seniority in chairing the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee,” said Stabenow, who served two stints as chair and was the ranking Democrat on that Senate committee from 2015 to 2021. “So I could block and tackle.” When Democrats in Congress wrote the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which would wind up being the biggest climate spending bill in history, Stabenow fought to include almost $40 billion in funding for climate-smart agriculture, forestry and rural energy programs.
The money for climate-smart agriculture would prove to be particularly controversial. The term refers to practices that are believed to reduce emissions or sequester carbon on farms, but some groups and lawmakers argue the category is too broad to actually be meaningful. Still, in her final months in Congress, Stabenow sought to secure future funding for conservation programs and climate-smart agriculture, submitting a roughly 1,400-page draft resolution of the farm bill to the Senate, even though it had virtually no chance of passing.
Stabenow’s draft text included a provision that would have ensured leftover money for climate-smart agricultural practices from the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, would be included in the next farm bill. This became one of the main irreconcilable differences between her and her Republican counterparts in the House and Senate.
Stabenow said it was important to name climate change in these discussions and explain why reducing emissions matters. Climate change is wreaking havoc on farmers: For instance, cherry orchards in Michigan have recently struggled with unseasonably warm and wet conditions. On the East Coast, farmers dealt with unprecedented drought and wildfires this past fall, which most in the region had never before encountered. “When discussing policy, we need to connect the dots,” she said in an email to Grist.
Despite staunch gridlock in Congress, Stabenow insists that policies aiming to curb emissions from agricultural lands are common-sense.
“When you talk to people about conservation programs and keeping carbon in the soil and protecting our land and our water from runoff with pesticides and so on, farmers all support that,” she said. “They are all doing these practices.”
Indeed, according to the American Farm Bureau, a leading industry advocacy group, U.S. farmers have increased their use of cover crops by 75 percent over the past 10 years while also increasing adoption of other practices that trim emissions.
However, some in the industry worry that allocating money exclusively for climate programs excludes farmers from directing it to other important uses. The Republican House agriculture committee chair, Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, wrote in an op-ed last year that farmers should have more flexibility in how to use federal dollars. Environmental groups, meanwhile, have questioned the effectiveness of certain programs deemed “climate-smart” under the IRA, such as spending on methane digesters, which create fuel out of animal manure.
David Swanson / AFP / Getty Images
Even before she advocated to extend the IRA’s climate-smart spending, Stabenow pushed for policies that boosted food security and environmental conservation. Though not explicitly labeled as climate solutions, these provisions help make farms and our food system more resilient against shocks from extreme weather and other impacts of global warming. The 2018 farm bill, which Stabenow led negotiations for, provided $428 billion over its first five years, with 7 percent of that total aimed at conservation programs.
A major focus of Stabenow’s career was increasing support for specialty crops — those fruits, vegetables, herbs, and tree nuts — through farm bill programs. These make up a big chunk of U.S. crop production value — up a quarter in 2020, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department — but it took until 2008 for Congress to specifically include research and funding for them in the farm bill. Specialty crop growers have benefitted from Stabenow’s work to ensure they had better access to crop insurance and block grants, which in turn helps them address disease and volatile weather, said Jamie Clover Adams, the executive director of the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board.
Support for specialty crops is not explicitly a climate solution. However, experts say that diversifying our food system can boost resilience against extreme weather. Additionally, certain land management practices used in specialty crop farming can help lessen its impact on the environment; cover crops planted in barren fields during the fall and winter, for example, help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. Rotating the kinds of crops grown on specialty farms can also improve soil health, which in turn makes crops more resilient to climate impacts.
It made sense for Stabenow to take up the mantle for specialty crops: Michigan, which is one of the country’s most agriculturally diverse states, produces around 300 products and is a leading grower of fruits and vegetables like tart cherries and asparagus. (In her farewell speech to Congress, Stabenow said, “I have frequently said that you can see Michigan on every page of the farm bills I have written.”) Her work on food and agricultural policy was often popular across party lines: She won endorsements from industry groups like the Michigan Farm Bureau, which often supports Republicans. In fact, once Stabenow’s seat was vacant, the Michigan Farm Bureau endorsed Republican candidate Mike Rogers as her replacement. (The race was narrowly won by Democrat Elissa Slotkin.)
Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Stabenow’s commitment to a wide variety of agriculture is even visible on the walls of the Senate agriculture committee room in Washington, D.C., where portraits of committee chairs hang. Stabenow’s portrait is filled with asparagus, cucumbers, corn, pumpkins, peppers, carrots, turnips, potatoes, peaches, apples, blueberries, tart cherries, and geranium flowers, as well as dairy cows in the background. “Even when she’s not there, it’s going to be a constant reminder that we exist and that we are part of farm policy,” said Adams of the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board.
It was her commitment to specialty crop farmers that made Stabenow widely known and respected by advocates of sustainable food systems. (She’s been called the “specialty crop queen” by agriculture industry leaders.) Her work on past farm bills showed that investment in one type of agriculture “doesn’t have to be to the detriment of other types of farming,” said Lavender, from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
After Stabenow’s retirement, fellow Democrats on the committee lauded her work on climate policy in agriculture. She “leaves behind an impactful legacy from her work as a champion for nutrition, local food systems, and conservation,” said Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey in an email.
But Stabenow’s interest in expanding the scope of the farm bill also sparked criticism from those who believed she did not do enough to protect commodity farmers, such as corn, soy, and cotton growers. In November 2024, when she released the text of her draft farm bill, Boozman called it “insulting.” The two lawmakers were split on a number of key issues — like how much funding should go towards conservation programs and food assistance programs. Boozman, now the Senate agriculture committee chair, has repeatedly said efforts should be focused squarely on securing better economic outlooks for U.S. farmers.
In early February, he invited farmers to share stories of recent financial hardship with the Senate agriculture committee. One of them said, “I can say without a doubt that it was the most difficult year financially that we have endured so far. This year, I’m even more worried about what is to come.”
Farmers have indeed been hit by declining profits for two years in a row. Research shows severe weather is at least part of the reason why. For her part, Stabenow hopes lawmakers will continue supporting small, diverse farming operations — while pushing for climate and conservation.
“Conservation practices in general are a win-win, because it’s about keeping carbon in the soil, about keeping soil on the land and not running off into lakes and streams,” she said. “Focusing on what we call climate-smart conservation is really just doubling down on those things that are most effective at being able to capture carbon.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline One senator’s lonely quest to make the farm bill more sustainable on Feb 27, 2025.
For years, Debbie Stabenow fought for environmentally friendly agricultural policy. She retired with mixed results. Food and Agriculture, Politics Grist
