Climate Change Is Walloping Us Farms. Can This Farm Bill Create Real Solutions?
Although it seems like everyone in D.C. is buzzing about a “climate farm bill,” some of the most impactful changes, including crop diversification and shifting diets from meat toward plants, are barely on the negotiating table.
April 26, 2023 | Source: Civil Eats | by Lisa Held
For the past decade, Emma Jagoz has been stewarding and expanding a thriving organic farm that now spans 25 acres near Frederick, Maryland. At Moon Valley Farm, she grows a wide variety of vegetables that end up in CSA boxes and restaurant kitchens in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia year-round.
Increasingly, she has had to contend with extreme weather: early frosts threaten her fall crops. False springs have caused her winter crops to bolt too soon. Rain comes all at once and then not at all.
“Over the past 12 years, it does feel like the seasons are getting less predictable,” she said in early March at the Farmers for Climate Action: Rally for Resilience in D.C., where she held a hand-drawn sign decorated with beets and tomatoes.
As an organic grower focused on building healthy, carbon-holding soil, Jagoz’s climate activism may seem predictable.