Predictions of the top 5 agriculture issues in 2024

It’s that time of year when your intrepid columnist uses a divining rod, a scrying ball, a set of tarot cards and three slightly scuffed marbles to prognosticate the top ag stories for 2024.

Seeking some helpful insight this year, I turned to an unassuming tome, Les Propheties written in 1554, to see what 2024 might bring:

“The dry earth will grow more parched and there will be great floods.”

The author of this prediction is the French astrologer Michel de Nostredame. Yeah that guy. Nostradamus.

Holy climate change. That’s. On. My. List. As well as four other big agricultural issues sure to be discussed this year.

The 2023 Farm Bill

It should have been signed, sealed and delivered by Sept. 30, 2023. House Committee on Agriculture Chair Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-Penn., and Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., pinky-swore to deliver a new farm bill for the president’s signature before the 2018 Farm Bill expired. Quaint, given the failed efforts in 2018 and 2012.

Neither Thompson or Stabenow could have foreseen what became the total dysfunction of the U.S. House throughout the fall of 2023, culminating in the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Throughout the McCarthy firing and subsequent three-week process of voting for a new speaker, nothing was accomplished.

In all fairness, the House and Senate Ag committees also contributed to the delay by failing to deliver first drafts of anything approaching a timely fashion. Thompson says the COVID-19 pandemic delayed hearings necessary to draft legislation.

But first prize for derailing the bill goes to the GOP House, which once again tried mightily to cut funding for climate change and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Lawmakers were also slowed by negotiations over the deal passed in early June to raise the federal debt ceiling in exchange for, in part, new work requirements for SNAP payments.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise when Sept. 30 came and went without a farm bill deal. Congress might have completely ignored taking up reauthorization of the current farm bill had it not been for the “milk cliff,” which promised retail dairy prices likely doubling shortly after the New Year.

Faced with that bleak prospect, newly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson attached a farm bill extension to Sept. 30, 2024, to a continuing resolution to keep government funded through Jan. 19.

But the battle over farm bill funding is far from over. I expect the majority of the GOP wish to cut climate funding in USDA’s new Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities program. And the Republican Study Committee’s Blueprint to Save America is proposing significant budget cuts in the farm bill, including defunding conservation programs that pay producers to not plant environmentally sensitive acres.

Stabenow and Thompson need to move with due haste, put pen to paper and draft legislation for committee consideration and markup. If the two leaders draw out the process, they run the risk of finding the farm bill taken as a partisan hostage during the fall election.

Climate change

In the U.S. alone in 2023, there were 25 weather/climate change related events. Each one exceeded $1 billion in damages. There have been floods, severe storms and a wildfire.

Across the planet, the World Economic Forum estimates the cost of climate change events averages $16 million an hour. That’s 24-7.

Up until now, the world has done a whole lot more talking than doing to reduce carbon dioxide and methane emissions, which are primarily responsible for the increase in global temperatures.

So it was stunning last month, when headlines out of Dubai at the United Nations 28^thConference of the Parties on Climate Change reported “Countries clinch unprecedented deal to transition away from fossil fuels.”

In its first ever global stocktake decision, COP 28 delegates called for drastic targeted reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, including:

Accelerating efforts toward the phase-down of unabated coal power; Accelerating efforts globally toward net zero emission energy systems, utilizing zero and low-carbon fuels well before or by around mid-century.
Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science;
Accelerating and substantially reducing non-carbon-dioxide emissions globally, including methane emissions by 2030,
Accelerating the reduction of emissions from road transport on a range of pathways, including through development of infrastructure and rapid deployment of zero and low-emission vehicles.

Food production did not escape attention. Delegates called for wholesale changes in diets and corporate farming production methods. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization will update the report for this November’s COP 29, with finalization targeted for COP 30 in Brazil in 2025.

It goes without saying, the acknowledgment by COP that oil, gas, coal, and methane are the main cause of climate change was long overdue. But talk is cheap.

Last year, the average planet temperature briefly increased to 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. Noted climate scientist James Hansen says the ship has sailed on holding world temperatures at 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Meanwhile greenhouse gas emissions hit historical high levels in 2022. When all is said and tallied, 2023 likely will be worse than 2022.

The atmosphere doesn’t traffic in promises and voluntary commitments. Until proven otherwise, COP 28, while inspirational, was Kabuki theater. Will 2024 bring promised deliverables to climate change? It’s all the atmosphere cares about.

It’s a CRISPR world!

CRISPR — Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat — is a DNA editing tool that can turn on or off a living organism’s genes almost as easily as switching on or off a light. It’s also possible to use CRISPR to construct enzymes to rewrite a living organism’s DNA. For agriculture, the possibilities are unlimited. In 2022, CRISPR was used for a wide range of agricultural applications from non-browning bananas to growing bigger fish to producing cattle with short coats.

And later this year, if all goes well, CRISPR could deliver on a mind-blowing, up to now white whale of a goal that has eluded the world’s top scientists.

Cows. More to the point, cows doing cow things, specifically belching methane into the atmosphere. As it turns out, cow burps across the world are a significant contributor to climate change.

But now, three California universities – UC Davis, UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco are teaming up to put an end to all this methane belching.

The idea is to use CRISPR to engineer gas-producing microbes in a cow’s gut to reduce and perhaps one day eliminate methane. A breakthrough is possible later this year.

Hasta la vista, Chevron deference

Almost 40 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council that courts needed to defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute as long as that interpretation is reasonable.

In the court’s 1984 majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote:

“Sometimes the legislative delegation to an agency on a particular question is implicit rather than explicit. In such a case, a court may not substitute its own construction of a statutory provision for a reasonable interpretation made by the administrator of an agency.”

Up until recently the courts have generally given deference to Chevron. But in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled the Environmental Protection Agency misinterpreted the Clean Air Act in setting emission standards for mercury, ignoring a Chevron defense.

In his concurring opinion of Michigan v. the Environmental Protection Agency, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that Chevron forces the court to abandon what they believe is “‘the best reading of an ambiguous statute’ in favor of an agency’s construction. It thus wrests from Courts the ultimate interpretative authority to ‘say what the law is,’ and hands it over to the Executive.”

And Thomas isn’t the only Supreme who thinks Chevron impinges on the court:

In denying a writ of certiorari in the 2022 case Thomas H. Buffington v. Denis R McDonough, Secretary of Veteran Affairs, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the court “should acknowledge forthrightly that Chevron did not undo, and could not have undone, the judicial duty to provide an independent judgment of the law’s meaning in the cases that come before the Nation’s courts.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh has also expressed reservations on Chevron.
In West Virginia v. EPA, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. made it clear courts should rein in federal agencies performing outside the authority granted by Congress – “Agencies have only those powers given to them by Congress, and ‘enabling legislation’ is generally not an ‘open book to which the agency [may] add pages and change the plot line.’”

Justices will revisit Chevron later this year in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. In that case, plaintiffs argue that the Chevron deference violates the principle of separation of powers, and violates the Administrative Procedure Act.

In the administration’s opening brief to the Supremes, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote that upending Chevron “would threaten settled expectations in virtually every area of conduct regulated by law”:

“Stare decisis principles weigh heavily in favor of adhering to Chevron, which has been a cornerstone of administrative law reflected in thousands of judicial decisions — and which has provided a stable background rule against which Congress has legislated — for 40 years.”

But for a court that’s already demonstrated an eagerness in micromanaging the doings of the federal government, that defense will most likely go nowhere. If you smell what the Supremes are cookin’, Chevron meets its demise before July, making it more difficult for the federal administration to oversee law.

The November elections

There is a 50-50 chance come January 2025 that Donald Trump will be hanging the portrait of his favorite president, Andrew Jackson, back in the Oval Office. Say what you will about the former POTUS, but it is certain he brings chaos, breaking of democratic norms, and uncertainty wherever he walks. Under the previous GOP administration:

The United States formally withdrew from the Paris climate agreement promising to fight climate change due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels.
Attempted to eliminate rural development as one of USDA’s core mission areas by downgrading it from a sub-cabinet agency to an office and eliminating the agency’s undersecretary. Congress blocked the effort in the 2018 Farm Bill, but it’s clear there’s little desire to fight rural poverty and support rural businesses.
Revoked Obama Administration rules protecting livestock farmers from exploitation by Big Meat by making it almost impossible for livestock farmers to win lawsuits against giant agricultural corporations.
Significantly weakened the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration by incorporating its duties into the Agriculture Marketing Service, a USDA office that researches and reports on ag markets to the public. The move handcuffed GIPSA’s oversight of corporate agriculture.
Endangered meat workers during the COVID 19 outbreak by naming them essential personnel needed to keep meat processing plants open and profits flowing to Big Meat.
Handcuffed the Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture by abruptly moving both agencies from Washington, D.C. to the Kansas City area. The move essentially reduced the ERS workforce by half. The action was generally believed to be a vindictive response to ERS acknowledging the reality of climate change and threats facing the food system.

One clear trend emerged from it all – Trump favoring Big Ag over individual farmers. The people needed to put Trump back in the White House this fall. It can’t be stressed enough that no one has a clear picture of the potential damage Trump 2.0 might bring to agriculture. Which is a huge issue.

Food production and food safety need certainty and order to function effectively.