How the Inflation Reduction Act Affects Food and Agriculture

Lloyd Wright is a retired farmer and former director of the USDA's Office of Civil Rights. It will help the Black community.

Senator Booker told Mother Jones that he was excited about the inflation reduction act. We will keep family farmers around the country by giving USDA the authority to modify debt for distressed borrowers. The legislation sets in motion a process to correct the wrongs that have been done to black farmers.

It was the bad.

Climate change is affecting America's Midwest, one of the world's most productive farming regions. The Corn Belt is dominated by two crops, corn and soybeans, which are both sown in the fall, leaving the ground bare until the spring. Warming temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico can make the soil vulnerable to fierce storms, which can cause huge amounts of precious topsoil to be washed into streams and polluted with chemicals.

The natural rate of replenishment is 16 times higher in the Midwest than it is in the rest of the country. A study from the University of Massachusetts found that a third of the Corn Belt has already surrendered its entire top layer.

The IRA works to maintain the region's corn-soy duopoly. Thanks to federal mandates, about a third of the corn crop is consumed by corn-based fuels. The majority of auto fuel in the US is gasoline and corn. The new bill will allow a huge expansion of gas stations that retrofit pumps to take fuel with 15 percent alcohol content.

The American Coalition for Ethanol hailed the bill for its " significant provisions recognizing the role farmers and ethanol producers can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions." A group of researchers at American land-grant universities found in a peer-reviewed paper that the government's policy of requiring farmers to grow more corn has led to more water-fouling and greenhouse-gas emissions. They found that the push to use more corn-based fuels likely increased greenhouse gas emissions.

The tax credit for sequestering carbon dioxide in the ground was increased from $50 per ton to $85 per ton. As Clive Thompson pointed out in a Mother Jones cover story last year, federally subsidized carbon capture is at risk of becoming just another taxpayer gift to incumbent dirty industries.