Sponsors (2)
Introduced March 6, 2025 by Julia Brownley · Last progress March 6, 2025
The bill centralizes and prioritizes federal agricultural climate research and technical assistance to boost resilience and technology transfer for farmers and rural areas, while creating greater federal costs, potential funding skew toward prioritized topics, and risks of industry influence and data-privacy and equity concerns.
Farmers and rural communities will receive coordinated, science-based research, guidance, tools, and training that improve climate resilience, crop management, and reduce losses from extreme weather.
Researchers, extension services, and state/local governments will get clearer national research priorities and funding direction, improving technology transfer and reducing duplicated efforts.
Congress and agencies will receive prioritized, biennial research agendas and baseline inventories (e.g., soil carbon stocks, technical assistance needs) to focus funding and policy on key gaps like soil carbon and livestock methane.
Taxpayers will likely face higher federal administrative costs because establishing and staffing the Committee and Network, and coordinating a national research agenda, will require new appropriations or reallocation of funds.
Farmers, universities, and local research priorities may lose funding as the bill mandates and prioritizes particular climate research areas, potentially skewing support away from other valued agricultural research and local needs.
Small and resource-poor farmers may be left behind because committee composition and tech-transfer processes could favor larger operations or better-resourced regions, raising equity and conflict-of-interest concerns.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Creates a USDA advisory committee to coordinate agriculture climate research, set data standards, produce a national research agenda, and recommend program evaluations and technology assessments.
Creates an Agriculture Climate Scientific Research Advisory Committee inside the USDA Office of the Chief Scientist to align and advise on climate-related agriculture research, data systems, technology transfer, and a national research agenda. The committee must review priorities (including carbon sequestration, soil health, livestock methane, wetland management, and climate-smart practices), identify research gaps, produce a biennial national research agenda and annual scientific recommendations, and conduct periodic program evaluations and data-standardization work. The text sets out the committee's duties and recurring deliverables (annual recommendations, biennial agenda, 5-year program evaluations, and 5-year data protocol updates) but does not specify membership, funding, implementation timelines beyond the recurring tasks, or enforcement mechanisms.