Climate-friendly agriculture bill to get watered down as California lawmakers rush to beat deadline

A plan to help California farms adopt climate-friendly practices with $3.6 billion in new funding won’t advance to the November ballot, at least not in the scope that its advocates envisioned. 

One of the lawmakers who helped co-author the bill to place the bond on the ballot this November said he and other supporters are making late changes to the proposal. They don’t have much time.  

The final version of the proposed bond would subsidize government funding toward wildfire prevention, healthy drinking water, and farmworker’s programs dedicated to solving issues related to climate change.

But time is quickly running out for the bill’s supporters. Assemblymember Connolly, who provided the information above, underscores that a final legislative version of the proposed bill must be in print by Monday, June 24 so that it can be heard in time for the legislature to place the measure on the Nov. 5 ballot later that week.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” Arohi Sharma, a senior policy analyst for the environmental advocacy nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said Thursday, June 19. “It feels like no one’s operating with the same information as another person.” The Natural Resources Defense Council is a member organization of the coalition that advocated for the legislation.

Even if the proposed climate bond passes, it’ll be significantly watered down. 

The Legislature is facing a $45 billion budget deficit, CalMatters has reported. A bond allows the government to borrow money that it must repay over time. A survey by the Public Policy Institute of California conducted in May and June found that about 64% of likely California voters don’t think it’s a good idea for the state to sell bonds to finance new projects and programs, according to Bloomberg. 

Originally, the two bonds added up to an estimated $20 billion in total, Connolly said. Now, he is aiming for a combined total of $10 billion in order to satisfy voters and legislators, though exact amounts and other details remain in flux because negotiations are ongoing.

Asked whether he is confident in the proposed climate bond’s ability to ultimately pass both chambers and voters, Connolly described himself as an “optimist by nature.”

“I’m holding out strong — I think the parties are motivated,” Connolly said. “At the same time, there’s a recognition that we’re in fiscally constrained times right now, that people are stretched.”

Assembly Bill 408 was led by agriculture, environment and labor advocates

The push for this agriculture and climate bond was led by 17 groups that focus on agriculture, labor, food and environmental issues calling themselves the Food and Farm Resilience Coalition. 

According to Kristine Rebiero, a spokesperson for the California Climate and Agriculture Network — one organization co-sponsoring the bill — the coalition came together during the height of the 2020 pandemic, wildfires, drought, and heat waves. 

“We collectively witnessed how those events exacerbated the inequities in our food system, with small family farmers, farmworkers, and low-income families suffering disproportionate health, economic, and food insecurity burdens,” Rebiero wrote in an email. 

In 2021 the coalition held a series of listening sessions in response to those issues to identify what infrastructure investments were needed to solve the problem of climate inequities, from which the climate bill’s predecessor was born. 

According to a press release from the office of then-Assemblymember Robert Rivas, who introduced the original bill in 2021, the proposed legislation intended to invest $3 billion in an effort to “accelerate California’s economic recovery and improve the state’s climate resilience.” However, due to a budget surplus that California experienced in 2022, all climate bonds in the bond measure were held in the Legislature and failed to advance.

The coalition’s new bill was intended to accomplish those same goals, for instance, allocating $35 million for grants for farmers and tribal producers to transition land for purposes of organic certification according to the bill’s text. 

“Conventional” industrial agriculture institutionally gets large subsidies from the United States Department of Agriculture, said Mark Schapiro, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism who has extensively written on climate change and the food supply. 

Yet, this type of agriculture uses large quantities of pesticides and biocides and degrades soil, he said. The way Schapiro sees it, by incentivizing the transition to organic farming, the bond could have potentially encouraged more ecologically healthy agriculture, ultimately bringing down the cost of organic foods.

“Organic food is more expensive than conventional foods, but that is an illusion to great degree because the costs of conventional agriculture are paid,” Schapiro said. “And the health of farm workers and the health of the ecosystems and the health of the atmosphere — we pay for those extra charges, but they’re not on the food when we buy it.”