Research and Policy

RIPE is committed to proactively mitigating barriers of entry that often have confronted producers of color, smaller diversified producers, women producers, young producers and other socially disadvantaged and limited-resource producers. Our policies and principles to address this important issue are summarized as follows:  

• Equitable access to funds by all agricultural communities.  
• Equitable access to funds by all farm sizes, small and large. 
• Targeted outreach to Black farmers and other disadvantaged farmers. 
• Regular guidance from the USDA Advisory Committee on Minority Farmers. 

Additionally, RIPE’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access (IDEA) Committee continues to grow and guides the RIPE proposal development to build an equitable and inclusive agricultural program. Read more about our commitment to inclusion, diversity, equity and access here.

RIPE’s proposal offers forest owners payments over costs for riparian forest buffers, silvopasture practice, expiring forestry CRP contracts and tree/shrub establishment. RIPE supports the policy principles of the American Forestry Foundation (AFF) and the National Alliance of Forest Owners (NAFO), who are both members of the FACA Forest-Climate Working Group (FCWG), including their support of incentives and market-based mechanisms designed to maintain working forests, increase carbon benefits across the working forest value chain, and encourage broad participation from forest owners, forest products manufacturers, and potential investors. RIPE also supports the position of the Forest Landowner Association (FLA) to foster a strong business environment and balance regulatory climate for the benefit of families who own managed forestland.

The following list of conservation practices are proposed to be compensated under the RIPE proposal because they deliver at least $100 per acre or animal unit in public benefits when combining the climate, soil health, water quality, water conservation and other environmental benefits. 

Agricultural associations and other stakeholders are invited to engage RIPE to help identify additional conservation practices. RIPE also supports inclusion of state-level conservation practices that are equivalent to the following and may be more appropriately tailored to the state context. 

You can download our methodology and data sources here, or review individual practice information below.

RIPE supports expanding clean energy opportunities for farmers and mitigating the tension sometimes created by installing it on productive agricultural lands. Specifically, we support:

• Incentivizing siting renewable energy projects on unproductive farmland.

• Incentivizing and increasing R&D for dual-use agrivoltaics plan that allow for solar alongside farming, if placed on productive or unique farmland.

• Expanding USDA REAP benefits to farmer-led cooperatives to allow for shared resource pooling and benefits.

• Requiring developers who lease solar arrays on farmland to decommission them in a manner that protects the land for active agriculture future use.

The RIPE program would not initially include direct compensation for clean energy, in part because of the high cost of installation and other policies, and market mechanisms are more appropriate for rewarding it fairly. Future phases of the RIPE program could include consideration of direct compensation for clean energy, which delivers in the range of $5,000 to $18,000 per acre in public environmental benefits, after careful analysis of how to protect productive agricultural lands and farmers’ economic opportunities, as well as best use of various programs and market mechanisms.

The conventional notions of how to measure and reward farmers’ greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions within government programs and private markets rely on: a) not rewarding farmers who have already been doing the stewardship practice since their contributions are not “additional” to the program; and b) expensive and complex farm-level monitoring and verification. RIPE proposes to use a more farmer-friendly approach that draws upon the successful precedent of existing USDA conservation programs, where farmers self-certify their practices by submitting receipts and field notes, USDA analyzes a subset of farms to estimate program impacts, and USDA audits 5% of participants to ensure appropriate use of funds. 

To demonstrate to the public and Congress that this program is delivering real and additional GHG benefits, we propose the following process: 

1. For the initial stage of the program, the USDA will estimate gross GHG impacts from all acreage enrolled in the RIPE program using program-level estimates of GHG impact for each practice, rather than farm-level data. This will be done by sampling a subset of enrolled farms, using COMET-Farm or DAYCENT plus some soil sampling, and statistically extrapolating to all farms in the program.
2. USDA will report both total emission reductions gross and additional emission reductions. The additional emissions is a subset of the program’s estimated impact on GHG that removes early actors and captures the “additional” GHG reductions from the program.  This way early actors are still compensated for their contributions and the program can report the additional reductions. For the second phase of the program, Congress could set a target for a minimum level of additional reductions to be achieved and grant USDA authority to raise payment terms for new practice adoption.
   
3. Continuous innovation to improve the science of GHG calculations will be advanced by establishing a Research & Innovation Program dedicated to developing a methodology that can be used by a national program with cost-effective oversight and maintains farmer-friendly enrollment process.  The program will provide additional incentives to farmers who voluntarily chose to participate in R&D efforts such as remote sensing and soil data sample gathering. The program will also work to advance program and technological innovations for the second phase of the program, including proposing performance-based incentives that allow farmers to be rewarded for outcomes rather than practices, as those methods become practical. 

RIPE supports policies that help rural electric co-ops transition to clean and reliable energy in ways that do not raise rural customers’ costs. Rural Americans are disproportionately burdened by high energy costs, spending 40% more of their income on energy bills and 48% more on household electricity than urban residents. Moreover, 43% of rural households have incomes below 200% of the federal poverty level, which further increases vulnerability to energy burdens.