The RIPE100 Plan
RIPE100 is a proposal to directly pay farmers a minimum of $100 per acre or animal unit for voluntary land stewardship that can provide a greater benefit to the public through carbon sequestration, improved soil health, cleaner water, water conservation, flood mitigation, pollination, biodiversity and other environmental services. This approach is supported by many program precedents, volumes of peer-reviewed research, and offers producers adequate incentive to adopt key conservation measures.
RIPE100 is designed to remedy many of the shortcomings of carbon farming payment programs, which are a net economic loss for most farmers, and allows farmers to participate in both systems. It also promotes diversity, equity and inclusion by addressing barriers that have often kept farmers of color, smaller diversified farmers, women farmers and young farmers from participating in previous conservation programs.
The RIPE100 plan:
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- Offers farmers and ranchers a profitable incentive to invest in effective farm stewardship practices.
- Eliminates middlemen and expensive transaction costs
- Integrates equity principles and rewards farmers of all sizes and types
- Offers policymakers flexibility on funding mechanisms
- Uses a simple program design that offers transparency to all stakeholders
- Can be implemented within 100 days with room to scale and refine as funding and political support grows.
This plan is uniquely designed to ensure that climate policy will not hamper farmer profitability, offering a path to involve farmers as true champions of climate policy as part of a broader bipartisan climate coalition to improve American farmers’ financial and environmental sustainability.
RIPE100 Phases 1 & 2
The program is designed in two phases. The goal of Phase 1 is to leverage the Democratic commitment to quickly launch climate policies and programs with a proposal that can benefit farmers’ profit opportunities through voluntary stewardship on a per acre or AU basis. If the first phase is successful, agricultural representatives can advocate for expanding the program to allow farmers and ranchers to include a greater share of their operations in the voluntary program.
In Phase 1:
- Farmers enroll, attend a conservation workshop and adopt high-value conservation practices that are compensated at $100/acre or AU. The workshop provides information on best practices to address climate and other priority environmental resource concerns . Farmers will select and adopt one stewardship practice that is practical and suitable to their operations and be compensated at $100/acre or AU.
- Farmers self-certify practices and USDA oversees program integrity. Following the established precedent of existing NRCS programs, farmers will self-certify the adopted conservation practices using established NRCS protocols. Self-certification will be required annually and submitted to the NRCS for validation.
- Annual payments continue, once participants develop comprehensive conservation Farm Plans. The program is intended to provide annual payments to farmers at $100/acre or AU with increasing acreage enrolled for farm or ranch, as the program budget grows. Technical assistance will be provided to producers at no cost to them to develop ongoing conservation Farm Plans and to support successful implementation.
- Enrollment is a simple and equitable process that does not penalize early adopters. To ensure that farmers of all types have equitable access to the program, RIPE100 integrates equity principles and rewards farmers of all sizes and types. Early adopters who have previously adopted stewardship will not be penalized and will fully qualify for the payments.
- USDA will manage the program. USDA shall receive the funding for administration, educational programing, farm plan development and technical assistance. USDA will receive funds to oversee the program, including an audit of up to 5% of participants.
- Augments private sector payments for carbon farming, maximizing farmers’ options. Private carbon farming payments only work for a small portion of farmers, due to the small size of the market, low carbon price, and high transaction costs. RIPE’s proposal complements private carbon markets with a public program that offers farmers a direct and reliable investment without middlemen. It also allows farmers to participate in both programs, maximizing farmers’ options.
Phase 2 aims to:
- Expand the program budget to allow enrollment of all producers who wish to participate with as many acres as they wish
- Refine payment terms to reflect the latest science and give incentives for performance-based practices that maximize farmers’ options
- Be funded in the range of $40 billion a year as part of a comprehensive climate policy package that will fairly compensate farmers for their voluntary stewardship at rates that are profitable above all policy costs, including fertilizer and other input cost increases.
The specific policy design elements are being co-designed with agricultural producers and stakeholders.