5 Biden admin officials to watch on agriculture and forestry

BY: MARC HELLER | 01/26/2023 01:57 PM EST

GREENWIRE | Policies on agriculture, forestry and conservation will pick up momentum in the coming year as Congress works on an update to the 2018 farm bill and the Biden administration aims to push its climate agenda past a newly empowered — and highly skeptical — House Republican majority.

Those moves will play out across several agencies at the Department of Agriculture, from the Natural Resources Conservation Service to the Forest Service and the Rural Development office. EPA will play a big role, too, as the environmental agency weighs limits on pesticides and manages competing interests on boosting biofuel volumes as part of the renewable fuel standard. All of this will happen under the watchful eye of lawmakers who say the Biden administration is going too far — or not far enough.

Here are a few of the officials who will have a hand in shaping agriculture and forestry policies in 2023:

Point on food production

Robert Bonnie, USDA’s undersecretary for farm production and conservation, will be the administration’s point man on the intersection of climate change and food production. He’s likely to be front and center as the Biden administration defends its heavy emphasis on farm practices as a way to combat the climate crisis.

Bonnie has a long resume with USDA and with conservation programs. He has farm country credentials, too, as the owner, with his wife, of a horse farm in northern Virginia.

Bonnie served as undersecretary of Agriculture for natural resources and environment during the Obama administration, and he was part of the transition team on agriculture for the incoming Biden administration.

Before being nominated for his current position, Bonnie was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s top adviser on climate change.

Republicans have made clear they’ll conduct closer oversight of some of the programs Bonnie either supervises or has influence over, such as the “climate-smart commodities” pilot program, which is pouring $3 billion into agriculture and forestry projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Hearings on that issue are likely in the House Agriculture Committee, Republican Chair Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) has said.

Along with Vilsack, Bonnie will be asked to defend the administration’s use of USDA’s Commodity Credit Corp. — a farm safety net agency dating to the Great Depression — for that program. Thompson has said he doesn’t think USDA has authority to tap the CCC for that purpose.

As Congress puts together the farm bill, Bonnie is sure to play a big role in the recommendations USDA makes to lawmakers, not only on conservation programs but on other parts of his portfolio, including crop insurance and disaster assistance to help farmers through extreme weather events.

A voice for farm country at EPA

Rod Snyder is the agriculture adviser to EPA Administrator Michael Regan, part of a small team of officials who keep the agency head apprised of farmers’ concerns. In that sense, he’s an advocate in a department that’s often viewed as an enemy in farm country — a perception the agency says it wants to change.

He comes from a farm policy background, living on his family’s West Virginia farm, and he worked for a variety of groups related to agriculture, including the National Corn Growers Association and CropLife America — the lobbying group for pesticide companies — before arriving at EPA in 2021. His immediate pre-EPA job was as president of Field to Market, a sustainable agriculture group.

Although his Twitter profile notes that he’s a lifelong Democrat, Snyder stressed bipartisanship at a recent kickoff meeting of an EPA farm and ranch advisory committee, saying the aim is be “as bipartisan or nonpartisan as possible.”

If past EPA practices hold, the agriculture adviser won’t appear in many headlines, leaving public pronouncements to the administrator (Greenwire, May 7, 2021).

But Snyder will be a significant voice inside the agency as congressional Republicans and farm groups push back on restrictions against pesticides like chlorpyrifos and dicamba, as well as on the renewable fuel standard, and as farmers push for bigger volumes of fuel derived from corn, soybeans and other crops.

Forest management and wildfire challenges

Forest Service Chief Randy Moore is in charge of an agency with a tradition of generating timber from national forests in an administration that is leaning toward saving forests as a protection against climate change.

He’s also juggling the pressures of wildfire policy, including sticking with prescribed fire as an underutilized forest management tool despite the trouble the Forest Service has had with such fires escaping control.

Moore is a former regional forester in California, having headed the Pacific Southwest Region from 2007 until his appointment to the chief’s job in 2021. He’s the first African American to have the agency’s top job. Moore also previously was regional forester for the Eastern Region, and his USDA career began in 1978 with the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

In 2023, he’ll guide the Forest Service’s work on protection for “mature” and old-growth forests, beginning with defining those terms. As part of USDA, the agency also falls under the five-year farm bill that’s up for renewal in 2023, and he’ll be asked to weigh in on how much additional authority — if any — the Forest Service wants to expand its work on forest management. He’s under pressure from Republican lawmakers, especially in the West, to increase timber targets.

Moore will also oversee how the Forest Service implements recent appropriations bills, including the Inflation Reduction Act, in selecting where to aim its wildfire mitigation work. So far, the administration has signaled it wants to focus on “firesheds” in the wildland-urban interface.

Leading a timber experiment

Until recently, Earl Stewart, the head of the Forest Service’s timber transit pilot project, was supervisor of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Now, he’s leading USDA’s program to supply timber-starved mills with saw logs brought in by rail from hundreds of miles away, as well as the agency’s wildfire risk reduction solutions program.

If the pilot project works, it could offer the government a viable way to keep mills open in communities that depend on them but are short on available timber, while reducing an overabundance of dead or dying trees in Western forests affected by drought, fire, insects and disease. That’s a big problem in California, where many mills have closed, as well as in Montana and other states.

Even the project’s main partner, the National Wild Turkey Federation, has said that the initiative doesn’t pencil out in the traditional economic sense but that it creates a bigger benefit by managing wildfire risk and maintaining healthy forests. The federation recently announced a 20-year shared stewardship agreement with the Forest Service, the first time the federation has done so on a national scale.

Although the initial project is focused on a mill in the Black Hills region of Wyoming and South Dakota, Stewart will continue to work from Alaska, the Forest Service said.

Stewart, who joined the Forest Service in 1991, has worked in the agency’s Southwest Region, including as a deputy forester. He was once a legislative fellow in the House Appropriations subcommittee overseeing Interior programs.

Help for rural areas

Xochitl Torres Small is the undersecretary of Agriculture for rural development, overseeing programs that help small communities pay for everything from clean water and sewage treatment to affordable housing and high-speed Internet. Much of that work is supported by the recent flood of appropriations through the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act.

As the department continues to implement those laws, money will go toward energy-efficiency projects in rural communities and biofuel infrastructure such as upgraded dispensers at fueling stations.

On a political level, rural development programs are one of the closest connections between the federal government and rural areas that have leaned ever more Republican in recent elections.

Torres Small will face close attention from lawmakers on how USDA distributes funds for rural broadband. Already, lawmakers say the effort suffers from bureaucratic tangles because it’s split among a number of federal agencies, and because one program, called ReConnect, favors nonprofit applicants over for-profit companies (E&E Daily, Sept. 16, 2022).

Torres Small represented a New Mexico congressional district before becoming undersecretary in 2021. She’s a granddaughter of farmworkers and grew up in the New Mexico borderlands.