Question: To solve a nonexistent problem, should we pay farmers billions of additional dollars for doing what they're already doing?

Will Big Ag plow under Waxman-Markey? | Grist

Other sources cite an even larger potential role for agricultural practices to mitigate climate change. Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute reckons [PDF] that “practical organic agriculture, if practiced on the planet’s 3.5 billion tillable acres, could sequester nearly 40 percent of current CO2 emissions.”

To move in that direction would require a tremendous shift in practices, Lal told me in an interview: a move to farming that explicitly seeks to build organic matter in soil. That means reduced tillage, extensive cover cropping, and “as much manure [but if we all go vegetarian to stop global warming, where will all this global-warming-fighting manure come from?] and compost as possible.”

Yet the agenda being pushed by Big Ag is much less about rewarding farmers for shifting practice than it is about rewarding farmers for current practices: in other words, another sop to the large agribusiness firms that dominate our food system.