The Texas Climate Smart Initiative, led by Texas A&M AgriLife Research, has announced financial incentives for farmers, ranchers and small forest owners statewide who volunteer to adopt climate-smart agricultural practices.
Representatives of the Texas Climate-Smart Initiative will work with participants selected through an application process, helping them understand and implement climate-smart practices. Initiative leaders select new participants bimonthly. Producers who have already adopted climate-smart practices are eligible.
Prospective participants can apply at the Texas Climate Smart Initiative website. Specific incentive information is also available at the site’s producer resources page.
Producer benefits, market-based solutions
The Texas Climate Smart Initiative is a five-year large-scale pilot project to work with the state’s commodity producers. Its goal is to help producers adopt climate-smart agriculture and forestry practices, access benefits, and develop models for voluntary, market-based climate solutions.
“Our main focus in this project is to simultaneously improve resilience to climate change and mitigation of climate change through adoption of climate-smart practices,” said Julie Howe, Ph.D., soil chemistry and fertility professor in the Texas A&M Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, Bryan-College Station. Howe is the project’s principal investigator.
“Texas’ diversity in agriculture and natural resources — seen in our climates and soil — particularly, makes Texas a great place to create solutions that can be scaled to other areas of the nation and build upon existing infrastructure,” she said.
