RIPE

The challenge:

American farmers have a pivotal role to play in tackling climate change, but they shouldn’t  sacrifice their own prosperity in the process. RIPE100 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.

What can be done?

RIPE (Rural Investment to Protect our Environment) is a coalition of farmers, ranchers, and agricultural trade association representatives advancing a national dialogue for bipartisan, comprehensive, common-sense climate policy that integrates fair and forward-looking agricultural solutions. We believe a powerful rural-urban coalition will form in support of a federal framework that simultaneously supports climate mitigation and invests in rural America by enabling farmers to earn a fair and profitable return from voluntary stewardship practices that deliver tremendous public value to carbon, soil health, water quality and other environmental services.

How RIPE Roadmap is meeting the challenge:

The RIPE100 Plan is a common sense policy proposal to compensate growers for voluntary stewardship practices at rates that reflect the values they deliver to society. Supported by many program precedents and volumes of peer-reviewed research, RIPE100 proposes to pay farmers a minimum $100/acre or AU to implement these stewardship practices. This amount covers the cost of implementation, offsets the increased costs of inputs affected by climate policy, and provides an incentive for participation. It is also equivalent to the public value provided by these practices.