The Texas Climate Smart Initiative, led by Texas A&M AgriLife Research, announced it will offer financial incentives to farmers, ranchers and small forestland owners across the state who voluntarily adopt climate-smart agricultural practices.
Representatives from the Texas Climate Smart Initiative will work with participants selected through the application process to help them understand and implement climate-smart practices. Initiative leaders will select new participants every two months. Growers who already have climate-smart practices in place are eligible.
Potential participants can apply on the Texas Climate Smart Initiative website, where specific incentive information is also available on the site’s Producer Resources page.
Producer benefits, market-based solutions
The Texas Climate Smart Initiative is a large-scale, five-year pilot project working with the state’s commodity producers. Its goal is to help producers adopt climate-smart agricultural and forestry practices, access benefits, and develop models for voluntary, market-based climate solutions.
“The primary focus of this project is to simultaneously improve climate resilience and climate change mitigation through the adoption of climate-smart practices,” said Julie Howe, PhD, professor of soil chemistry and fertility in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M University in Bryan-College Station. Dr. Howe is the principal investigator on the project.
“The diversity of Texas agriculture and natural resources, particularly our climate and soil diversity, makes Texas a perfect place to create solutions that can expand to other parts of the country and build on existing infrastructure,” she said.
