ND Chosen for 'Climate Smart' Farming Pilot Project

Jan 24, 2024

By Mike Moen

North Dakota is one of four states chosen for a federally funded pilot program to spur more interest in farmers to reduce their carbon footprint.

Through a USDA grant, the Alliance to Advance Climate-Smart Agriculture will offer farmers and ranchers in the selected states $100 an acre or animal unit to implement conservation practices, such as cover crops and no-till farming. The federal government has longstanding cost-sharing programs for these efforts, but it's not easy for all producers to get approved.

Matt Perdue, government relations director with the North Dakota Farmers Union, said this new approach aims to connect with a diverse pool of applicants.

"It is a more streamlined process, it's a simpler program," he explained. "Producers will be selected through a random algorithm instead of a complex scoring process. And so, there are ways there that we're going to improve access for producers to this program."

Officials say 40% of the project's nationwide enrollment must come from under-served, socially disadvantaged or limited-resource farms. A 2021 report from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy noted there were nearly 900 applications for the federal Conservation Stewardship Program in North Dakota, but only 14% of applicants were awarded funds.

Click here to see more...

Video: How American Farmers Harvest 1.15 Billion Pounds of Sunflowers

Across the open plains of North Dakota and South Dakota, sunflower fields turn the American landscape into a sea of gold. In this farming documentary, we go inside modern sunflower farming to see how farmers plant, grow, harvest, clean, dry, process, and transform sunflower seeds into valuable products used every day.

In 2024, American farmers harvested about 1.15 billion pounds of sunflowers. This video follows the full journey from warm spring planting to combine harvesting, seed cleaning, storage, oil extraction, refining, roasting, packaging, and animal feed production.

You will see how sunflower seeds are processed into cooking oil, roasted snacks, bakery ingredients, birdseed, livestock feed, and useful byproducts. From golden fields to modern processing plants, this is the story of how a beautiful flower becomes one of America’s important oilseed crops.

Watch until the end to discover how sunflower farming connects farmers, machines, factories, food production, and sustainable agriculture.