US House & Senate Committee Maps

Use these maps to see if your elected US House or Senate representative sits on the Agriculture or Natural Resources Committee.

Learn who else is making decisions about how our food system and natural assets are being managed. Thanks for visiting and send us a note if you have any questions or comments!

Energy & Natural Resources

House Members

Senate Members

Ag Committee

House Members

Senate Members

State Healthy Soil Policy Map

The US State Soil Health Policy Map is a crowd-sourced policy tracker designed to support the growth of healthy soil and related policies by sharing frameworks and lessons learned. Click on a state and read below to learn more!

Legislation Passed through 2/10/2024Legislation Filed through 2023ActivityInterest


As a collaborative and “living” site, this map is updated by volunteers as policy is conceived, created, and moves forward.  

Information on each state is maintained by a “State Curator” or group of curators who serve to keep the space information based, clean and functional. If you are interested in adding information to the resource list below, or to a state page, please email the state curator at <state>@healthysoilspolicy.org (ex: newmexico@healthysoilspolicy.org).


Legislative Status Update

Through February 10, 2024, 26 states have passed Healthy Soils legislation, and Pennsylvania is implementing a Soil Health Program through existing statute.

These 27 states include 57.1% of U.S. farm acreage (502,948,364 of 880,100,848 acres, based upon 2022 National Agricultural Statistics Service Agricultural Census), and 62.9% of U.S. state population (208,044,827 of 330,759,736 people, based upon 2020 Census).

Of these 27 states, all create or empower state agencies to create soil health programs with incentives for implementation, except:
     Hawaii (in 2022 legislation passed to create program, but vetoed), and
     Nebraska (technical, training and legal assistance program, but not incentives)

The states that have created state agencies to lead soil health programs are:
     CaliforniaColoradoConnecticutIllinois, Maine, Maryland, MassachusettsMichigan, MinnesotaNew Mexico
     New YorkOklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Washington.

The states that have empowered state agencies to create soil health programs are:
     ArizonaLouisiana, New Hampshire, New JerseyNevadaPennsylvania, South DakotaVermont, and West Virginia.

Note that though many of these states empower state agencies to create soil health programs, there are efforts to pass legislation to put such programs in state statutes and to establish reliable funding for those programs. Of the bills filed in 2023, the bills in 9 states (Hawaii, Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, Nevada, and Oregon) create a soil health program or add soil health to existing programs.  Also, Kansas has effectively created and is funding the Kansas Soil Health Initiative in the annual budget, but has not yet established the program in statute.


Changes in Soil Health Policy from 2020 to 2023

Use the arrows below to see the evolution of Soil Health Policy in the United States.

For more information on each state, visit the individual state Policy Information in the next section. 


State-by-State Policy Information

AlabamaAlaskaArizonaArkansasCaliforniaColoradoConnecticutDelawareFloridaGeorgiaHawaiiIdahoIllinoisIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusettsMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew YorkNorth CarolinaNorth DakotaOhioOklahomaOregonPennsylvania – South CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexasUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWest VirginiaWisconsinWyomingPuerto Rico

Related Resources

Maps

Media

A new website promises to help rebalance our climate — using dirt By Carbon180

“A new website is tracking soil health policy across the US, with the goal of supporting state healthy soil activities and helping enact state policy. Launched by volunteer organization Nerds for Earth and climate-focused nonprofit Soil4Climate, and with support from the Carbon Project, the site is built on crowdsourced data, with curators from each state serving to update and maintain it. With the stroke of a mouse, one can find healthy soil and agriculture policies broken down by each state, a legislative database for the 2019 session, and other related resources — policy guidance, technical guidance, agricultural markets, scientific papers, grant funding, and more.

The timing of this new resource couldn’t be better. As the conversation about climate change gains momentum, regenerative agriculture is moving into the mainstream.”

Links

Soil4Climate Legislative Database

National Healthy Soils Policy Network


Last Update: 01/12/2024

This project was produced by a collaboration of  Tufts University, Soil4Climate, Nerds for Earth, and The Carbon Project at People Food & Land Foundation. Initial Funding was provided by Jena King.

A Drop in the Bucket

Nerds for Earth is a volunteer organization that uses technical skills to help rebalance our climate.  Learn more about us here, and stay in touch by subscribing at the bottom of the post.

As benevolent nerds, our instinct when solving a problem is to build something new and revolutionary.  

Especially when facing a challenge as large as rebalancing our planet’s climate.

Let’s launch giant sun shades into space to reflect the Sun’s heat!

Let’s use drones to seed clouds with light-reflecting dust!  

Both may someday be useful tools to have in the toolbelt.

But they don’t address the root cause of the issue, and in no way move us closer to living in balance with our planet.  

They are over there, somewhere in The Glorious Future – not connected to our everyday lives and the systems, like agriculture, we rely upon.  

Surfing the Adjacent Possible

Please indulge this 2 x 2 problem solving matrix:

  1. Bottom-left: we have the current state of affairs – which if you’re reading this I assume you believe to be less than ideal.
  2. Top-right: we have The Glorious Future – the beautiful state of nirvana-like biological balance that anyone with a Prius probably aspires to.  The Glorious Future is usually a cruel illusion, as it can’t be reached directly from our current reality.
  3. Top-left and bottom-right: we have adjacent possibility – moves that we could directly make as individuals or societies.  Composting at home or advocating for a municipal compost program in your town would fall in this bucket.

Some would decry walking through door #3 as “incrementalism” or a “drop in the bucket.”  

But drops in the bucket are literally all we have.  

Drops in the bucket – individuals burning fossil fuels and spraying pesticides – are how we got here, and how we will move forward.  

At Nerds for Earth, we believe in finding buckets in our society that are already working well, and adding our unique drop.  You might call this surfing the adjacent possible.

Step Forward to Cool the Planet

Carbon Farmers are masters of the adjacent possible.

Using known agricultural techniques, like compost application and cover cropping, they pull carbon from the air into the soil.  

Increased soil carbon means healthier soil, higher nutrient density in food, and often increased crop yields.  Photosynthesis FTW!

It’s a non-sexy strategy that leads to sexy results.

Note: you can find the full list of carbon-beneficial land management practices on the Natural Resources Conservation Services website in case you’re curious.

I’ll let John Wick, rancher and co-founder of the Marin Carbon Project, explain Carbon Farming in detail:

Carbon Farming could go a long way towards rebalancing our climate and increasing food security.

The Marin Carbon Project estimated that if we applied compost one time to 50% of rangelands in California, we could sequester the state’s annual emissions from commercial and residential electricity use – all while increasing the amount and quality of forage production.

Many agricultural support groups (Fibershed, California Resource Conservation Districts, Mad Agriculture, and the San Diego Food System Alliance to name a few in the US) are working actively to help ranchers + farmers implement carbon-beneficial land management practices.   

So how can we, as nerds, support their work?

Building the Adjacent Possible

Before putting pen to paper as technical volunteers, we first have to answer a couple questions:

  1. Who are we serving?
  2. What do they need?

Answering these questions is always more difficult than it appears.  It requires Listening Closely, and not projecting what we’d like to build or would be fun to build onto the situation.

Who are we serving?

Before a farmer or rancher implements carbon-beneficial practices on their property, they generally build out what’s known as a Carbon Farm Plan.  

That plan is prepared by conservation planners, who often work at the local Resource Conservation District or at a nonprofit group like the Carbon Cycle Institute.

So, for purposes of this project, we specifically decided to serve conservation planners preparing Carbon Farm Plans.

What do they need?

Part of the output from the Carbon Farm planning process is a list of recommended practices and their projected carbon sequestration benefit (calculated using the COMET Planner tool):

What we heard from Carbon Farm planners, is that they wanted help answering a couple questions about Plans they’ve produced:

  1. How much will this cost to implement, given the local variability of labor and other costs?
  2. Given that cost, which practices should be implemented first to get the highest carbon sequestration benefit from a limited budget?

This is the point at which our wheels start turning.  

By calculating the cost of implementing carbon-beneficial practices, we could help Carbon Farm Plans be implemented – a direct adjacent win for everyone involved (+Earth).  

What we Built

The end result of this process was a simple cost + return model built in Google Sheets.  Yes, that’s right – even spreadsheets have a role in rebalancing our climate.

The model relies 100% on existing public data, thanks to the NRCS (a sub-agency of the USDA created during the Dust Bowl as the “Soil Conservation Service”).

NRCS provides cost-share funding to farmers + ranchers engaging in conservation practices through a program called EQIP.  So if planting a hedgerow costs $1,000, a producer can apply for cost-share funding to cover roughly $500 of the cost.

Thankfully, to support this program, NRCS publishes state-level cost estimates for each conservation practice they fund.

So, all we had to do was download the raw cost data from their site, do an *absurd* amount of data processing (boo PDFs), and voila!  

We had a working cost + return model, where a Carbon Farm planner could enter:

  1. The practices they planned for a farm or ranch, and the acreage / amount of each
  2. The expected benefits from that practice, in terms of carbon sequestration, increased soil organic matter, water holding capacity, or yield

And out the other end comes an estimated cost of implementing each of those practices, as well as the relative ‘bang for buck’ in terms of carbon sequestration vs other practices.

Carbon Farm cost + return model
The final output of our Carbon Farm cost + return model

If you’re curious to check out the model for yourself, browse the California and Colorado versions (to make your own copy and put it into action, select File -> Make a Copy and follow the Instructions tab).

Listening Twice

Our instinct as volunteers was to build the spreadsheet model, share it with Carbon Farm Planners, then celebrate.  

But we found it wasn’t that simple.  Ensuring that something you’ve built as a volunteer actually gets used requires listening twice: before you build it, and after you’ve shared it.  

For example, we learned from a couple planners that our model had one major shortcoming:

They needed to be able to set granular component-level costs (like labor, fence, or compost) for each of their plans, as costs in a state like California can differ so widely across different regions.

If we didn’t have 1-on-1 follow-up meetings with planners, we never would’ve learned about this – and our attempt to serve would’ve ended up on the trash heap of history.

But since we did, we were able to build a process into the Sheet to modify costs locally:

Modifying local costs in the cost + return model
Modifying local costs in the Carbon Farm model

Listening Closely can avert (almost any) spreadsheet disaster.  Many thanks to everyone who generously shared their time to offer feedback on the tool. 

What’s your Adjacent Possible?

This is just one small story of one group helping farmers + ranchers help the planet.  A drop in the bucket.

Never forget, though: incrementalism depends on your frame of reference.

As nerds, data wrangling and spreadsheet modeling sure feels incremental.  A direct move up or to the right on the matrix of possibility.

But when blended with the skills of the planner, we make progress towards creating something new and real and good: The Glorious Future.

All that is to say – please do not take your technical skills for granted, just because they come naturally to you.  

When combined with the talent of the people you’re seeking to help, they can be revolutionary.  

Nerds for Earth is a volunteer organization that uses technical skills to help rebalance our climate.  To volunteer or propose a project, drop your email below.