In an age defined by technology, we tend to take farmers for granted. Yet farmland continues to dominate the American landscape. An astonishing number of acres — close to 900 million, more than half of the contiguous United States — are devoted to agricultural production of one sort or another. A lot of it is for the grains, fruits and vegetables we eat but also, and more fatefully for the climate, for the grazing and feeding of animals.

According to official figures from the Environmental Protection Agency, agriculture is responsible for about one-tenth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, chiefly methane from the digestive systems of animals as well as nitrous oxide, another powerful greenhouse gas, from lavish use of synthetic fertilizer. That’s smaller than the emissions from transportation (28 percent), electric power (25 percent) and industry (23 percent). But agricultural emissions are hard to measure and are almost certainly underestimated. Add in the fossil fuels used in farming equipment, the loss of carbon stored in soil when grasslands and native vegetation are converted to crops, the methane from manure deposited in lagoons and slurries in big animal feeding operations, and the climate footprint gets bigger.

But so too does the opportunity to make a difference. That’s why the architects of last year’s giant Inflation Reduction Act included $19.5 billion aimed at shrinking that footprint by greatly increasing the money available to farmers under the Agriculture Department’s conservation programs. Dollarwise, that’s not a big deal, a sliver of the $350 billion or so the bill invests in encouraging adoption of clean power, energy-efficient buildings and electric vehicles.

But philosophically, it’s a very big deal because for the first time, legislators have firmly acknowledged the reality of the link between climate change and agriculture and have taken a major step in making sure that American agriculture policy has a climate lens going forward. To that end, they have included climate-focused “guardrails” in the text of the bill — language ensuring that the $19.5 billion will be spent exclusively on efforts to “reduce, capture, avoid or sequester carbon dioxide, methane or nitrous oxide emissions.”

Nearly all of this money will be directed to four important conservation programs that have long been part of the Farm Bill, a behemoth that is updated every five years and is up for reauthorization this year, with a September deadline. The spending in the present bill is $428 billion. About three-fourths of that pays for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (once known as food stamps); much of the rest, including programs established for desperate farmers during the New Deal, provides price supports for producers of big row crops like corn, soybeans, wheat and rice, as well as a generous crop insurance subsidy providing further protection against price declines and other losses.

Bringing up the rear are the conservation programs, including the four that would be augmented by the Inflation Reduction Act, all underfunded and all oversubscribed. The Agricultural Conservation Easement Program pays farmers not to sell their land to developers. The Regional Conservation Partnership Program unites farmers and local authorities in programs covering regional areas, such as the Chesapeake Bay watershed and sage grouse habitat in the West.

The Conservation Stewardship Program, which involves one-on-one consultation between farmers and Agriculture Department experts, and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program have much the same objectives: paying farmers to use sensible practices like planting cover crops, no-till farming, rotational grazing, tree planting, wetlands restoration and careful use of fertilizer. Most of these programs are designed to keep carbon firmly stored in the ground or, as in the case of tree planting, sequester it.

Climate activists love these ideas. So do many farmers, especially those who have come to believe that extreme and damaging weather events may be climate related and that they, like everyone else, have an interest in reducing emissions.

So what could go wrong? Plenty. In February, the Biden administration announced that it was immediately making available $850 million from the $19.5 billion authorized by the I.R.A. to replenish the four conservation programs, in this fiscal year, and invited farmers to apply — a kind of down payment on what it hoped would be a multiyear stream of spending on climate-friendly programs. But whether that stream actually materializes depends heavily on what Congress, when it writes the new Farm Bill, decides to do with the rest of the $19.5 billion in the years ahead.

Under the administration’s preferred plan, Congress would add the new money to what it would normally authorize for conservation, resulting in a sizable net increase in funding and, no less important, a higher baseline for future Farm Bills. That’s exactly what should happen and pretty much what the Senate agriculture committee, led by Debbie Stabenow, a soon-to-retire four-term Democrat from Michigan with an estimable record of farm bill reform, is likely to do.

The outlook is dicier in the House, where hostility to almost any measure dealing with climate change runs strong. There is real fear among climate activists — and indeed anyone worried about the issue — that the House could repurpose or even ignore the I.R.A. money. Glenn Thompson, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the House Agriculture Committee, did nothing to soothe those fears when he told The Washington Post this week that he is open to redirecting funding in the climate law so long as the money has not been allocated. “Quite frankly,” he said, “if the dollars have been authorized but the checks haven’t been written yet, then they should be up for reconsideration.” Some Republicans would simply use the new money to replace the old, while others oppose the I.R.A.’s explicit directives on greenhouse gases; still others — Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, for one — would rescind the money altogether.

The result, in any event, would be no new funding for climate mitigation, a perverse outcome though one made possible by the 2022 midterms delivering a narrow Republican majority in the House. Not just the climate will suffer. So will wetlands, water quality and the wildlife species that depend on healthy grasslands. So, too, will the farmers themselves, deprived of money they want and need. That is something, come to think of it, that Republicans who see themselves as champions of rural America might keep in mind before they go about undermining some excellent policies.

Robert B. Semple Jr., a reporter and an editor for The Times from 1963 to 2018, writes about the environment for the editorial board. He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1996.

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