Source: POLITICO'S MORNING AGRICULTURE, 10/15/19

The agriculture industry is still dealing with damage from heavy rains, floods and a "bomb cyclone" winter storm that devastated swaths of the farmbelt earlier this year. The barrage of wet weather turned crop fields into lakes, killed livestock, ruined stored grains and rendered a record 20 million acres unplantable. And that's after multiple disasters pummeled producers in 2018, from hurricanes in the Southeast to historic wildfires in the West.

The severe weather and its impact on agriculture is increasingly seen as the new norm. But USDA hasn't stepped up its efforts to prepare the industry, our Helena Bottemiller Evich reports. Top officials rarely discuss climate change directly, and employees throughout the department have effectively limited their work on the issue for fear of repercussions if they say the wrong thing.

USDA's primary operation for helping farmers adapt to climate change, a network of regional climate "hubs" launched during the Obama administration, has continued to work with scant resources, and it's kept a low profile to avoid sparking the ire of top department officials or the White House.

Tale of two Twitter feeds: An under-the-radar Twitter account for the climate hubs has issued frank warnings about worsening weather problems to its 3,200 followers. By contrast, the main USDA account with nearly 640,000 followers hasn't used the word "climate" since December 2017.

"To say USDA does little to help farmers and ranchers is completely untrue," a department spokesperson said in an email, pointing to longstanding conservation programs that make up about 4 percent of USDA's budget. Spokespeople for the department declined all interview requests for Helena's story and would not allow officials who work on climate adaptation to discuss their work with POLITICO.