Outside of exchanges on trade and climate change, farm issues largely played a minor role in the CNN-Des Moines Register debate, held on Tuesday at Drake University in Iowa’s capital city. 

All of the leading Democratic presidential candidates are calling for major increases in spending for roads, bridges, rural broadband and other infrastructure needs, but the plans differ sharply in scope as well as in how the candidates plan to pay for them. 

Conservation advocates, major corporations and farm groups band together to launch a private market to reward soil carbon and clean water.

The Democratic presidential candidates are rallying around a carbon tax as a central solution to climate change, but putting the idea into law will mean overcoming concerns of farm groups about the tax’s intended goal - raising the cost of fossil fuels.

If just one environmental issue comes up during the Democratic debates scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, there’s a pretty good chance it will be climate change, a subject Republicans prefer to avoid but Democrats trip over themselves to talk about.