As the cornerstone of food and nutritional security, agronomy – the science of soil management and crop production – is essential to the climate science that deals with contemporary realities. The CSA terminology was coined in 2012 to characterize an approach that reorients or even transforms agriculture from a present-day condition of serious inadequacies to one that directly addresses food security in a changing climate. The focus was on building evidence for context-specific remedies to increase the adaptive capacity of subsistence and small-holder farmers where climate change threatened livelihoods. Proponents advocated for building resiliency via coordinated action among farmers, researchers, policymakers, communities and the private sector, and specifically sought to link climate and agricultural financing and policy. A decade later, CSA is established in the political vernacular of most nations, and research and development financing has expanded dramatically. However, the popularized concept has expanded to encompass mitigation, which may overshadow adaptation where food insecurity is less of an immediate concern. In the U.S., pressure to comply with international climate change agreements without dramatically reducing energy consumption has created CSA policy frameworks that are not well supported by science or aligned with plausible pathways forward for farmers. Indeed, poor formulation of policies and incentives can generally be tracked to a lack of rigorous, underpinning science and a persistent desire to identify and implement simple, generic strategies that will have measurable, directionally correct impact on global climate change without consideration of tradeoffs. Some important adaptation strategies can have contradictory impacts on mitigation, while mitigation strategies may exacerbate food insecurity and/or other environmental problems. Where the promise of CSA has yet to be realized, the solution lies with stronger, more intentionally designed research portfolios and a reinvestment in the capacity to implement flexible, context-specific solutions, supported by innovative policy and financing actions that minimize tradeoffs.