Since the 1930s, the government has relied on voluntary conservation efforts by farmers, often supplemented by federal payments, to reduce erosion and protect water quality. That approach is no longer sufficient and should be replaced in the 2018 farm bill by “mandatory adoption of farm practices that reduce runoff and cause other forms of environmental degradation,” says the American Enterprise Institute.
In a policy paper, the free-enterprise AEI says conservation spending, which runs around $6 billion a year, “deserves to be maintained if not increased” and targeted more closely at gaining the largest environmental benefit. That will require significant changes in the way the USDA awards cost-share money to farmers to adopt new practices or clean up existing programs, and how it decides to idle fragile land in the Conservation Reserve, says the paper, written by Erik Lichtenberg, a University of Maryland professor. In particular, he says, projects should be ranked on a national scale to get the highest return on the dollar. At the moment, many cost-share programs are run at the state or county level.
“Voluntary efforts like those incentivized by conservation programs in the farm bill have proved unable to achieve reductions in emissions large enough to meet water goals, even in places such as Maryland, which has provided cost-share funds to a much greater extent than other states,” says the AEI paper.
“There are also equity considerations: It seems only fair that polluters pay something toward cleaning up the environmental damage they create. These considerations suggest that meeting goals for water quality and other environmental amenities will require mandatory adoption of farm practices that reduce runoff and cause other forms of environmental degradation. … [C]onservation programs in the farm bill could help farmers bear the regulatory burden in much the same way that EPA grants help fund sewage treatment.”
The AEI paper is the latest in a series of calls for reform of the USDA’s conservation agenda. The Environmental Working Group has called for Congress to require farmers to perform more stewardship work in order to qualify for farm subsidies and has proposed greater coordination of conservation projects to achieve lasting benefits on a watershed scale.
Similarly, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition says “farmers and ranchers widely support prioritizing working lands conservation programs.” The NSAC also seeks restoration of conservation cuts equaling $600 million a year made in the 2014 farm law and the additional $2 billion that has been trimmed from the programs since then by the annual appropriations bills for the USDA. The funds should be restored “because natural resource and environmental issues related to agriculture are daunting,” says the NSAC.
Farm groups, which usually have the ear of the Senate and House Agriculture committees that write the farm bill, have given top priority to crop insurance and commodity supports in recent years, ahead of conservation.
The AEI paper suggests that the USDA, when allocating conservation funds, should put more emphasis on water quality and protection of endangered and “threatened” species; consider the aggregate of a project, such as its value on a landscape or watershed level; and make all funding decisions at the national level.
“The culture of USDA as an institution representing farm interests suggests that reorienting conservation spending toward national environmental priorities is unlikely without some pressure from outside the farm community,” says the AEI. “The natural source of that pressure is, of course, the Environmental Protection Agency, which has a statutory mandate for regulating air and water quality and has an institutional culture oriented toward regulation.”
Agriculture generally is exempt from clean air and clean water laws. Enforcement has been aimed at “point” sources, such as a factory smokestack or a sewage pipe. “The growing expense and technical difficulty of achieving further reductions in point-source emissions combined with advances in modeling have made it possible to begin discontinuing that de facto exemption,” says the AEI.
Partly because it offers financial assistance for voluntary cooperation on conservation, the USDA is more popular among farmers than the EPA, which is painted as the regulatory bogeyman of the government. Farm groups often expect the USDA to be their advocate in dealing with other agencies.