The election of Donald Trump means that environmentalists can forget about new, broader rules on land and water stewardship by farmers, said a prominent Republican farm leader. “Those new regulations are not going to happen,” said Chuck Conner, who added that the 2018 farm bill would continue the system of incentives for voluntary action against erosion and polluted runoff.
Conner, a member of Trump’s agriculture advisory committee, nixed new stewardship regulations immediately after Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group proposed them during a Farm Foundation panel discussion of the agenda for the upcoming farm bill.
“Voluntary incentives alone cannot meet the challenge posed by farm pollution,” said Faber. EWG says conservation funds are spread too thin and should be focused more tightly on practices that will generate the largest impact. In October, EWG said, “Congress should require all subsidized farmers to do more to curb polluted runoff from flowing into America’s rivers, lakes and streams and to protect our drinking water.”
Since 1985, farmers have been obliged to prevent erosion on fragile land and to preserve wetlands and grasslands to qualify for crop subsidies. The 2014 farm law expanded so-called conservation compliance to cover federally subsidized crop insurance polices.
Farmers and ranchers “felt like they have been under attack for the last several years” by the “heavy hand” of the EPA and consumer groups that have unreasonable ideas of how modern agriculture works, said Conner. Farmers voted heavily for Trump because he promised less regulation, he said. A pre-election poll gave Trump a 3-to-1 advantage over Clinton among farmers, and exit polls indicated rural America voted 2-to-1 for him.
“At the end of the day, this is going to be a very farmer-friendly farm bill, period,” said Conner. He said the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House Agriculture Committees were longtime backers of mainstream agriculture and Trump would be an ally.
Darren Bakst, of the Heritage Foundation, said the food-stamp program should be considered in separate legislation, rather than being part of the panoramic farm bill, “so you don’t have this logrolling that exists.” Conservative House Republicans briefly killed the farm bill in 2013 when they insisted on the largest food-stamp cuts in a generation. House Republicans voted repeatedly in budget bills to convert food stamps into a block grant for states to run as they wish.
Farm and anti-hunger groups have formed a coalition to stand together against radical cuts to Agriculture Department programs, said Conner, in a signal of united opposition to removing food stamps from the farm bill. Farm supports and public nutrition “are fundamental to the bill. They are the vote-getters,” he said.
“We should not weaken SNAP,” said Faber, using the acronym for the formal name of food stamps, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. “This is a program that needs more resources, not less.”