Organic and CRP Land

A newspaper account of a meeting on organic agriculture in Minnesota. What strikes me is the speaker's emphasis on the CRP-organic linkage. (Because CRP land has been out of production for years, it probably meets the 3-year requirement (no chemicals) to qualify as organic. )

So the greens might say, if you're getting out of CRP, go organic. But some greens must be a bit ambivalent about the idea, as tilling CRP land would cause a larger carbon footprint. Life is so complicated, it's unfair.

Government Policing Farmers

The 1985 farm bill instituted compliance with "sodbuster/swampbuster" provisions as a prerequisite for earning certain farm bill payments. This was a major wrench for the USDA agencies, particularly the Soil Conservation Service (as NRCS was then called). SCS was used to being the farmer's friend and educator, helping install farm ponds and contour cropping trips. Sod/swamp moved them more into the policeman role, determining what the farmer had to do to comply. An interesting history could be written of the next 23 years, as farm groups lobbied for changes, conservation groups fought back, SCS and FSA felt caught in the middle.

Now we can anticipate other changes. As my right-wing friends might say, an ever-encroaching government bureaucracy taking away farmers' freedoms. Here's an piece in Mulch, on the problems of controlling run-off pollution in watersheds (a problem already faced in the New York City watershed). The writer struggles to plot a course between purely "voluntary" conservation measures, which aren't that effective, and alternatives, trying to identify alternatives which aren't oppressive. For an old cynic, the struggle is most interesting.

CRP's Future

Here's an article outlining the tradeoffs faced by the Conservation Reserve Program in an economy very different than that of the early 1980's, when it was pushed into law.

Sodsaver Provision

I hadn't been following this. At gristmill a story on the "sodsaver" provision: "The House and Senate versions of the farm bill both contained this new provision, which would have prohibited crop insurance and non-insured disaster payments for production losses to producers in any state who plowed up native grasslands in order to plant crops. This would have also prevented these farmers from receiving regular disaster payments, because farmers must first have crop insurance in order to be eligible for disaster payments."

Apparently the conference committee is restricting it to the desert pothole area (i.e., the area of small lakes/marshes left behind when the glaciers retreated that are great for ducks, etc.) and making it optional by the governor. That's much to the regret of conservationists. What concerns a former bureaucrat is the possibility the law will mix apples and oranges. Mostly in the past, eligibility provisions have been either/or, land or person. A person who violated the sod/swampbuster provisions would be ineligible for all payments everywhere. Or, if the program provisions on a farm were violated, there might be no payments for that farm. But this sounds as if it might be a mixture--someone plows grassland in ND and in SD, for example. ND says okay, but SD says no. Result--person is ineligible on all his land in SD but not in ND. Very difficult to control, unless the IT systems FSA uses have gotten considerably more sophisticated.

It's also interesting--under sodbuster NRCS would have to have an approved plan for the farm to make the producer eligible. Sounds to me as if this "sodsaver" provision is a tacit admission that NRCS was unable/unwilling to administer the "sodbuster" provisions as originally intended. No real surprise--NRCS as a bureaucracy did not have the culture of policing regulations.

Conflicting Priorities

Keith Good covers the conflicts over the farm bill. At issue, does the nation want more money for food stamps (recognizing rising food prices and unemployment), for conservation (recognizing the trend to plant more acres and farm more intensively in order to take advantage of $6 corn futures, etc.) or for farm payments (recognizing ?).

South Dakota Swampbuster Case

"Swampbuster" is a provision, originating with the 1985 farm bill, which prohibits farmers who get farm program benefits from draining wetlands. That's the over-simplified version. This article describes a case in SD where a big partnership (brothers) receiving big bucks ($2.5 mill in 10 years) is fighting a determination by National Resource Conservation Service. There's enough description to show some of the complexities involved, though it doesn't say when the violation is said to have occurred.

Stupid People

Via From the Archives, this image. Golf courses use 8 percent of the water in Southern Nevada

Environmental Quality IMprovement Program Takes a Hit

This piece in the NY Times Week in Review takes after EQIP for helping large livestock producers in dealing with manure.

The questions, then, remain: Why should taxpayers foot the bill for manure lagoons, particularly under the flag of environmental conservation? Why should taxpayers subsidize expansion of livestock farms? And if livestock farms have created environmental problems, shouldn’t the polluters have to pay for the mess that they created, rather than the taxpayers?

Just another example of the falling support for farm programs.

Fence Row to Fence Row

Those words were a motto of the 1970's, when grain prices also peaked after the Nixon deal with the USSR. Apparently they may also be the motto of the 2000's, when ethanol spikes the grain prices. See this report from Ducks Unlimited on the land going out of Conservation Reserve Program and into crop production.