BACK TO BASICS

Voluntary programs and technical help from government technicians and scientists cannot hold soil and water together in the face of the pressure to push the land harder and harder. The pressure for all-out production is intensified by the profound changes in land ownership. Meanwhile conservation programs are being overwhelmed by misguided farm and biofuel policies that magnify the perverse incentives of a marketplace that turns a blind eye toward soil degradation and water pollution.

It is time to make sure that the most basic, simple and traditional conservation practices that hold soil and watersheds together are in place everywhere they are needed. Science tells us that such practices would result in a big improvement in protection of the environment and in sustaining agricultural production in an increasingly dangerous climate. These conventional practices will not solve all the problems we confront, but they will go a long way to building the foundation on which more targeted efforts can be placed.

It is also time to go back to what works — requiring farmers to protect soil and water in return for the billions in income, production and insurance subsidies that taxpayers put up each year. It was good policy in 1985 and it is even more so now.

The first step is to get back to full enforcement of the conservation compliance law that has been on the books since 1985. The Natural Resources Conservation Service must intensify its annual inspections to determine whether farmers are maintaining the required soil conservation practices, and the Farm Service Agency (FSA) must make full use of its authority to impose graduated penalties on farmers and landlords who fail to comply with conservation requirements.

Figure 14: According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s database of “common land units,” both of these gullied fields are designated as “highly erodible cropland” and by law should have conservation practices in place to reduce soil erosion.