Des Moines Register, Philip Brasher
Published August 31, 2008
Iowa was among the top four in conservation proceeds, but broad support means spreading around money.
Washington, D.C. - The new farm bill puts more money into conserving soil and water on working lands, rather than taking cropland out of production.
That's a fitting move, given that the world needs the United States to produce more food, not less.
The Conservation Stewardship Program, formerly the Conservation Security Program, is one of the biggest winners in this shift. The program, created in 2002 to reward farmers for improved environmental practices, now enrolls 15 million of the more than 900 million acres of farmland nationwide.
The new farm bill will add nearly 13 million acres to the program annually during the next five years.
The question now is how much impact the program will have on water and soil quality and other environmental needs. That will depend on some new rules for how the money is distributed, experts said.
Under the farm bill, program acreage will now be allocated to states primarily based on the share of the nation's agricultural acreage, including rangeland. That assures that Plains and Mountain states, including such agricultural powerhouses as Wyoming, will get significant shares of the money. Texas and Montana alone have about 190,000 acres of farmland between the two of them, or about 20 percent of the agricultural acreage nationwide.
That's more farmland than there is combined in Iowa, Illinois and the other seven states that contribute most of the agricultural runoff that causes the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
"It makes one wonder how dispersed the program is going to end up being, rather than focused on those states and those regions of the country where the environmental and natural resource problems are really the most severe," said Craig Cox, Midwest vice president of the Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy group.
Under the old farm bill, more than one-third of Conservation Stewardship Program spending has gone to four states, in this order: Oregon, Missouri, Iowa and Arkansas.
Lawmakers probably had no choice other than to set some formula for dividing the money. Up to now, the program has been seen in Washington, D.C., as a pet project of Sen. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who wrote the conservation program into the 2002 farm bill.
Aides to the Senate Agriculture Committee, which Harkin chairs, said it was important to broaden support. That means ensuring the money is available nationwide, including states such as Texas, which ranks 23rd in conservation program spending.
"You can target (program funding) much more tightly," said Ferd Hoefner, who follows conservation policy for the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. "Then, the Upper Midwest gets most of the money and you get a huge political problem."
The farm bill contains provisions that, depending on how U.S. Department of Agriculture implements them, are intended to ensure that the program does what it was supposed to: improve soil, air and water quality, enhance wildlife habitat and conserve water and energy.
For example, the program requires the Agriculture Department to set priorities, such as improving water quality, which the conservation program contracts should address in each state.
Farmer applications for the program will have to be ranked according to the environmental benefits the producers will provide. The highest-ranked proposals get first crack at the money.
Farmers also are required to make further improvements during the life of their five-year conservation contract. Under the old farm bill, the payments were largely based on practices, such as reducing tillage to conserve soil, which farmers were already following when they applied for the program.
Payments are expected to range from $10 to $30 an acre under the program. Individual farms can receive as much as $40,000 a year. The overhaul of the program comes at a critical time for U.S. agriculture, Cox said.
"We need to ramp up stewardship now more than ever with the intensification of production," he said.
