E&E Publishing, Greenwire

(Wednesday, March 7, 2012)

Amanda Peterka, E&E reporter

A coalition of water agencies, state and local governments and environmentalists urged Congress yesterday to link water incentives to crop insurance.

The Healthy Waters Coalition also called for targeting certain watersheds for priority funding and expanding monitoring of conservation practices.

"Congress must ensure that we have strong farm bill conservation programs that exist to help agriculture producers implement simple, cost-effective conservation practices," said Shana Udvardy, director of flood management policy at the environmental group American Rivers.
The coalition includes the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Clean Water America Alliance, Environmental Working Group and National Wildlife Federation.

The focus is on House and Senate agriculture committees that are holding hearings on the reauthorization of the 2008 farm bill, which expires in September. Lawmakers are hoping to have a bill on the House and Senate floors this spring, although most observers say it's likely the process will be delayed until next year.

Former Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer expressed support for the coalition, calling for federal policy that encourages new technologies and allows for the trading of water-quality credits between farmers and municipalities. Schafer led the Agriculture Department under former President George W. Bush.

Coalition members said it was up to the farm bill to address pollution washing off rural land through programs that encourage farmers to make environmental improvements. Excessive nutrients from manure and fertilizers are causing algae blooms that degrade waterways, creating "dead zones" where depleted dissolved oxygen levels smother aquatic life.

The bill's conservation programs should be focused on nutrient runoff reduction and targeted to impaired watersheds, coalition members said. The coalition urged Congress to restore full funding to the farm bill's wetlands restoration program, which also expires in September.

"Strengthening the farm bill's conservation programs will not only benefit farmers who manage their working lands with care," said Diane VanDe Hei, executive director of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, "but it will help downstream water utilities currently faced with removing excessive levels of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution at their ratepayers' expense."

The coalition also called for Congress to require farmers to comply with certain conservation mandates before they can buy crop insurance.

Although polls have shown that individual farmers support the requirements, major farm groups, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, have opposed it, saying that government support shouldn't come with strings attached.

But with farm subsidies expected to undergo massive overhauls in the upcoming farm bill, environmentalists see an opportunity to reattach the requirements to the $7.4 billion crop insurance program and are attempting to bring the issue to the fore (Greenwire, Feb. 27).
Ferd Hoefner, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said the debate over "conservation compliance" figures to be "the major fight that's coming down the road."

"Nobody wants to see neighbors getting away with bad practices, cutting costs, cutting corners and polluting rivers and streams," Hoefner said. "We think it's high time that we renew that support for what Congress calls conservation compliance. It's really the basic social contract with the American people, that in return for various production supports that there's also an expectation that you're going to take care of the land."