ASHINGTON,
June 15, 2001 — A coalition of more than 100 environmental
and hunting organizations, from the Sierra Club to the
National Rifle Association, is trying to turn the measure that
will set farm policy for the coming years into the major
conservation act of this Congress.
With the recently enacted $1.3 trillion tax cut squeezing
out most new spending programs, the conservationists are
focusing on what is typically known as the farm bill as their
best bet for recovering millions of acres of wetlands,
prairies, grassland and forests and protecting the wildlife
that live on the land.
Few other bills offer both the money — $79 billion in new
financing over the next five years — and the assurance that
the legislation will become law. The bill pays for the
subsidies that have for decades underwritten farmers who grow
major crops like corn, wheat, rice and soybeans.
But in the last 15 years, since conservation programs were
added to the farm program, farmers have lined up for cash
payments in return for taking their land out of production and
letting it return to the wild.
Already, farmers have voluntarily set aside more than 35
million acres as nature reserves and another million acres of
wetlands as part of the two major conservation programs
supported by the farm program. There is a backlog of farmers
and ranchers who have applied for $3.7 billion in payments for
setting aside an additional 68 million acres, but the programs
have run out of money.
Conservation and hunting groups support payments to farmers
for returning some of their acreage to a natural state because
it not only helps sustain wildlife but also helps farmers hold
on to their property. In addition, it slows the encroachment
of suburbs into the countryside.
"The conservation programs in the farm bill have
really helped the farmer hold the line against
developers," said Susan Lamson of the National Rifle
Association, making points more often associated with the
Friends of the Earth.
The environmental and hunting groups are asking that a new
farm bill include money for the protection of another million
acres of wetlands and 10 million more acres of land through
the conservation reserve program. They are going up against
the powerful farm and agribusiness lobbies that have helped
persuade Congress to keep increasing crop subsidies, which
last year reached a record $22 billion in commodity payments
to farmers.
Environmental groups argue that these subsidies encourage
overproduction of the major crops, which not only keeps prices
flat but also pollutes rivers and soil with chemicals.
"When farms go into overproduction you have dirty
water and dirty air," said Brett Hulsey of the Sierra
Club. "With conservation programs, you have clean water,
reduced flooding and more open space."
In Congress, these environmentalists, as well as the
hunting and fishing groups, the so-called hooks-and- bullets
crowd, have found natural allies among senators and
representatives from states where farmers receive little of
the $20 billion annual subsidies for the major crops. More
than 120 House members wrote to the Agriculture Committee
chairman this week asking for support for the conservation
programs.
"We could turn this farm bill into the great
conservation bill of the 21st century," said
Representative Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin, who is leading
the movement in the House to rewrite the farm bill with
conservation as its centerpiece.
Congress has begun considering how to rewrite the farm
bill, which was last passed in 1996 as the Freedom to Farm
Act. Representative Larry Combest, Republican of Texas and
chairman of the Agriculture Committee, has concluded that the
major commodity subsidy programs should be more predictable,
with farmers receiving less money when their crops fetch
higher prices. He has yet to recommend how much money should
go to conservation.
"This is a work in progress," said an aide to Mr.
Combest. "When the environmentalists discovered the farm
bill, they made it trendy. Now the conservation programs are
more oriented to Eastern farmers. Mr. Combest prefers the more
traditional point of view of protecting soil banks that would
give more money to the Western areas."
That geographic split is evident throughout Congress. In
the Senate, a group of 43 Republican and Democratic senators
from New England and mid-Atlantic states have formed an
informal caucus to support farm conservation programs. Most of
their farmers from Maine to Maryland either grow vegetables
and fruits or are dairy farmers and therefore ineligible for
the major commodity subsidy programs. But they can and have
taken advantage of the conservation programs.
In the current farm bill, conservation payments have become
so popular they rank third, behind payments for growing corn
and wheat. Over five years, government payments to corn
farmers were $24.3 billion, to wheat farmers $13.2 billion and
to conservation programs $8.24 billion.
"In many parts of farm country, conservation is now
the single most important source of government assistance to
agriculture, especially for small and medium-size farms,"
said Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group.
During the Republican revolution in which Newt Gingrich was
House speaker, the conservation programs were nearly lost.
When the House wrote the initial Freedom to Farm Act of 1996,
the bill excluded financing for conservation. But
Representative Sherwood Boehlert, Republican of New York,
offered an amendment to reinstate the programs, and the
measure won by a vote of 372 to 37, establishing the now
classic divide between Eastern and Western farm states over
financing.
"Conservation used to be considered the purview of the
Midwest and its eroded soil," Mr. Boehlert said in an
interview. "With the expanded programs it has worked
wonders for our Eastern farmers who were on the edge."
With so much money at stake in the new revision of the farm
bill, Mr. Combest has vowed to present a new farm bill to the
House by the end of July, nearly a year in advance of the
Senate. For their part, the environmentalists in the House say
they will offer legislation this month to expand the
conservation programs.
"Our competition is the commodity payments, and there
is only so much money in the bill," said Scott Sutherland
of Ducks Unlimited, a conservation group supported by hunters.
"We want funding put back for the wetlands and we know
there are members of Congress who are hunters and anglers who
will want to preserve those wetlands."
New York Times