NY Times: In the Farm Bill, a Creature From the Black Lagoon?

[Guest guest]

Interesting article about the Farm Bill, and how small farmers have been

squeezed out...

January 13, 2008

In the Farm Bill, a Creature From the Black Lagoon?

By ANDREW MARTIN

IT may not surprise you to learn that much of the pork and chicken and

beef and milk that you buy at the grocery store comes from huge,

industrial-size operations that bear little resemblance to the quaint

family farms that adorn many food packages.

But you may be surprised to learn that your tax dollars have helped pave

the way for the growth of these livestock megafarms by paying farmers to

deal with the mountains of excrement that their farms generate. All of

this is carried out under the rubric of “conservation.” Congress is

about to renew the program — and possibly even expand it — as part of a

new farm bill wending its way through the Capitol.

It’s called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, also known as

EQIP — a name that suggests an initiative to encourage farmers to

improve environmental standards.

And, in fact, when the program was created as part of the 1996 farm

bill, that’s exactly what it was. At the time, the government agreed to

pay a share — up to 75 percent — of a conservation project, and the

payments were limited to $10,000 a year. Farmers used the money for

small-scale projects that had environmental benefits, like planting

cover crops to prevent erosion and soak up excess nitrogen or installing

fencing to better manage grazing cattle.

But in the 2002 farm bill, the program was changed at the livestock

industry’s behest, and funding for the program was raised from $200

million a year to, eventually, $1.3 billion. Yearly payment limits were

scratched, replaced by a provision that farmers could get no more than

$450,000 during the bill’s life.

Another change: large-scale livestock facilities that once were not

eligible for EQIP money were encouraged to participate under the 2002 bill.

As a result, many farmers are using their EQIP money for animal waste

management practices, which include helping to pay for lagoons to store

manure. The lagoons are lined ponds that are used to keep the waste

until it can be pumped out for some other use, usually as fertilizer on

nearby fields. In some instances, manure lagoons have leaked or

overflowed into the groundwater or neighboring streams.

They don’t smell very nice, either. So I’m sure families living downwind

of the lagoons would be pleased to learn their tax dollars helped to

finance them.

For the 2006 fiscal year, for instance, the Department of Agriculture

paid farmers about $179 million for animal waste management practices,

with Iowa, Wisconsin and North Carolina getting the most money. More

recent data was not available, nor were individual payments.

That compares with $125 million for soil erosion and sediment control,

$139 million for irrigation water management and $74 million for grazing

land practices, according to Department of Agriculture records.

Livestock industry officials argue that farmers should be allowed to use

EQIP money for animal waste to help comply with environmental

regulations for air and water quality.

Galen, spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation,

argues that bigger livestock farms should be eligible for more EQIP

money, not less, because they are the focus of the strictest

regulations. (Farms with more than 1,000 animal units, equal to 700

dairy cows, face tougher regulations.) “If larger farms are going to be

viewed — accurately or not — as part of the problem, then the resources

necessary to implement the solution also need to be available to those

farms,” he said in a statement.

Others maintain that EQIP money has helped to stop runoff from farms

that was polluting local and regional waterways.

Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, says that while

he doesn’t believe conservation funds should be spent on industrial

livestock farms, the money is a relatively small share of the EQIP

total. He says that most of it is spent on valuable environmental

initiatives.

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?

“Having a lagoon that doesn’t leak into groundwater, that’s the cost of

doing business,” said Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the Sustainable

Agriculture Coalition. “You shouldn’t be justifying that as a

conservation payment. You are building things that have been proven time

and time again to cause severe environmental damage when they misfunction.”

Much criticism of the proposed farm bill has focused on subsidy payments

to farmers, particularly when they are receiving sky-high prices for

corn, soybeans and wheat. EQIP doesn’t get nearly the same level of

scrutiny, in part because environmentalists are split on the merits of

using EQIP money to manage manure on big farms.

THE Senate passed a version of the farm bill that includes about the

same amount for EQIP in coming years. A proposal to scale back

individual payments to a $240,000 maximum was squelched in part by

Senator Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who maintains that

construction costs are higher in the Northeast and that EQIP money is

helping to clean up Lake Champlain.

Industrial dairies and manure lagoons in Vermont? Guess I’ll rent a

cabin in New Hampshire next summer.

The House version of the farm bill would expand EQIP by taking money

from another conservation program. The House and Senate will work out

their differences in conference committee. But I doubt that they will

change the payment formula for EQIP.

So if Congress is to keep sending taxpayer money to farmers to build

manure lagoons, it may want to consider a more honest name for the program.

How about “Factory Farm Incentive Program”?