Ag Policy Blog
Letters on Permanent Law, Conservation Compliance
Tuesday was a day of big letters leading into Wednesday's initial farm bill pow-wow between conferees from the House and Senate Agriculture Committees.
Again, with 41 conferees, it's difficult to imagine conferees getting beyond 41 opening statements on Wednesday, but we can all cross our fingers and hope.
As it is, there were at least two letters sent out with more than 250 signatures from groups stating their case. One letter seeks to protect the permanent-law language and recouple nutrition programs to the farm bill. http://dld.bz/…
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A second letter of 278 groups --- a mix of conservation, environmental and sustainable-agricultural organizations -- signed on to make another push to re-couple minimum conservation standards to premium subsidies for crop insurance. That group also asked lawmakers to support a national sodsaver provision.
On compliance, the groups said farmers traditionally adopted conservation practices to protect soil and water in exchange for a safety net. Yet, the main safety net is now shifting increasingly to crop insurance, creating a "loophole" in efforts to better protect the land. "Without these key protections, billions of taxpayer dollars spent on crop insurance over coming years will subsidize soil erosion that will choke our waterways, increase the cost of water treatment and dredging, and reduce the long term productivity of farmland. It will also allow for the destruction of tens of thousands of acres of valuable wetlands, resulting in increased downstream flooding, loss of wildlife habitat and decreased water quality."
Along with that, native prairies are now increasingly being converted, or "broken out" into crop production. The groups said 400,000 such acres were converted from 2011 to 2012. The groups advocate for a sodsaver provision that taxpayer subsidies are limited for those lands. They also asked to apply sodsaver nationally.
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