While many recognize that putting land into conservation programs leads to cleaner water, healthier soil and robust wildlife habitat, few realize that CRP land also plays a major role in fighting climate change. According to the USDA, one acre of protected land sequesters 1.66 metric tons of carbon every year, carbon that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere.  The 7 million acres about to be cut from the Conservation Reserve Program have been putting 11.6 million metric tons of carbon into the soil every year.

The Environmental Protection Agency says that this amount of carbon is equivalent to the annual emissions of 2 million passenger vehicles. All that stored carbon will be sent back into the atmosphere if those 7 million acres are plowed under to plant more industrial-scale corn for ethanol and livestock feed.

A recent poll conducted by Iowa State University Extension and Outreach found that 68 percent of Iowa farmers surveyed say climate change is occurring; many of those same farmers likely experienced the devastating weather events of the past few years. So you’d think that there would be a clarion call from agriculture to have the federal government do whatever it takes to protect farmers against the ravages of climate change. Instead, taxpayers have to pick up the rapidly increasing insurance tab after climate-related disaster strikes.

And had industrial agriculture lobbyists not help scuttle climate change legislation, farmers would be collecting payments today via carbon credits for their conservation practices.

The main impetus for cutting conservation acres is the mad rush to plant every available inch of ground–whether it’s highly erodible land or a golf course–to capture high prices for corn propped up by Washington’s misguided corn ethanol mandate.

Speaking of corn ethanol, the industry and its lobbyists should be gravely concerned about the carbon emissions released by plowing under Conservation Reserve Program land. Political support for corn ethanol–which has been slipping–depends in part on whether it is better for the environment than gasoline. Most believe that corn ethanol currently is no better, emissions-wise, than gasoline.

America’s water, soil and wildlife habitat have never been under greater assault from the ravages of modern industrial agriculture. And since industrial crop production is exempt from most federal regulations, farm bill conservation programs like the Conservation Reserve Program are often our only line of defense against erosion and water contamination by toxic agrichemicals. Conservation is the rare investment in agriculture that pays every taxpayer a positive return.

Meanwhile lavish government payments to highly profitable mega-farms continue. Astonishingly in this tea-flavored budget environment, farm state lawmakers and agribiz lobbyists are working toward newer programs that could increase taxpayers’ burden. Farm income has been white-hot for a decade and shows no sign of diminishing. But if you quiz industrial ag lobbyists about why agribusiness subsidies should be spared the budget axe while conservation gets whacked, they’ll tell you farm bills are written for the bad times, not for the good times.

Well, it’s pretty obvious these are the bad times for conservation.

The conservation community needs to fight back hard against these proposed cuts. EWG president Ken Cook said it best:

No conservationist worthy of the name should accept legislation that cuts another $6-plus billion from the farm bill’s programs to protect land, water and wildlife. Nor should conservationists accept subsidy programs that give incentives to farmers who drain wetlands, plow up prairies or recklessly increase already severe runoff pollution from farm fields.

And if the climate change community can engage the debate on the farm bill with the same intensity it used to postpone the Keystone Pipeline, we may just have a conservation battle we can win this time around.

Originally published on EWG’s AgMag

The popularity of Oscar-nominated Food, Inc. and writers Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman make it clear that consumer interest in food and farming issues is now deeply embedded in the cultural mainstream.

And that’s not just my personal impression. Two brand new polls show a surprising degree of agreement on consumers’ concerns about the quality of food and how it’s produced, considering that one was commissioned by an environmentally-oriented foundation and the other by an organization that’s out to advance the interests of large scale agribusiness. I’ll come back to those results in a minute.

Shoppers’ buying habits reflect their growing interest in food quality and where it comes from. Healthy food-oriented chains such as Whole Foods are thriving, farmers’ markets are more prevalent than ever, and organically grown food is the fastest growing segment of the agriculture sector. Before long, it’s inevitable that consumers’ growing interest in food issues will start to affect their behavior in the voting booth as well.

Industrial agriculture has taken notice, as evidenced by the “Food Dialogues,” a series of panel discussions convened last week (Sept. 22) in four cities as part of a $30 million public relations campaign mounted by big agricultural interests. Billed as an effort to connect consumers with farmers and ranchers, the event was created by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, whose membership list is a who’s who of major industrial agriculture organizations across the country.

While the panelists were mostly sympathetic to industry, they included World Wildlife Fund’s Jason Clay and Roots of Change President Michael Dimock, who said many smart things about the sustainability of modern agriculture. The event triggered comprehensive reactions by rancher Jeff Fowle and author Anna Lappé, and a story in yesterday’s (Sept 28) New York Times.

The Alliance set limits on the scope of the “Dialogues,” keeping potentially divisive issues like the farm bill or the corn ethanol debacle off the agenda and thereby skirting the touchy topic of how government policies affect what we eat. That’s too bad, because the farm bill is especially relevant right now as the Super Committee budget cutters in Congress tasked with reigning in federal spending take a hard look at what farm programs to cut. Many informed observers believe the committee will effectively re-write the farm bill this fall, a full year ahead of schedule. (For a little context, check out Why the Farm Bill Matters.)

President Obama, farm state senators and commodity groups have already weighed in, underscoring the likely impact of the Super Committee’s work on the future of US food and farm policy. We at Environmental Working Group have also issued several of our own analyses of how the Super Committee could, and should, reform farm policy. And today, 56 conservation-oriented groups, including EWG, have come together to lay out a set of principles that should guide the panel’s deliberations.

That’s why the polling information I can tell you about here is important, because it’s a unique window into what American consumers are really thinking, not just what big agribusiness wants you to believe.

In July, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation commissioned the Benenson Strategy Group and Voter Consumer Research to conduct a survey of American attitudes on issues related to agriculture, the environment, and the federal budget. Here–for the first time anywhere–are some highlights of the findings, based on 1,200 telephone interviews conducted nationally. (The poll had an overall margin of error ±2.83 percent.)

• 78 percent said making nutritious and healthy foods more affordable and more accessible should be a top priority in the next farm bill.
• Americans value conservation programs with environmental benefits more than programs with economic benefits such as job creation or recreation dollars.
• 69 percent said reducing the use of chemicals that contribute to water pollution should also be a top priority.
• 52 percent said subsidies for crops such as corn and soybeans should top the list of programs to be cut, and 49 percent named crop insurance as the next target. Only 31 percent ranked conservation programs as top targets for cuts and just 23 percent wanted to chop food aid for low income Americans.
• 57 percent did not agree with cutting funding for farm conservation programs, saying they save money by preventing pollution.
• 38 percent said protecting soil and farmland to ensure future food security should be the top priority of conservation initiatives, while 34 percent put protecting water quality at the top.
• 60 percent said farmers should be required to meet environmental standards such as protecting water quality or soil health as a condition of receiving subsidy payments and subsidized crop insurance. That number jumped to 65 percent in the six biggest ethanol-producing states.
• 75 percent said helping family farmers stay in business should be a top or high priority in agriculture policy and 31 percent would make it the top goal of subsidy programs.

The Alliance’s two polls, conducted in August by Ketchum Global Research Network and Braun Research, sampled an even larger number of consumers (a total of 2,417) and, separately, 1,002 farmer and ranchers. The polling was part of the preparation for the “Food Dialogues.” Their website offers only a limited sampling of the results, but in some ways the USFRA’s poll findings were consistent with what the Packard survey found:

• 79 percent of consumers said “producing healthy choices… is very important for farmers and ranchers to consider when planning farming and ranching practices.”
• 70 percent said their shopping decisions are affected by how food is grown and raised, although 72 percent said they “know nothing or very little” about it.
• 73 percent of consumers were satisfied with the availability of healthy foods and 66 percent are satisfied with food safety standards, but, 42 percent said the U.S. is “off on the wrong track in the way we produce food,” as against 39 percent who said it’s “heading in the right direction.”
• the five top topics consumers wanted more information about are, in order: how chemicals are used; how pesticides are used; food safety standards; effect of government regulations, and; how antibiotics are used/genetic engineering in crops.
• according to an account in the online Hagstrom report, 42 percent of the consumers polled said the way food is produced has improved in the last 10 years, but 37 percent said it has worsened.
• of those who said it has worsened, 1-in-5 cited its “environmental impact.”

If you want to influence how the next five years of farm policy are written, arm yourself with the Packard Poll results and head on over to EWG’s food and farm bill action center, where you can tell Congress that you won’t stand for industrial agriculture’s hold on the food system anymore.

Originally published on Environmental Working Group

Will the next Farm Bill, scheduled for passage in 2012, put public policy in service of a food system that works for farmers, eaters, and the environment?

Well, optimism over federal food-policy reform never runs very high in sustainable-ag circles. The agrichemical lobby is flush with cash and friends in Congress and the White House. But the current budget fight is making a bleak situation look downright disastrous. It’s looking like the looming budget deal will slash funding for the few programs that currently counteract the Big Ag policy agenda.

And while the current fight only involves fiscal 2011 funding, what emerges from it will set the “baseline” for funding in the coming Farm Bill, Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), told me in a phone conversation. Many of the USDA programs heralded by the Obama administration under the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative, which are designed to expand access to fresh food and link farmers to local markets, are on the chopping block, Hoefner told me, as are ag conservation programs that give farmers incentives to consider other goals besides just maximizing production of a few commodities. The sustainable-food movement has put together the initiatives through decades of grassroots organizing and low-budget lobbying, and they are in danger of seeing their budgets cut for years to come.

A recent letter signed by 154 progressive ag groups, including Hoefner’s NSAC, analyzed the proposed House budget like this:

The House measure would cut a disproportionate $5.2 billion or 22 percent from the combined USDA and FDA budgets, compared to a 6 percent cut for the government overall or 14 percent for non-security spending. Even those numbers mask the size of the actual cut. The House also proposes deep cuts to mandatory conservation and renewable energy funding provided by the 2008 Farm Bill—a combined $500 million would be cut under the House bill from the Conservation Stewardship Program, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, Wetland Reserve Program, and the Biomass Crop Assistance Program. With those cuts included, the total cut to agriculture comes to $5.7 billion or 24.5 percent.

And what about commodity payments, which go to a relatively small number of large farmers?

Despite the decision to re-open the 2008 Farm Bill and make cuts to mandatory programs in an appropriations bill, none of the cuts in the House bill are directed at the two largest federal agricultural spending items—commodity and crop insurance subsidies. In a year of relatively high farm income, the House has focused its cuts instead upon programs that protect the environment, increase economic opportunity, serve beginning and minority farmers, and ensure proper nutrition for low-income families.

Why are the conservation programs so important? For decades now, the main thrust of U.S. farm/food policy has been to push farmers to grow as much corn, soy, and a few other commodities as possible. Nixon-era USDA Secretary Earl Butz set the tone. Farmers should “get big or get out,” he famously thundered; and the surviving large operations should “plant hedgerow to hedgerow”—i.e., as much as possible, damn the environmental consequences. Butz’s agenda is tailor-made for big corn processor/meat producers like Cargill and the agrichemical giants that sell farmers inputs, like Monsanto.

The Farm Bill’s commodity programs are the most infamous example of this maximum-production-at-all-costs policy, but hardly the only one. The various federal goodies propping up corn ethanol—from tax breaks to the Renewable Fuels Standard—are probably even more important at this point. The result has been mountains of cheap food—and all manner of public-health and environmental ills, which I tried to sum up in a post last year for Grist called “Why are we propping up corn production, again?”

The conservation programs offset, however tentatively and insufficiently, this mad Butzian zeal to produce a whole lot of a very few foodstuffs—all of them easy inputs for industrial-food processors. Like the commodity programs, conservation programs are funded by the Farm Bill and even have their own Farm Bill “title,” although they draw a fraction of the funding that the commodity programs do. If the commodity programs give farmers incentives to maximize production at all costs, the conservation ones offer incentives to consider ecological factors in making planting decisions.

For example, the Conservation Reserve Program rewards farmers for keeping environmentally sensitive land out of production—important at a time when high corn prices might tempt a farmer to squeeze a last couple of crops out of a highly erodible piece of land. Other programs give farmers incentives to plant buffer strips along streams, which can trap agrichemicals that would otherwise drain into streams and foul drinking water.

These relatively modest, successful programs deserve to be ramped up. Indeed, they could provide a template for a Farm Bill that makes sense for farmers, eaters, and the environment alike. Say, for example, we stopped paying farmers merely for planting corn, as some commodity programs do, or rewarding them for how much corn they harvest during low-price years, as other commodity programs do. Instead, say we started rewarding them for biodiversity: for expanding rotations to include other crops besides just soy, which would cut down on the need for agrichemicals. What if we paid them to plant nitrogen-fixing winter cover crops, which would build organic matter in soil and cut synthetic nitrogen use?

Dan Imhoff is the author of Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Farm Bill, a book about the outcome of the 2008 Farm Bill and what we can do to effect change despite business as usual in Washington. He will be taking part in Slow Food Nation’s Food for Thought panel series, and is co-author of the Vision Statement for Agriculture and Food Policy for the 21st Century, being presented at SFN August 28th.

I spoke with Dan recently and asked him some questions about his work and his upcoming participation in Slow Food Nation. This is Part I of the interview. Part II will be posted tomorrow.

Paula: Congress just recently passed a five-year Farm Bill, why is it such an important piece of legislation?

Dan: The Farm Bill determines what crops we grow, where we grow them, under what conditions, how cheap different types of foods are in the marketplace, how well we take care of our land and waterways and wild habitats, and it ultimately determines our health and our nutrition.

Paula: What was the original purpose of the Farm Bill, and did that original version of the Farm Bill work?

Dan: It started out of desperation. Our soil was blowing away, literally, and we were also witnessing, I think, the end of the agrarian era in American history and we were massively moving towards cities and an industrialized economy. Then we had the Depression, and there were lots and lots of people out of work and hungry. The farmer had only one way to try to get ahead in this new economy and that was to plant as much as possible, but the irony was that the more that they planted, the less it was worth. And ultimately they planted so much, so radically, in places that have never been plowed, that they created the Dust Bowl. The early programs were designed to try to compensate farmers fairly to give parity, and they tried to peg the value of any given commodity, whether it was peanuts, cotton or rice, with a real value in an urban environment. And for decades, the rural versus urban parity was just way out of whack. So they tried to set some price floors, and give a fair price so that the farmer could actually get his or her money back. A lot of these programs were loan based, and if you couldn’t pay back your loan at the end of the season because the price was too low, you just gave your crop as payment, and so the government got into the grain storage and distribution business. This goes all the way back to Confucian times, and Biblical and Egyptian practices.

Paula: When and how did it change?

Dan: For many decades, in order to be eligible for programs, you had to put a certain percentage of your land aside in conservation. And this encouraged you not to plant marginal land, and it restricted the supply somewhat to try to [keep] prices at a certain level, [so as] not to over saturate the market. In the 70s, I think that we just had this idea that we were going to become the grain exporter of the world and that we just needed to expand and produce as much as possible regardless of how we produced it.

Paula: Do you think that the policy objectives of the Farm Bill are still relevant?

Dan: The policy objectives definitely don’t seem to be aligned with the problems that have really started to surface in 2008, and by that I mean escalated petroleum costs, escalating food costs, unpredictable climate events, and the nutrition epidemic that seems to be really gripping the country.

Paula: The bill was passed overwhelmingly in congress, are there some positive elements to it?

Dan: Well there are always some positive elements, but I really feel like we are being held hostage, and that our leadership is at fault. Millions and millions of citizens came into the Farm Bill debate. They were mainly asking for reform of the commodity titles, the 30 – 40% of [Farm Bill] spending that goes for direct or indirect payments (subsides) for crops.

Paula: I assume by what you are saying that you think these positive elements of the bill are not enough to make a real difference?

Dan: No, you’d have to be out of your mind to not be angry [at] how little reform actually took place. All you can hope is that we are going to have a new secretary of agriculture, and maybe we’re even going to have a whole new envisioning process in the USDA, and that the first thing that they are going to do is come in and say we need a 21st century food and agriculture policy. It needs to affect every decision that we make, every policy that we sign.

Paula: So those benefiting from the Farm Bill are those larger farms that own the most land and are producing the most, and getting the most in subsidies?

Dan: Well that one tier, definitely. The people who make out the most are the people who are buying the commodities in markets that are completely saturated. Those who are buying the raw materials, the cotton, wheat, rice and soybeans, and especially the corn. And if you look at the Farm Bill, the main beneficiaries are big feedlot operations, because they get the low cost feed. They are paying sometimes 20% less than they would without the subsidies, and it’s keeping them going. There should be no subsidization without social obligation. I think that’s what the taxpayers and the concerned citizens were trying to say. You want money from us, there has to be some kind of social benefit in return.

Photo by topherous