Chicago Tribune
Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005

Green farming faces budget ax
Trims proposed in conservation program

By Andrew Martin
Tribune national correspondent

PRESTON, Minn. — For the first time in his quarter century of farming, Dave Serfling received a check from the federal government that paid him for how he farms, not how many crops he grows.

Serfling, who raises antibiotic-free pigs and a variety of grains, is among the early participants in the Conservation Security Program, an initiative that rewards farmers for using their land in ways that don't harm the environment.

It is a program praised by Republicans and Democrats alike. But its allure is not nearly so powerful as more traditional farm subsidies, and as a result, it has been whittled by the Bush administration and gutted by Congress ever since it was passed as part of the 2002 Farm Bill.

On Wednesday, as part of an effort to cut $3 billion from the agriculture budget over five years, Senate Agriculture Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) proposed cuts of $574 million to food stamps and $1.1 billion from conservation programs, the vast majority of which -- $821 million -- would come from the Conservation Security Program.

The Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry was to have discussed Chambliss' proposal Thursday morning, but late Wednesday the hearing was postponed. The House agriculture committee is expected to consider its own cuts to the agriculture budget within about two weeks.

"It's pretty much along the lines of what I expected, which is terrible," said Ferd Hoefner, the Washington representative of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, when asked about Chambliss' plan. "CSP took the biggest hit. They just decided that was the one they were really going to go after. It's like, `We're going to make sure that the program that has the potential to reform farm policy is nipped in the bud.'"

Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, which advocates for conservation programs, said: "This is just a shallow pot of money to steal from, even though there is a lot of shallow support for CSP. A lot of the ideas are good and bold. You just can't move with something that big without getting big political buy-in."

But Keith Williams, spokesman for the Senate agriculture committee, said budget constraints required trims across the board, including a 2.5 percent reduction in traditional commodity subsidies. While the overall amount for the Conservation Security Program has been reduced, the proposal seeks to put funding for it into the statute to "keep Congress from coming back each time and pulling money out of it."

He said farmers that already participate in the program would continue to be paid the full amount.

Chambliss' proposal does not include payment limits on farm subsidies, an idea proposed by the Bush administration and by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Many Southern members of Congress, including Chambliss, oppose payment limitations because they would mostly affect cotton and rice farms, many of which are in the South and some of which collect hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in government payments.

Proposal criticized

Some critics said that, by trying to keep farm subsidy programs relatively intact, Chambliss' proposal threatened the United States' position in negotiations at the World Trade Organization to open markets.

Farm subsidies that encourage production have been widely criticized for creating artificially low prices that hurt Third World farmers, and developing nations have demanded that wealthy nations such as the U.S. cut subsidies that distort trade.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the ranking minority member on the Senate agriculture committee, complained that the budget cuts were a way to finance additional tax cuts for rich Americans and would increase the federal deficit while hurting farmers and needy citizens.

Prior to the 2002 Farm Bill, the federal government's conservation strategy was primarily to pay landowners to take land out of production through the Conservation Reserve Program.

By contrast, the Conservation Security Program pays farmers a maximum of $45,000 a year for improving the soil, water, air and animal life on land that is being used for agricultural production. While the rules vary by state, farmers can be rewarded for, among other things, rotating crops, planting grasses for grazing or using "no-till" practices that cut down on greenhouse gases.

The program originally was supposed to be available to any farmer who met the qualifications. But it was trimmed back to include only farmers in certain watersheds, 18 in 2004, 220 this year.

Serfling, who lives in the Root River watershed, said he used to raise as much corn and soybeans as he could on his hilly 320 acres to collect government payments that are tied to production. The dependence on subsidies was a powerful tether.

But in the late 1990s, he discovered that the water in his wells was too polluted to drink, so he cut back on farm chemicals and started rotating a variety of crops on his land, changes that for many years earned him no points with the government.

"The easiest way to get more money from the government is to get more land and farm it more intensely," Serfling said. "We were penalized so bad under the regular commodity program."

Under the Conservation Security Program, Serfling said he'll receive about $20,000 a year for doing things like leaving his pastures unmowed from May 1 to July 1 to promote habitat for songbirds and pheasants and installing a raking device on the front of his tractor that flushes out birds so they aren't crushed by the machine's blades.

`Doesn't that sound good?'

On a tour of Vance and Bonnie Haugen's dairy farm in Canton, Minn., visitors are asked to be quiet to listen to the sounds of their cows munching on clover and alfalfa. "Doesn't that sound good?" Bonnie said.

The Haugens' dairy farm is a throwback to when cows were simply let out to pasture to find food, as opposed to being fed grain in a barn. Vance Haugen argued that it was ultimately better for the environment because the cows' manure fertilizes the pasture grasses, which in turn soak up rainwater and prevent erosion on their 230 acres of hilly farmland.

"You can see that when it rains, the water isn't going too far," said Vance Haugen, who estimated they would receive about $8,000 a year from the conservation program. "If it was corn and soybeans, it would run down the hill."

As program director for the Minnesota-based Land Stewardship Project, Mark Schultz has encouraged farmers to sign up for the Conservation Security Program and helped them negotiate the exhaustive paperwork.

"Farmers farm the government," he said. "The idea of the CSP is that they still farm the government but they're doing it in a way that benefits society."

He worries that Chambliss' proposal will encourage more drastic cuts to the conservation program by the House.

"These cuts will mean that the CSP will be severely hamstrung," he said. "The message this sends to the House is to fire away."

ajmartin@tribune.com

Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune

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